AEGiS-AFP News: SAfrica-AIDS: Three S. African Nobel peace prize winners pray against AIDS

SAfrica-AIDS: Three S. African Nobel peace prize winners pray against AIDS

Agence France-Presse - December 6, 2000

JOHANNESBURG, Dec 6 (AFP) - South African Nobel Peace Prize winners Nelson Mandela, Frederik de Klerk and Desmond Tutu joined in prayer Wednesday against the AIDS epidemic ravaging the country.

Former president Mandela, who shared the prize in 1993 with De Klerk, the last apartheid-era president, said at a prayer service in a Johannesburg church that South Africa had achieved a miracle by ending white minority rule and now needed another one to fight AIDS.

"We will find another miracle and win the battle. We can heal our land," Mandela said after lighting a flame of hope at the Anglican Cathedral of Saint Mary the Virgin.

He called upon South Africans to change their often-discriminatory attitude towards people who have HIV or AIDS, estimated by government be 4.2 million people, or one in 10.

"There is nothing wrong with people who have AIDS. We have to love them, shake their hands. They are our brothers and sisters," he said.

Tutu, the former Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his efforts to end apartheid, added: "South Africans should reach out and touch, love and tell AIDS sufferers that they belong to the society."

"What we are doing today to AIDS sufferers is exactly how people who suffered from leprosy were treated in the Bible," he added.

De Klerk, who was a deputy president to Mandela for two years after the first democratic election in 1994, called for "a national commitment to fight and defeat AIDS."

"Children at school should be taught about the disease and they should feel free to talk about it everywhere, then they will know and understand that AIDS kills," he added.

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