PRESS CONFERENCE BY STEPHEN LEWIS ON HIV/AIDS IN AFRICA

PRESS CONFERENCE BY STEPHEN LEWIS ON HIV/AIDS IN AFRICA

“We must right this wrong”, declared the United Nations top envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa today, calling passionately for the creation of a powerful, well-financed global women’s agency to turn back “the legacy of inequality” and marginalization, which drove the virus and led to the “devastation of women and girls on the African continent” and around the world.

Just back from AIDS-ravaged Lesotho and Swaziland -- with prevalence rates respectively, of 25 and 42.6 per cent –- Stephen Lewis, the Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, told reporters at United Nations Headquarters that, what had happened to women, was such a “gross and palpable violation of human rights” that, somehow, some way, funding to establish a dominant, international force for women, must be found.

“There is no item more urgent on the international development agenda,” he said, describing “an omnibus catalogue” of vulnerability facing African women -- from rape and sexual violence, to forced marriage and other harmful traditional practices, such as “wife inheritance” and “widow cleansing”.  If there was a United Nations agency for women, “not only would the women of Lesotho and Swaziland now be far better off, but we could, at this point, mount an unbridled campaign to demand that gender equality be legislated and enforced in those two countries”.

Even as the virus tightened its deadly grip, he said, Lesotho was struggling to fight back.  The country had embarked on a massive undertaking, unique in Africa; the Government intended to offer HIV counselling and testing to every household in the land by the end of 2007, in what it called the “Know Your Status” campaign, which was meant, unflinchingly, to confront the unthinkable.  “ Lesotho knows its fighting for its very survival, words like extinction and annihilation are commonplace.”

But, despite that glimmer of hope, he said, the Government, on the other hand, had still not passed the “Married Persons Equality Bill”, which had been debated for a number of years, but had yet to be embraced by parliament.  Predictably, under customary law, women in the country were regarded as minors; married women were under the guardianship of their husbands and unmarried women were under the guardianship of their fathers, brothers, or even sons. “This circumstance is both untenable and intolerable,” he said, “but it speaks directly to the prevailing gender equality.”

Swaziland, which had the highest HIV/AIDS prevalence in the world, had, remarkably, slightly exceeded its “three by five” target, by the end of last year, he said.  [In 2003, the World Health Organization (WHO) kicked off an ambitious plan to get at least 3 million people in developing nations living with HIV & AIDS on to life saving antiretroviral therapy, by the end of 2005.]

But, with a prevalence rate of 56.3 per cent for pregnant women, 25 to 29 years of age, he said that, by the 2010, there was a terrifying inevitability that between 10 and 15 per cent of the population would consist of orphans.  That was of the entire population -- not just among the child population.  And, with women there “shackled” to the status of minors, turning back the ravages of the virus and enshrining gender equality “will be a gargantuan struggle”.

The virus had both Lesotho and Swaziland by “their throats and… gasping for survival,” he said, stressing that, in both countries, the deluge of orphans was overwhelming.  “So who comes to the rescue?  As everywhere else in Africa, it’s the grandmothers,” he said, adding, sorrowfully, that Africa was a continent being held together by its grandmothers.  “They bury their grown children, and return home to take care of their grandchildren.”

“Why do I go on in this fashion,” he said, “Because I’m frantic.  Things are changing so incrementally on the ground -- Lesotho and Swaziland are but symbols for the greater whole -- that we’re losing millions of young women in Africa.  In the process, we are creating a generation of orphans, whose lives are lives of torment.”  He added that, in very large part, the despair and carnage that had taken root in many African countries had been allowed to rage, because the voice of women was a voice that was still not heard.

And, here was where a singular United Nations-led, strongly resourced and staffed multilateral agency -- on the level of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) -- could do so much good.  Particularly since, as he and others in the women’s movement felt, neither the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), nor the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), nor the Division for the Advancement of Women, could do the job that needed to be done.

That was not to disparage the good work of those bodies, he added.  It was only to say that that work had to be combined, and then enhanced a hundred-fold.  Indeed, the United Nations did not seem to understand the reality of the devastation that had been wrought over the 20-year arc of the virus, he said, reserving especially pointed criticism for the Secretary-General’s 15-member High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change.  Those diplomats -- appointed as part of the United Nations overall reform effort -- had been specifically chosen to “rework the landscape of development, humanitarian assistance and environment within the United Nations”.

“Development and humanitarian assistance? What job description could have more to do with the lives of women, that is to say, with the lives of more than half the world’s population,” he said.  Yet, of the 15 members originally appointed to the panel, only 3 had been women.  One of those had since been replaced by a man, so the ratio was now 13 to 2.  “And, if that wasn’t sufficiently preposterous, the two members of the Secretariat, thus far, appointed to work for the panel are both men,” he said, adding: “What in the world is going on?  Tragically, nothing new.”

With the panel already in place, Mr. Lewis said the only thing that could be done was to tip the ratio, by expanding its membership, and to have transparency in its work.  “Everything must be open to monitoring by women’s groups,” he said, warning that, if, in the spirit of United Nations reform, as well as achievement of the Millennium Development Goals, the panel was not willing to make dramatic changes to the way women were addressed in multilateral forums, then it must be required to explain, among other things, on what basis it determined that current international arrangements served the needs and rights of women everywhere.

If efforts to uphold the human rights of the women of the world were not implemented immediately, “How will we ever explain what we have wrought?” he asked, recalling how the world had emerged from the Holocaust, as well as Rwanda, asking itself how it could have been inert in the face of the horrors “that everyone knew was taking place”.  It was his contention that, years from now, historians would ask how it was possible that the world allowed AIDS “to throttle and eviscerate a continent, and overwhelmingly the women of the continent, and watch the tragedy unfold, in real time, while we toyed with the game of reform.”

A reporter asked, given Mr. Lewis scepticism about the Organization’s ability to do the job, why did he believe that a new United Nations agency would be effective in addressing the needs of women in the field of AIDS.  Mr. Lewis said that he believed the pandemic had been a turning point in the struggle for the rights of women.  What had happened in the last five or six years, particularly as the world had recognized the predicament of women on the African continent, had galvanized the recognition that the failure to address the needs of women, the failure to have an international agency to respond and give voice to their concerns, could rally the activist women on the continent and internationally.

That could, in turn, rally Governments and other agencies to respond, he said.  That was important, because, even in countries that had adopted action plans on women, nothing ever got implemented.  “Everything falls by the wayside. Women are always consigned to the margins, even more than children, because children, at least had UNICEF to react and respond for them,” he said.  With all the extremely important work that UNIFEM and UNFPA were doing, neither was an international agency with the broad mandate, clout and funding to right the wrongs that were being done.

“So you’ve got to have something more imaginative, more powerful, more serious,” he said, adding: “I think the violence that is being done to women, in the absence of a serious multilateral response, is… unconscionable, and the pandemic has given it expression as nothing has before, and I think that’s the turning point.”

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