Mbeki 'still Aids dissident'
2007-11-06 22:26
Special Report
The South African government has announced a joint venture to reduce the cost of anti-retroviral drugs with a Swiss company.
Johannesburg - President Thabo Mbeki still questions the link between the HIV and Aids, according to an article in Tuesday's Guardian newspaper.
"There is no question as to the message Thabo Mbeki was delivering to me along with this document: he was now, as he had been since 1999, an Aids dissident," the article quotes the author of a new Mbeki biography, Mark Gevisser, as saying.
The biography is entitled Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred.
The document in question is a 100-page paper secretly authored by Mbeki and distributed anonymously among the ANC leadership six years ago.
It compared Aids scientists to latter-day Nazi concentration camp doctors and portrayed black people who accepted orthodox Aids science as "self-repressed" victims of a slave mentality, according to the British newspaper.
Entitled "Castro Hlongwane, Caravans, Cats, Geese, Foot & Mouth and Statistics: HIV/Aids and the Struggle for the Humanisation of the African", it described the "HIV/Aids thesis" as entrenched in "centuries-old white racist beliefs and concepts about Africans".
Difficult decisions
Mbeki was eventually persuaded to "withdraw from the debate".
Gevisser described it as "one of the most difficult (decisions)" of his political career.
Quoting Gevisser, the Guardian article reads: "When I asked him in 2007 how he felt about having to withdraw from the Aids debate, he told me it was 'very unfortunate' that his initiative had been 'drowned'."
The Democratic Alliance said the article again confirmed the party's belief that the government's response to SA's Aids pandemic had been systematically undermined by a lack of proper leadership - specifically by Mbeki and the Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang.
DA health spokesperson Mike Waters said the party would submit three parliamentary questions to Mbeki: whether he would consider overturning the Cabinet's decision that he withdraw from the debate, if not; whether he endorsed any of the views in the "Castro Hlongwane" document and what his current views on the relationship between HIV and Aids were.
Comprehensive Aids policy
Waters said: "HIV/Aids and Zimbabwe will forever tarnish President Mbeki's legacy.
"Indeed, one might even argue that they will, to a large extent, define it."
Presidential spokesperson Mukoni Ratshitanga said the "most important thing" was that government had a comprehensive HIV and Aids policy which was being implemented.
"The government is funding that policy quite comprehensively. It has the full support of the president."
- SAPA