WASHINGTON, Oct 8 (AFP) - The United States on Friday congratulated Kenyan ecologist Wangari Maathai, the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, but tempered its praise over her claim that HIV/AIDS is a biological weapon aimed at wiping out the black race.
The State Department said Maathai's selection reflected well on Kenya and the Kenyan government, in which she serves as assistant minister of the environment, and added that she had worked tirelessly to preserve African forests.
"She's had many long years of environmental activism," spokesman Richard Boucher said. "We're delighted to see that she's the first African woman to have been selected for this unique honor."
"We think she's been a very prominent and important activist on environmental issues, and we have great respect for that," he said.
While focusing on praise for Maathai's environmental work and noting that she had worked with officials from the US embassy in Nairobi in that area, Boucher allowed that Washington had had serious disagreements with her on other matters.
"We certainly have not agreed with her on everything," he said. "We do some things together with her, but we haven't agreed on everything."
Boucher declined to outline the areas of disagreement, but a senior State Department official said later that Washington vehemently objected to Maathai's comments about the origin of HIV/AIDS.
"She said (HIV/AIDS) was invented as a bioweapon in some laboratory in the West," the official said. "We don't agree with that."
The official pointed to a report of those comments published in late August by the East African Standard, a Kenyan newspaper, in which Maathai was quoted as saying that HIV/AIDS was created by scientists for the purpose of mass extermination.
"We know that the developed nations are using biological warfare, leaving guns to the primitive people," the Standard quoted Maathai as telling a public workshop in central Kenyan town of Nyeri on August 30. "They have the resources to do this."
"AIDS (is) not a curse from God to Africans or the black people," she said, according to the paper's account of the meeting published a day later. "It is a tool to control them designed by some evil-minded scientists, but we may not know who particularly did."
Maathai, 64, was honored by the Nobel committee for standing at the "front of the fight to promote ecologically viable social, economic and cultural development in Kenya and in Africa."
In 1977, she founded the Green Belt Movement, the largest tree-planing project in Africa aimed at promoting biodiversity and at the same time creating jobs and giving women a stronger identity in society.
Voted Time Magazine's "Hero of the Planet" in 1998 and a household name in her country, Maathai said the award had been the "biggest surprise in my entire life."
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