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Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2002 21:35:41 -0500
From: Africa Action <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Africa: AIDS, Lewis Speech in Nairobi
Africa: AIDS, Lewis Speech in Nairobi
Date distributed (ymd): 020618
Document reposted by Africa Action
Africa Policy Electronic Distribution List: an information
service provided by AFRICA ACTION (incorporating the Africa
Policy Information Center, The Africa Fund, and the American
Committee on Africa). Find more information for action for
Africa at http://www.africaaction.org
+++++++++++++++++++++Document Profile+++++++++++++++++++++
Region: Continent-Wide
Issue Areas: +health+
SUMMARY CONTENTS:
This posting contains a powerful speech given last week in Nairobi
by Stephen Lewis, Special Envoy of the UN Secretary-General for
HIV/AIDS in Africa, to a gathering of African religious leaders
from 30 countries. Lewis calls for the religious leaders to fully
engage and galvanize the battle against AIDS. He also calls for
them to take the initiative to fight the racism that lies beyond
the developed world's failure to respond with urgency. For the
declaration of the religious leaders at the conference see
http://www.africaaction.org/docs02/debt0206.htm
and for more background on the conference see
http://www.hopeforafricanchildren.org/
+++++++++++++++++end profile++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Address by Stephen Lewis,
Special Envoy of the UN Secretary-General for HIV/AIDS in Africa
to the African Religious Leaders Assembly on Children and HIV/AIDS
Nairobi, Kenya
10 June 2002
Your Eminences:
I feel entirely privileged to address this meeting; it's actually
the first time that I've ever addressed a large gathering of
religious leaders, and I am appropriately chastened by so
auspicious an occasion. What's more, I want to speak with direct
and sometimes uncomfortable frankness, so I appeal to all of you,
at the outset, to let the milk of human kindness flow through your
veins and to treat me with compassion.
Your eminences, the direct impact of the pandemic on children, in
all its aspects, will be set out for you later this morning by
Carol Bellamy, the Executive Director of UNICEF. She is obviously
the right person to do so. For my own part, suffice to say that
there are now estimated to be 13 million children orphaned by AIDS
in Sub-Saharan Africa, with the number almost certain to double by
the end of the decade. In human terms, in the history and
literature of vulnerable children, there's never been anything like
it. In fact, of course, there's never been anything like the
HIV/AIDS pandemic. Comparisons with the Black Death of the 14th
century are wishful thinking. When AIDS has run its course --- if
it ever runs its course --- it will be seen as an annihilating
scourge that dwarfs everything that has gone before.
What it leaves in its wake, in country after country, in every one
of the countries you represent, are thousands or tens of thousands
or hundreds of thousands or, eventually, even millions of children
whose lives are a torment of loneliness, despair, rage,
bewilderment and loss. That doesn't mean orphan children can't be
happy; it simply means that at the heart of their individual beings
there is a life-long void.
The numbers are overwhelming, the circumstances are overwhelming,
the needs are overwhelming.
Nor do I intend to quote, in a pretend-learned fashion from
religious texts. It would be presumptuous and foolhardy on my part.
That is your collective world, not mine.
Rather, I would wish to suggest to all of you, as religious leaders
drawn from across the continent, that it is time, it is well past
time that you summoned your awesome reserves of strength and
followers and commitment to lead this continent out of its
merciless vortex of misery. There is no excuse for passivity or
distance. No excuse for immobility or denial. No excuse for
incremental steps when you, collectively, have the capacity to
rally both Africa and the world if you choose to do so.
The timing could not be better. Let me tell you why, and bare my
most protected inner thoughts in the telling.
I think we may have reached a curious and deeply distressing lull
in the battle against AIDS. Over the last two years, much has
happened. The political leadership of Africa has come alive to
HIV/AIDS, conferences have been held in profusion, from Durban to
Addis to Abuja to New York to Ougouadougou. PLWAs have raised
powerful and insistent voices, the Global Fund has been
established, goals and targets have been set, drug prices have been
driven down dramatically by generic manufacturers, there are more
data and analysis and reports and commentary and studies and sheer
newspaper copy available than any library on earth could
accommodate, and significant numbers of modest interventions are
being pursued.
