JOHANNESBURG, Sept 21 (AFP) - Growing numbers of South Africans -- even political allies -- are contesting President Thabo Mbeki's controversial stance on AIDS.

The powerful Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), allied to Mbeki's African National Congress (ANC), passed a unanimous resolution Thursday urging the government to end speculation on the cause of AIDS and provide medication to HIV-positive women and rape victims.

But Mbeki, leading the country with the highest number of HIV-positive people -- 4.2 million at the end of 1999, according to government figures -- is sticking to his guns.

He noted in parliament Wednesday that AIDS stood for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, and declared: "A virus cannot cause a syndrome. A virus can cause a disease, and AIDS is not a disease, it is a syndrome."

He added that the link between HIV and AIDS had been questioned by "very eminent scientists," and declared that while he had no problem accepting that HIV contributed to the collapse of the immune system, other factors were involved too.

The government meanwhile refuses to provide anti-retroviral drugs to rape victims and women about to give birth, even though 5,000 HIV-positive babies are born each month in South Africa.

The Anglican archbishop of Capetown, Njongonkulu Ndungane, declared Tuesday that the Church believed history would judge the slow response to the pandemic "as serious a crime against humanity as apartheid."

More than 5,000 mainstream scientists and doctors rebutted Mbeki's views in the "Durban Declaration" earlier this year, affirming point-blank that "HIV causes AIDS," and adding that the evidence was "clear-cut, exhaustive and unambiguous."

In the past week, Mbeki's Communist Party allies in the ruling alliance have echoed that stance, along with COSATU, and Arts and Culture Minister Ben Ngubane, a member of the minority Inkatha Freedom Party.

Even the health committee of Mbeki's own African National Congress (ANC) is against him, with a confidential document leaked to a Cape Town newspaper declaring that "The predominant scientific view that HIV causes AIDS is the view that the ANC, its leadership and its membership has to publicly express."

Barney Pityana, the chairman of the South African Human Rights Commission, an independent body set up under the constitution, meanwhile said this week that the commission was considering suing the government to force it to provide anti-retroviral drugs to people suffering from HIV.

Journalist Charlene Smith wrote in the Citizen Thursday that young people were refusing to wear condoms as a result of the president's views.

She said his "African solution" to the pandemic was coming from white dissidents who mostly live in California, and added: "AIDS is writing Thabo Mbeki's epitaph."

000921
AF000970

Copyright © AFP or Agence France-Presse, 2000 - All Rights Reserved. AFP articles contained on the AEGiS web site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, displayed, published or broadcast without AFP's prior written permission. You may make one copy of each article for your personal, non-commercial use only; more copies would require AFP's prior written permission..  http://www.afp.com/