A South African 'genocide' in AIDS policies

Yet there is, perhaps, more to regret in South Africa.

Much is being written about South Africa's accomplishments, great and small, during the last decade that addresses the country's political stability, the economic discipline of the government, the primacy of the rule of law, racial harmony, and ongoing efforts to promote reconciliation between whites and blacks.

Yes, we are told, South Africa is still a country in transition, still facing formidable problems of crime, unemployment, poverty, and inequality. But progress has been significant, and the political will is there to tackle problems head-on. Like other first-tier developing countries, South Africa is struggling to find its niche in the global order, but it will prevail. Thus the African National Congress, the party of liberation, will be returned to power with a sweeping marjority in the national elections taking place Wednesday. This we are told.

All true, but at the same time a truth that omits a greater truth: Something terribly wrong has happened here -- not by design, but not by accident, either.

For much of the last 10 years, especially the last five, the ANC-led government has presided over a genocide perpetrated on its own people, and the number of dead already surpasses the Rwanda slaughters. The government willfully consigned the HIV/AIDS pandemic to one of many problems the country faced rather than the problem. Its willful inattention to the disease -- belligerent intransigence would be more accurate -- has doomed millions of blacks to die unnecessarily, fodder for the unforgivable arrogance of their leaders, especially their president, Thabo Mbeki.

Mbeki is a man who speaks the language of poetry but practices the art of deceit and denial where AIDS is the issue. A modern day Pontius Pilate, he has washed his hands of AIDS. Until the Constitutional Court brought him to heel, he refused to make the drug Neviparine available to HIV-positive pregnant women despite irrefutable proof that it cuts the transmission rate of HIV from mother to child by 30 to 50 percent. About 200 HIV-positive babies are born every day, a number only now beginning to fall as the government begins belatedly to implement the court's ruling.

The government has peopled the country with AIDS orphans: In five years there will be 1.6 million. Mbeki is pugnaciously unwilling to call AIDS a virus. He cannot even utter the word in public; it has been expunged from the government's lexicon. All the death is attributed primarily to poverty and not the virus. He praises his minister of health, who advocates a diet of onions, sweet potatoes, and garlic as an antidote for the deadly disease and urges the people to turn to traditional remedies.

He decided to obfuscate and use dilatory tactics to prevent the rollout of antiretroviral drugs. He has provided no leadership, no political will to mobilize people and resources to address the fear that stalks the country, no organized effort to take the stigma attached to the disease, no exhortations to the people to come together under the umbrella of a government they would see as the vanguard, carrying the war to the insidious disease, battling it on every front, ready to put every Cabinet minister and member of parliament in the trenches.

Not a single Cabinet minister has questioned the president's unconscionable behavior or tendered a resignation . Not an ounce of honor among the lot.

Let me state, if only for the sake of my own conscience, that the ANC-led government under the leadership of President Thabo Mbeki has and continues to carry out a silent genocide on the people of South Africa. Not that millions have been killed in a short space of time, but within the next 10 years millions will. Last year at least 360,000 people died from AIDS. In 10 years an estimated 4.4 million will have died -- more than 10 percent of the current population. One in four people are HIV-positive. Life expectancy, 63 years in 1991, is now 46 and will drop to below 40 years, perhaps as low as 36 years by 2010. The United Nations' Human Development Index for South Africa was 57 in 1991; it was 94 in 2001 (the higher the number, the lower the level of development).

The liberators have led their people into the graveyards, supplied them with shovels, and watched as they buried the dead in stand-up positions because the cemeteries are full.

Had an apartheid government ever dared to pursue the HIV/AIDS policies, or rather the lack thereof, of the ANC, we would have seen UN resolutions, worldwide condemnation, thousands demonstrating outside South African embassies across the world, calls for sanctions, for the intervention of the international community, and for a redefinition of what constitutes a crime against humanity.

Rather than setting their country free, Mbeki's ANC is destroying it -- from apartheid to AIDS, a decade of nihilism. The orphans will inherit the future.

Padraig O'Malley, a visiting fellow at the McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies at UMass-Boston, is writing a book on HIV/AIDS in South Africa.