14 December 1999
Amb. Holbrooke Speaks Out on AIDS, Wars in Africa
(Warns next few weeks will be "critical" for Congo) (860) By Charles W. Corey Washington File Staff Writer Washington -- HIV/AIDS is an epidemic of "enormous, historic proportion" throughout sub-Saharan Africa, with more people dying from this dread disease than from the wars now ravaging the region, warns the U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke. Appearing on "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" television show December 13, Holbrooke, who just returned from a 10-nation trip to the continent, said of HIV/AIDS, "I cannot even begin to stress how important this issue is. ... Most of the wars in the world are now raging in Africa, and one of the main focuses of our trip was to draw attention to them and figure out what we should be doing to deal with them. But despite these terrible wars -- in the Congo, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Angola, and elsewhere -- the fact is that 10 times as many people are dying of AIDS than are dying in these wars." Holbrooke acknowledged that HIV/AIDS looms as a serious health problem worldwide, "but in Africa it's much more than that," he stressed. The disease "threatens the economies" of those afflicted countries and is causing "immediate security problems" that can lead to instability and war. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations traveled to Mali, Angola, Namibia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Rwanda, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Tunisia along with Senator Russell Feingold, the ranking Democrat on the Senate African Affairs Subcommittee. The delegation toured AIDS centers in every country it visited, but found that only Uganda "is really doing anything significant to reverse" the accelerating trend of the disease, Holbrooke noted. "In Namibia, we met with six women who have AIDS," he said. "But in order to meet with us they had to be driven in a covered van to the meeting place, and they couldn't allow themselves to be identified in public because they would lose their jobs. ... While they were brave enough to talk to us, they are still potential carriers of the disease. "Worst of all," he said, "the police and the military in these countries are among the primary carriers." Asked about how Africa's health workers are combating the disease, Holbrooke said they face two difficult problems. "Because the disease is sexually transmitted, it carries cultural overtones which are extremely difficult for many countries to deal with," he said, particularly the stigmatization of victims -- a problem the United States only now is coming to grips with. "It's only when people like [U.S. basketball player] Magic Johnson stepped forward [and admitted he was HIV-positive] that it began to be de-stigmatized," he pointed out. That has happened in "only one" of the nations the delegation visited, Uganda, where President Yoweri Museveni "has very courageously led an open de-stigmatization campaign." As a result of Museveni's vigorous leadership, he said, "the rates have dropped from 30 percent to 9 percent in Uganda. But everywhere else in Africa they are still rising." A second factor complicating the treatment of HIV/AIDS in Africa is the high cost of drugs, which most African families cannot afford. The Clinton administration, for fiscal year 2000, sought $100 million in funds to help Africa fight HIV/AIDS, but got less than it wanted from the Congress, Holbrooke said. (Since 1986, the United States has contributed more than $1,000 million in the fight against AIDS worldwide, of which more than half has gone to sub-Saharan Africa, and it has been the leading supporter of the U.N. Joint Program on AIDS, contributing more than 25 percent of the program's budget.) Asked about wars raging in Africa, Holbrooke said: "I would be hard put to give you a significantly optimistic report on either Angola or Congo. Both countries are engaged in brutal wars. Congo's is the largest interstate war in the history of Africa. "We visited all the countries in the region involved in the war," he said. "They wrote an agreement earlier this year themselves -- an African solution to an African problem -- called the Lusaka Agreement, because it was signed in Lusaka. If they implement this agreement the United States and other countries will participate in a peacekeeping effort. "But if they don't implement it," he warned, "it would be an impossible task for outside forces to impose and force or pacify the situation in a country as vast as the Congo, which is larger than the United States east of the Mississippi." So what we now have, he said, is an "intensification of American diplomatic efforts. Ambassador Howard Wolpe, our special envoy for the region, whom I spoke to earlier this afternoon, is on his way back into the region to accelerate the negotiations. We are going to intensify our efforts." "But," Holbrooke told his listeners, "we are not going to send peacekeepers in until we are certain that they are part of a coherent process. The next few weeks are going to be quite critical." (The Washington File is a product of the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State.)
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