Newsday - January 19, 2001
Laurie Garrett
At a special session of the Security Council Friday, U.S. Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke charged that the United Nations has done little to ensure that peacekeeping soldiers aren't spreading AIDS.
A year ago, Holbrooke successfully pushed for passage of UN Resolution 1308, which calls for an aggressive commitment to controlling the AIDS virus.
In his final UN address Friday, Holbrooke blasted the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations for failing to abide by the resolution's terms to limit the spread of HIV during UN peace operations.
"It would be the cruelest of ironies if people who had come to end war ...were spreading the most deadly of diseases," Holbrooke said. "If we don't address AIDS ...it will kill more people and undermine more societies than even the most critical conflicts we discuss here."
All U.S. troops are routinely tested for HIV infection, and those who carry the virus are not deployed overseas. But few of the 31,000 peacekeeping soldiers and police working under the UN flag come from countries that mandate HIV tests or even offer them on a voluntary basis. Some soldiers come from countries with adult HIV rates of 10 percent or more.
And a few of the countries to which UN peacekeepers are deployed, such as Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Cambodia, have high rates of HIV in their civilian populations. In those cases, peacekeeping soldiers are at risk for contracting the virus and then taking the virus back to their homelands.
Holbrooke charged that the peacekeeping department has done little to protect UN soldiers, or the civilians with whom they come in contact, from AIDS. He told the Security Council that the new choice for secretary of state, Colin Powell, shares his views and plans to continue U.S. pressure for full implementation of UN Resolution 1308.
Shortly before the Security Council convened Friday, the peacekeeping department's leadership met with Dr. Peter Piot, head of UNAIDS. They drew up a framework under which Piot's agency will help create guidelines for troop education, condom distribution and voluntary and confidential testing, both pre- and post-deployment.
The initiative drew mixed response from the Security Council. Nigeria's ambassador, Chief Arthur C.I. Mbanefo, whose country has an adult infection rate of more than 5 percent and supplies many peacekeeping soldiers to the UN, praised the effort and called for the UN to "provide medical facilities for their infected soldiers who serve as UN peacekeepers, upon the termination of their service."
Norway insisted that confidential testing of all troops, both before and after they are deployed, ought to be instituted. And Canadian Ambassador Paul Heinbecker demanded greater haste in the effort.
Indian Ambassador Kamalesh Sharma, however, said his country strongly opposes testing its soldiers.
"We find objectionable the imputation that peacekeepers are either necessarily at risk or carriers of the disease...Not one Indian peacekeeper has either arrived in theater in Africa with HIV/AIDS or left with it...Not one has died of AIDS," Sharma said.
India is a major contributor of peacekeeping soldiers. UNAIDS estimates that more than 3 million Indians are HIV positive.
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