This child is just one of some 12 million children who have lost their parents to AIDS. She too will die from this deadly disease. She is too poor to afford the over-priced medicines that could offer her some quality of life. She is one of 25 million people living in Africa who have been sentenced to death by banks, drug companies, Western governments and bodies like the international monetary fund. The 13th International Conference on AIDS was recently held in Durham, South Africa. The conference heard that half of all 15 years olds living in South Africa and Zimbabwe face death from AIDS. There are as many children orphaned in Africa by AIDS, as there were orphans in Europe at the end of the six years of the Second World War.KillsAIDS now kills 10 million people a year in Africa - 10 times more people than war.The disease has created some 12.1 million orphans on the continent, most of them prey to abuse, neglect and a short life of illness and crime.AIDS is also causing serious social problems. One in five adults are living with HIV. In Zambia there was a 13-fold increase in deaths among healthcare workers in the 1980's, largely due to AIDS. An estimated 860,000 children in sub-Saharan Africa lost their teachers to AIDS last year, according to the latest UNICEF Progress of Nations report.But statistics do not convey the horror of AIDS sufferers, especially poor AIDS sufferers are forced to endure. They die a horrific death, their flesh and innards consumed by painful and invasive afflictions. Even before the final stages of full-blown AIDS, suffers experience a sort of premature "death", overcome with lassitude and losing all interest and involvement in the world around them.No drug has yet been found which can cure AIDS. But particular treatments can dramatically slow down the deadly progress of HIV. The problem is that the multi-national pharmaceutical companies charge a fortune for them.Yet if these drugs were supplied on 'generic' - non-branded - basis they would be much cheaper. In 1997 the South African government said it would make cheap versions of expensive drug therapies that hold back AIDS. But the multinationals complained and won the backing of the US government and the World Trade Organisation. These drug companies made over £15 billion last year. They would rather see tens of million die than see their profits reduced.Pressure in Africa and the US has finally forced the drug companies to offer limited supplies of some drugs free and others at a "cheap rate.So AIDS Drugs that use to cost £10.50 a day will now cost £1.25 a day. But even this is not good enough. What use is that when almost half the continent exists on less than 65 pence a day?
AIDS is at its most deadly in partnership with poverty.Debt repayments and structural adjustment programmes have sucked more than £70 billion out of Africa in the last ten years. The health care system is often the first to be targeted. This means that dressings are reused and needles shared. Drugs are no good without hospitals, doctors, nurses and basic equipment. The recent G8 summit once again failed to tackle the debt crisis despite the call of millions of people around the world to cancel the debt. FanfareAt last years summit in Germany, with much fanfare and spin-doctoring, the G8 had pledged £15 billion in debt relief. But underdeveloped countries have seen less than 10 percent of this figure. And even that has come with hard economic cutbacks that will make life a living hell for even more people.The Aids crisis has exploded most terribly in the highly indebted countries.Many African countries spend four times as much on debt as they do on healthn Tanzania spends nine times as much on money for bankers as on health.n Zimbabwe spends 3 times as much on debt as it does on health.n Zambia spends £11 per person on health, £21 on debt.The money for health budgets in Africa is pitiful. Kenya spends £5.20 per person per year, Uganda £6.
Edward Hoppers book, The River was the subject of much controversy at the AIDS conference in South Africa. Hooper argues that the AIDS virus originated after US scientists gave HIV to Africans in polio vaccinations in 1959. A lab in Philadelphia was racing other scientists to make a live virus for polio.Its vaccine was made by injecting polio into the tissues of various animals, including Hopper argues, chimpanzees. HIV-1, the common form of the virus, comes from a virus in chimpanzees. Because the virus was live, the chimp virus could not be killed, and because HIV had not been discovered, they did not know it was there. But they knew there were risks. So they first gave the vaccine to mentally ill children in long-stay public hospitals in the US, and then to babies born to women prisoners in New Jersey.Hopper's argument is complex and it is difficult to say if he is right but it seems like the most probable explanation when you consider the fact that the spread of the earliest form of the disease follows closely the map of where the suspect batch of the vaccine was distributed.
U.S. Genocide The US government knew a decade ago of the AIDS disaster developing in Africa, but did nothing. In 1990 an official Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) report landed on the President Bush's desk. That report was called "The Global AIDS Disaster". It warned that AIDS was spreading rapidly in Africa and predicted that some 45 million cases would be found in the continent by the year 2000. The report's principal author, CIA officer Kenneth Brown, says some top US officials gave a frank response. GoodA US military official told him that the predicted death toll "will be good because Africa is overpopulated anyway".
Peter Piot, director of the UN Aids programme, says that £2 billion a year is needed to stop total devastation in Africa.But instead of fighting for these resources some African governments are looking elsewhere. President Mbeki of South Africa who hosted the AIDS conference is one example. He should be telling the drug companies that South Africa will copy their treatments and that they can go to hell if they want cash.DiscreditedInstead Mbeki acts like a model capitalist and dredges up discredited theories about Aids to cover his failures. So he took up the argument that maybe HIV does not cause AIDS. Scientists around the world were outraged and over 500 scientists and doctors issued a joint statement arguing that Mbeki is wrong - HIV does cause AIDS.Mbeki revels in praise from the World Trade Organisation, the international bankers and multinationals.ThatcheriteAt a recent press conference to launch a new programme of cuts and privatisation, Mbeki was asked if he was a neo-Thatcherite. "Just call me a Thatcherite" he replied.Mbeki says his aim is to create a "black capitalist class" and that it is unfortunate that "because we come from the black oppressed many of us feel embarrassed to state this goal as nakedly as we should".
