AIDS Fund Yanks Million$ In Grants For Burma

by Marwaan Macan-Markar

(IPS) BANGKOK -- In an unprecedented move, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria canceled millions of dollars in grants to Burma this month.

Travel restrictions the military regime in Rangoon imposed on all UN agencies and international humanitarian groups resulted in "weeks of delay" to get permits, said Jon Liden, spokesman for the Geneva-based group.

The three-year-old fund has approved grants to 127 countries to fight the three pandemics worldwide. The fund says it distributed close to $3.1 billion to approved programs during the first two years.

The United Nations' Millennium Development Goals, or MDGs, call for halting the spread of HIV/AIDS by 2015.

"This is the first time that the Global Fund has canceled grants," Liden told IPS. Programs in Burma, called Myanmar by the military regime, had been slated to receive $98.4 million in grants over five years.

"Of the $3.1 billion committed over the first two years, 56 percent goes to fight HIV/AIDS, while 13 percent goes to fight TB and 31 percent to malaria," according to a background statement from the Global Fund. "Of the HIV/AIDS grants, one half of the money is dedicated towards treatment and care, while the other half is for financing prevention activities and HIV testing."

These funds are deemed pivotal for countries to achieve the MDG target of halting the spread of the three killer diseases by 2015.

The other seven time-bound targets governments pledged, as part of the MDGs, included halving the number of people living in extreme poverty, achieving gender equality in schools and reducing child mortality.

"The Global Fund-financed programs can function in any country as long as the government doesn't actively try to obstruct them," says Liden.

The fund works in other countries ruled by dictatorships, including Southeast Asian neighbors Vietnam and Laos, which have communist regimes.

Burma, however, proved the exception. Programs combating HIV/AIDS were slated to receive $54.3 million of the $98.4 million in grants approved for the next five years.

Among the programs the Global Fund was to support were those designed to reduce the spread of HIV through education, care and support services. Groups identified drug users, sex workers, people with HIV, youths between 15-24 years in towns, and sections of the general population.

But little of that could get under way because of the travel restrictions. Nearly every aspect of the treatment scale-up in Myanmar required travel, says Liden.

The fund's decision to terminate its relationship with Rangoon has raised questions about the space available for humanitarian work in a climate of oppression.

"Because of the complications of complexity in Myanmar, a sufficient amount of flexibility is needed to deal with problems as they come up," says Charles Petrie, United Nations Development Program (UNDP) resident representative in Burma.

"The Global Fund was very strict because of the time-bound nature of the grants, and so I understand the decision they made," he explained during an interview by phone from Rangoon. "But humanitarian action is possible in Myanmar," he added.

The void left by the fund comes at a time when Burma has emerged as a country on the verge of exploding with HIV rates that could undermine its already weak efforts to contain the pandemic in the region.

Currently, there are an estimated 170,000 to 620,000 people living with HIV in Burma, according to the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS). And the infection rate among its 50 million people is 1.3 percent, second in Southeast Asia only to Cambodia, which has infection rates of more than 2 percent.

In July, a report by the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based think tank, painted a bleaker picture -- that Burma is the main source of all strains of HIV that have spread across Asia, from Kazakhstan on one end to southern Vietnam on the other.

In some northern parts of the country, HIV infection rates were "as high as 77 percent," the report revealed. Heroin routes originating from Burma and crossing the region have been the "greatest contributor of new types of HIV in the world," the report said.

Yet Rangoon's junta chose to keep the country's AIDS crisis under wraps till late 2003, when Khin Nyunt, a high-ranking general who was appointed prime minister, broke the silence on the subject, enabling humanitarian agencies to pursue anti-AIDS programs openly.

The substantial amount pledged by the Global Fund was seen as welcome relief for voluntary agencies such as World Vision. "The Fund provided a great deal of hope for the people who were going to benefit, including those with HIV," Roger Walker, head of World Vision's office in Burma, told IPS.

"If we cannot find replacement funds, the hopes of these people will be dashed," he added.

Rangoon has displayed concern at the Global Fund quitting Burma, but there is hardly a hint of its own role for circumstance leading to that decision. The junta's HIV/AIDS Country Coordinating Mechanism (CCM) issued a statement describing the cancellation of funds as "unjust."

"The CCM concludes that this termination is against the values and principles embodied in the United Nations Millennium Declaration, to which the Global Fund also owes its existence," said the statement.