U.S. Billion$ For Anti-Terrorism Leaves AIDS Fighters Bitter

by Lewis Machipisa

It was September 11, and her work was soon interrupted by shocking images of the smoldering remains of the World Trade Center in New York, and President George W. Bush vowing to commit the full resources of his government to a war on terrorism.

Bush has pledged some $40 billion to deal with the disaster, and to punish those responsible for the terror attacks on New York and Washington two weeks ago.

The urgency with which the world has risen to deal with the terror attacks in the United States has left Donovan wondering why the international community has ignored a far more serious scourge that has killed millions of people worldwide.

"These past several days, I've been tormented by the impossibility of understanding the gulf between zero tolerance for one injustice and total apathy toward another," Donovan told participants at the conference in Harare.

"Why hasn't HIV/AIDS, with all its in-built and underlying injustice, provoked collective indignation? Where is the global campaign borne of fear and rage over HIV/AIDS, the single-minded determination to root out its causes, the commitment of full resources, the admonition to make no mistake about it?" she wondered.

"Twenty years and millions of casualties into this worldwide pandemic, where are the three minutes of silence for the victims of AIDS?" Donovan asked.

Based in Nairobi, Kenya, Donovan is the regional advisor for Africa of the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM). She was in the Zimbabwean capital Harare attending a two-day Inter Press Service (IPS) media and NGO conference on Gender, Rights and HIV/AIDS that ended September 26.

Equally worried about the terror attacks in the United States, Zimbabwe's deputy health minister David Parirenyatwa laments that not much is being done to fight HIV/AIDS.

"If you look at the size of the population in Zimbabwe alone who have died of HIV/AIDS, you realize we have a much bigger war," said Parirenyatwa, referring to the more than 1,000 people who die of AIDS-related diseases every week.

"To me, that's a much bigger emergency that needs to be treated just how governments would deal with a war situation. The HIV/AIDS problem is an even bigger scale and we need resources of the same magnitude and even much higher if we are to control the epidemic," he told IPS.

About 25.3 million people are living with HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa alone, 52 percent of them women, according to the joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS).

"When thousands of innocent people are killed within a few dreadful minutes, anger is understandable. But that very basic human emotion makes it that much more difficult to comprehend the world's indifference when millions of innocent people die of AIDS one at a time," said Donovan.

Louise Thomas-Mapleh of the World Health Organization (WHO) said "Africa is at the crossroads of a devastating HIV/AIDS infection, with a much more alarming effect on some of the most affluent countries in the region."

"Already, we have begun to experience retrogression in the advances made in the health and social dimensions of our livelihood in the past few decades," said Thomas-Mapleh.

Although the World Bank and UNAIDS announced a few years ago that they would commit $3 billion annually to fight the epidemic, the amount falls far short of the $250 billion needed in Africa each year to combat HIV/AIDS.

With no vaccine in sight, the disease is crippling the ability of many developing countries to thrive in the global economy, with increased health costs, weakened economies and diminished overseas markets costing billions of dollars each year.

In many countries, AIDS is drastically reducing life expectancy at birth, one of the key measures used to gauge human development. In many sub-Saharan African countries, life expectancy has been cut by 15 to 30 years.

To combat the epidemic, the UN launched a $1.3 billion Global Fund for HIV/AIDS and Health over a month ago.