So it isn't that things have ground to a halt; it's just a
cumulative feeling of inertia rather than energy, of marking time,
of oh so slowly gathering forces together for the next push, of
incrementalism raised to the level of obsession. The Global Fund
has received no new sizeable contributions for many months. The G8
Summit later this month in my country, Canada, has made it clear in
advance that significant additional money will not be forthcoming.
The NEPAD document --- the new partnership for Africa --- which is
the heart of the G8 discussions, and the centrepiece for the future
of Africa, deals hardly at all with HIV/AIDS. A series of reports
to be released in the near future, just prior to and during the
international AIDS conference in Barcelona next month, will
acknowledge progress made, but at the same time recite
blood-chilling statistics on the situation of youth and children --
statistics which make you wonder whether the world has fallen into
a stupor of indifference.
It's not only that we can't rest on our laurels; it's the fact that
the laurels are fig-leafs. Let me be brutally honest: in the dead
of night, I sometimes think to myself that we're losing the war
against AIDS -- although I do recognize the feeling for what it is:
an unwarranted moment of despair. What we need is another massive
shot of adrenalin to take the battle to the next level, and you,
your eminences, the representative religious leadership of Africa
-- you are the shot of adrenalin, the energizing force, the
catharsis of faith, hope and determination which can propel us
forward.
That's the reason for this conference. As always, children and
women carry the burden of abandonment, vulnerability, stigma,
shame, poverty and desperation. They constitute, for you, the cause
you must lead. You constitute, for them, the meaning of salvation
in terms both spiritual and practical.
Who else, beyond yourselves, is so well-placed to lead? Who else
has such a network of voices at the grass-roots level? Who else has
access to all communities once a week, every week, across the
continent? Who else officiates at the millions of funerals of those
who die of AIDS-related illnesses, and better understands the
consequences for children and families? Who else works on a daily
basis with faith-based, community-based organizations? In the midst
of this wanton, ravaging pandemic, it is truly like an act of
Divine intervention that you should be physically present
everywhere, all the time. I ask again: who else, therefore, is so
well-placed to lead?
So where is that leadership? Dare I say that the voice of religion
has been curiously muted? There are notable exceptions as there
always are. Some of the finest work combating AIDS on the continent
is done through religious communities. But you will admit that,
overall, the involvement of religion has been qualified at best. I
haven't the slightest interest in recrimination or finger-pointing.
My interest, our interest, should only be, where do we go from
here?
I want to suggest, in the strongest possible terms, that you should
resolve, at this conference, in the name of all the children,
infected or affected, to seize the leadership, re-energize the
struggle, and turn the pandemic around. I want to suggest, in the
strongest possible terms, that you leave Nairobi this week, with a
solemn pledge to yourselves, that you will never again tolerate,
even for a moment, lassitude or passivity in the face of so
monumental a catastrophe. I want to suggest that the draft
declaration of the conference, when definitive, be embraced as
though it were legally binding.
All of us, who are your friends, understand the difficulties. We
know that certain of the faiths have problems around sexual
activity and the use of condoms. We know that there are internal
struggles around the leadership roles of women -- not to be taken
lightly when gender is such a visceral part of the pandemic. We
know that the religious leadership at all levels of society needs
training, in order to do an effective job in educating your
adherents. We know that even amongst religious leaders, there are
numbers who are HIV-positive, and have themselves felt the lash and
pain of stigma from colleagues. Religious leaders are human; they
face the same challenges and foibles as other mortals.
But religious leaders invoke a higher level of morality; that's why
every contentious issue must be treated afresh. The sacred texts,
from which all religion flows, demand a higher level of morality.
And if ever there was an issue which bristles with moral questions
and moral imperatives it's HIV/AIDS. The pandemic, in the way in
which it assaults human life, is qualitatively different from all
that has gone before. There is no greater moral calling on this
continent today than to vanquish the pandemic.
No one expects you to do it, one faith at a time. Somehow, you must
come together, in a great religious partnership, so that everyone
is involved, at every level. You should formalize the arrangement;
you should create an actual structure. Your draft plan of action
mandates the World Conference on Religion and Peace to make it
happen. Let it be done.
Nor can you do it by faith alone. You have to extend the
partnership to representatives of civil society, to associations of
PLWAs, to the UN family, to women's groups everywhere, to the
private sector and to government itself. The pandemic demands that
you move beyond the protective insularity of religion. It is often
argued that there must be a separation of church and state, that is
to say, the religious and the secular. But AIDS puts the argument
to the rout. If the church or the mosque or the temple don't work
in concert with the state, then death is the victor.
