CAPE TOWN, Dec 1 (AFP) - Southern African leaders at several events marking World AIDS Day on Wednesday called for mass mobilisation to take up the spear against the pandemic ravaging the worst-hit region in the world.
In a region where the average HIV prevalence rate hovers around 25 percent, political leaders attended a stray of events urging women, men and children to unite in the fight against AIDS.
Botswana President Festus Mogae, whose country has the second-highest prevalence rate in the world at 37.3 percent, according to UNAIDS, called on men to change their sexual behaviour.
"While the threat of HIV/AIDS continues to hang over our heads like the Sword of Damocles, we must never despair. We must keep hope alive and continue to fight until the epidemic is defeated," he told a rally in the western village of Ghenzi.
"Men in Botswana have often been associated with actions that serve to compound the problem, it is important that we find ways in which men can be part of the solution, rather than the problem."
Leaders in neighbouring South Africa, where more than five million adults are infected, fingered stigma as one of the pandemic's greatest enemies.
"We urge individual citizens to rededicate themselves to the fight against AIDS and AIDS messages should begin to enlist action on a wider scale, and a change in lifestyles and behaviour," Deputy President Jacob Zuma said in Cape Town.
"Allow me to re-emphasise the negative impact that the stigmatisation and discrimination associated with HIV and AIDS have on our efforts to fight the pandemic."
South Africa's Zulu opposition leader Mangosutho Buthelezi recently disclosed that he had lost two children to AIDS, a rare move in his traditional community where the disease is still highly stigmatised.
"Let us go out into the world and use every opportunity to tear down the walls of ignorance and perceptions of 'them' and 'us' between infected and the non-infected people," Buthelezi told a church gathering in Cape Town.
In Malawi, President Bingu wa Mutharika told a rally he wanted to see at least one million Malawians going for voluntary HIV tests in 2005.
"We want to put 80,000 on free anti-retrovirals by the end of 2005," Mutharika said.
"It's ambitious and achievable... but this will depend on how many people will go for voluntary HIV tests as we need to test at least a million people next year."
In Zimbabwe, around 2,000 people, including schoolchildren, AIDS workers and people living with HIV, crammed into an indoor recreational centre in Harare to mark World AIDS Day.
Zimbabwean Health Minister David Parirenyatwa said the alarming rate of sexual abuse among children caused high HIV infection levels among the youth.
"We hope as a country we can wake up and ask how we can fight child sexual abuse," said Parirenyatwa.
UNAIDS estimates put Swaziland, a mountain kingdom landlocked between South Africa and Mozambique, at the top of the list of affected countries in the world, but the absolute monarchy did not stage any World AIDS Day events on Wednesday.
Mozambicans spent most of the day casting their ballots in presidential and legislative elections, but presidential candidate Armando Guebuza has pledged to fight HIV/AIDS which affects 1.1 million of the country's 17 million people.
The government of Lesotho, a small country landlocked by South Africa, used World AIDS Day to announce a 1.3 million dollar (977,000 euro) project to feed its 100,000 AIDS orphans.
After Swaziland and Botswana, the prevalence rates in the region are highest in Lesotho at 28.9 percent and 24.6 percent in Zimbabwe.
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