Sunday Times, South Africa - April 23, 2000
Carol Paton

The concerns grew this week after a letter Mbeki wrote to US President Bill Clinton, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and other heads of state was leaked by White House sources to the influential US newspaper the Washington Post.

The Post ran two days of harsh editorials on the issue this week - an indication of unusually high public interest in the matter.

Although official responses from the White House emphasised the areas of agreement in Mbeki's letter, the concern is that these latest developments will catapult the AIDS issue to centre stage during Mbeki's May visit.

With growing militancy among activists of non-governmental organisations and grassroots organisations, US officials fear that Mbeki could face similar protests to those witnessed at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings in Washington earlier this month and at the World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle in November.

Foreign Affairs spokesman Ronnie Mamoepa, who will handle Mbeki's media arrangements during the trip, said the government was unconcerned by the possibility of large protests.

"It's their democratic right to protest, just as the President has a democratic right to hold a different view," said Mamoepa.

The controversy began when Mbeki aligned himself with socalled AIDS dissidents in the US - Berkeley biochemist Peter Duesberg and his ally David Rasnick - proponents of the view that HIV does not cause AIDS and that treatment with drugs such as AZT does more harm than good.

Their views have been harshly discredited by public health officials in the US, who are concerned that views like theirs weaken prevention campaigns and make prevention drugs even less accessible.

But in his letter, Mbeki insisted on SA's right to consult dissident scientists, arguing that an openminded approach was the best way of finding a solution suited to the nature of the disease in Africa.

In Parliament this week, Deputy President Jacob Zuma mounted a similar defence of the government's position, comparing criticism of the dissidents to the persecution of scientists in Medieval times.

"We have come to the conclusion that no scientist or group of scientists can claim a monopoly on all knowledge in this particular matter . . . We should not leave any stone unturned, even if this means including the views of the so-called dissidents," said Zuma.

While he said that Mbeki had never said that HIV did not cause AIDS, he said the government would go ahead with plans to convene an international panel of experts to "openly and candidly discuss all matters in contention".

In its editorial this week, the Post slated the idea of the panel "as a ludicrous waste of precious time and a cruel hoax on his suffering people. No serious medical scientist doubts the causal link between HIV and AIDS. And no serious political leader should either."

Speaking on behalf of the ANC in the parliamentary debate, the chairman of Parliament's portfolio committee on health, Abe Nkomo, criticised pharmaceutical companies for exploiting Africans by selling AIDS drugs at high prices. He said that an African solution was something on which SA was prepared to campaign to win international solidarity.

"Given the limitation on funding to deal with AIDS, do we ask the international community to donate medicines or to lift intellectual property rights. These are issues which we alone cannot campaign about so we need international solidarity," he said.
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