MUNYARADZI GWISAI, a member of Socialist Worker's sister organisation in Zimbabwe, was elected as the MP for Highfield in Harare week. He stood as an MDC candidate but raised a clear socialist programme during the campaign. He won 73 percent of the poll and took 12,616 votes compared to Zanu-PF's 3,234. Munyaradzi Gwisai spoke to Socialist Worker: "The atmosphere in the cities was electric during the elections. There was a sense of excitement and waiting for change. In this constituency our main themes for the campaign were "Power to workers and the poor" and "Tax the rich to fund the poor". We also pushed the slogan "Forward to socialism". SeizureWe called for price controls, subsidies on basic goods, land for the peasants and the seizure of big farms without compensation, an end to the IMF adjustment plans for the economy, jobs for youth, houses for the masses, and labour rights. This programme was well to the left of the one put forward by the MDC leaders. But they knew it was popular and did not dare to move against us. Although the outcome is not a win for the MDC, the cities have spoken clearly. The workers want Mugabe out. They want change. It is not simply a rejection of one man. It is a revolt against a whole system of running the country. Young people especially do not feel any reverence towards Mugabe. The MDC's victories will give confidence to sections of workers. The fact that an overall victory has been snatched away will increase the anger against Mugabe and his supporters. The MDC is at a crossroads. It has a good base, but it will develop it only if it reverses the move rightwards. There will also be many questions about the way the MDC leaders campaigned politically. They played into Mugabe's hands in the rural areas by lining up with white farmers. The results have favoured the middle class elements in the MDC. There are about six worker MPs elected. Some of them are clear that they will have to work to develop independent positions. We will now step up our efforts to put the case for socialism, revive workers' committees and to develop the confidence of the working class to fight. My role is to build the struggle and to stand with those who are really crucial, the people fighting for change, for economic and social liberation. I want to be a voice for them, not for the bosses and the bankers."
by George Monbiot, environmental campaigner and Guardian columnist.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank were conceived as instruments for holding down the Third World and maintaining American economic hegemony. Look at what the US delegation did during the 1944 Bretton Woods conference which gave rise to both these institutions. They effectively ensured the global economic system would be organised in such a way that their continued economic dominance was secured forever. What the IMF has done since is precisely what the Americans wanted it to do, which is to enforce a neoliberal world order-one which values the resources of developing countries very low and values the resources and expertise of developed countries at a much greater rate. AusterityThis ensures that developing countries can't receive a fair rate for their goods and labour, and also imposes unfair terms of trade and so called austerity measures whose purpose is to open up developing countries' economies to Western corporations. If we look at the Structural Adjustment Programmes brokered by the IMF and World Bank in, say, sub-Saharan Africa you see a consistent pattern. In order to pay off their debt-a debt which should not exist at all- sub-Saharan African countries have been forced to cut public services massively, with the result that there is far less money available for health and educationIn Zambia, for example, as a result of the Structural Adjustment Programme they had to close down many of the hospital beds that were previously open. Patients are also having to provide the money for their own treatment when they didn't have to provide that money before. Many simply cannot afford that, with the result that thousands of people are now dying from utterly preventable and treatable diseases. My argument is that the cost of joining the IMF is far higher than the cost of keeping out. But it is very tough, even for enlightened leaders, to sell that message to their own people when the country is being subject to massive economic sanctions if it does not sign up to IMF Structural Adjustment Programmes. The IMF's new language, about poverty reduction strategies, is the same old programme with different wrapping. The IMF's core strategy has not changed-to keep control of other countries' economies to ensure that, just as in colonial days, industrialised countries can determine what happens in developing countries.I think it is critical that protests like that planned in Prague in September take place and highlight the IMF's deficiencies, and call for a wholly new global economic architecture. That global architecture should have as its purpose the introduction of fair terms of trade based on much fairer exchange rates and a redistribution from creditors to debtors. We must remind our politicians that they are representing us in their global negotiations rather than only representing themselves. We need to make this into a major political issue so they don't forget that there are more interests at stake than just a few well-heeled bankers. In my view the IMF and World Bank are unreformable.There is no purpose in saying they've got to do their jobs better. It is the very nature of the job that is wrong. ImposedWe have to set our sights high if we are going to make a meaningful protest, and not just call for a bit of minor reformism but call for them to be swept away and a new system imposed. Of course at the moment we don't have the power to do that. But all protest movements start small. If you look at the beginning of the civil rights movement in the US, it was small and involved the least powerful people of all. Eventually it won some, if not all, of its aims. It is key to bear in mind that all these things start small, but if we can build them up we can make ourselves just as powerful as the countervailing forces.