Sunday Times, South Africa - June 18, 2000
Laurice Taitz

Besides enlisting the services of police and security companies to protect delegates from possible crime and violence in Durban, organisers have also gone to great lengths to protect delegates from each other.

Their plans to defuse tension among delegates include five "speakers' corners" in the conference venue to allow people to air their views through a public address system, and a "Vukani" (wake up) room for representatives of activist groups or communities to hand over memorandums, resolutions or action lists to authorities.

There are only three weeks to go until the conference which, with an expected 12 000 delegates from around the world, is the biggest to be held in South Africa. It is also the first AIDS conference to be held in a developing country. The six-day conference, which will be opened by President Thabo Mbeki, will focus the world's attention on South Africa and on the continent's burgeoning AIDS crisis. It will also focus attention on the President's controversial approach to HIV and AIDS.

One of the major issues that has received attention in the build-up to the conference has been the government's refusal to provide anti-retroviral treatment to HIVpositive women to prevent transmission of the virus to their babies. Over the past two years, this has become a burning issue for scientists and activists.

A Global March for Treatment Access will take place outside the Durban City Hall, just hours before Mbeki's address.

The organisers of the march, Nobel prize-winning Medecins sans Fronti res and South Africa's Treatment Action Campaign, have been at pains to quell rumours that the march will disrupt the conference and to emphasise that it will be peaceful.

But fears of violence were sparked months ago when South African trade unionists made public their plans to create "another Seattle" - a reference to last year's World Trade Organisation meeting which was disrupted by violent protests.

Tumediso Modise, AIDS co-ordinator for the National Council of Trade Unions, was reported as saying: "We want to try and create another Seattle against pharmaceutical firms and some governments which have not taken this AIDS issue seriously."

Added to this, a group of AIDS dissidents calling themselves ACT UP San Francisco, is expected to cause disruptions at the conference. Members of the group - which is not linked to the global AIDS activist group ACT UP - have been linked to violence at earlier conferences.

Their application to set up an exhibition stand at the event was turned down.

While the group's spokesman, David Pasquarelli, has publicly denied this, he is among four members of the organisation against whom arrest warrants were issued by San Francisco police last month after they barged into a meeting being held by activists not aligned to their cause. Pasquarelli was charged with trespassing and assault.

In a letter to delegates, conference chairman Professor Jerry Coovadia said: "South Africa has a zero to low tolerance level when it comes to protests and disruption when there is the potential of causing harm to individuals and damage to property.

"However, in the spirit of our new South Africa, we will allow people to air their grievances.

"For this reason we have paid special attention to safety and security within the conference venue."

Coovadia said certain zones in the conference centre had been demarcated for protests - as long as they remained peaceful.

In the past year, organisers have already had to:

Quell talk of a boycott by those who wanted to protest against the South African government's refusal to treat HIV-positive pregnant women with antiretroviral drugs;

Deal with protests from health workers and grassroots activists about the 700 (about R4 900) registration fee that will prevent many Africans from attending; and

Dispel rumours that pharmaceutical companies - some of the event's biggest funders - were scaling down the size of their delegations and withdrawing support because of fears of violence on the part of AIDS activists.

The most recent controversy was sparked by an invitation to a photographic exhibition at the conference dealing with women and HIV. The photo used on the cover shows a naked, voluptuous blonde femme fatale seated on the floor with an intravenous drip inserted in her arm.

In an e-mail discussion forum, Heather Worth of the Institute for Research on Gender in Auckland, New Zealand commented: "This is just the kind of soft-porn image of women that advertisers use to sell cars. And here we are just about to attend a conference in Africa where few women have access to the kind of drug therapy this photo portrays."

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