Let me take it further. There should be a series of targeted
interventions. Religious communities provide vital care to the ill
and the dying at village level. Somehow, the individual projects
must be taken to scale across the countries themselves. Religious
leaders can confront stigma from every religious podium in every
community, changing the values of the community through repetition
and education, week in and week out. Religious leaders should lead
a campaign to abolish school fees throughout the continent, because
whether it's fees, or the costs of registration, books, or
uniforms, vulnerable and orphaned children, invariably penniless,
are denied the right to go to school. You want a moral issue: why
should a just society, a society which has ratified the Convention
on the Rights of the Child, allow such a state of affairs? One
visit to the slums of Kabera, here in Nairobi, will reaffirm the
sorry consequences for children. It is entirely consistent
therefore, that religious leaders should throw themselves behind
the Hope for African Children Initiative because there is no
dilemma more urgent, more demanding, or more intractable than the
dilemma of orphans.
Let me take the argument further still. Religious leaders must do
something about the mothers who are infected and are dying
prematurely, leaving behind those orphans who the wander the
landscape of Africa, soon to be an entire generation seething with
resentment and fear. May I strike a personal note? The thing I
find by far most emotionally difficult as I travel through Africa,
is meeting with young women, stricken by AIDS, who know they're
dying or soon to die, with two or three young children, and they
ask me, frantically, 'what's going to happen to my children when
I've passed -- who will look after them?' And then, in an
understandably accusatory tone, they say to me 'What about us'?
And then they add, without using these exact words, but the meaning
is clear: 'You Mr. White Man, you have the drugs to keep us alive,
but we can't get them. Why? Why must we die'? And I want to tell
you: I don't know how to answer that. I have never in my adult life
witnessed such a blunt assault on basic human morality. In my soul,
I honestly believe that an unthinking strain of subterranean racism
is the only way to explain the moral default of the developed
world, in refusing to provide the resources which could save the
mothers of Africa.
But right now, as I stand before you, I want to know: what will the
religious leaders do about it? Surely, in the face of such a
violation of fundamental moral tenets, you have an obligation to
intervene.
And that takes me to my final proposition. In the last analysis,
religious leaders are the best chance to influence the political
leadership of the North as well as of the South. You have contacts
everywhere. You have brother and sister churches and mosques and
temples on all the continents. They support you, they often fund
you, they show solidarity with you. Your religious sway is not just
Africa, it's the world. And what politician would refuse to meet
with you? Who turns down a request for a meeting from a religious
leader? You have an entry to the citadels of secular power that
none of the rest of us enjoy.
What does it mean? It means that you should have a say in the
Global Fund -- you should storm the rhetorical ramparts and demand
that the major OECD countries contribute the money which they have
promised --- the famous .7% of GNP --- but never delivered. You
should have some sort of collective standing or voice at the G8
meeting. You should have a separate session at the Barcelona AIDS
conference in July. You should have a presence in international
decisions, wherever those decisions are made. You want a
precedent?: the Vatican has observor status at the United Nations,
and often speaks, including at the UNICEF Executive Board; no
government on that Board, at least while I was there, ever took
exception to the Vatican's right to participate.
Religious communities historically have followed one of two tracks.
There was the religious leadership which successfully fought for
the eradication of slavery in the Congo; the eclectic leadership
which supported the conscientious objectors in the Vietnam War and
helped, thereby, to bring that foul war to an end; the Islamic and
Hindu leadership which supported UNICEF's immunization campaigns in
Asia and the Middle-East, overcoming the fears of the citizens, and
doubtless saving millions of children's lives; the Judeo-Christian
leadership that resisted the infant formula companies and supported
the right to breast-feeding.
And then there was the other, woeful track; the religious
leadership that supported apartheid; the religious leadership that
was complicit in the genocide in Rwanda; the religious leadership
that was silent during the holocaust.
No one wants a choice between the two. It's simply that when the
history of the AIDS pandemic is written, you want it said that
every religious leader stood up to be counted; that when the tide
was turned, the religious leaders did the turning; that when the
children of Africa were at horrendous risk, the religious leaders
led the rescue mission. It's what all of us beg you to do; I submit
to you that it's what your God, of whatever name, would want you to
do.
************************************************************
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