Aids to SA’
Aaron Nicodemus
A leading Aids researcher says military bases in Angola and northern Namibia – belonging to the old South African Defence Force (SADF), the African National Congress’s armed wing and the Inkatha Freedom Party – are primarily responsible for the rapid and uneven spread of the disease in South Africa.
Dr Robert Shell, head of the population research unit at Rhodes University, calls his theory “The Trojan Horse”. Based on previous studies, Shell says that the HIV- infection rate in communities near military bases is significantly higher than expected. He also looks at the higher-than- expected rate of HIV infection around military bases in Liberia and Uganda.
Northern Namibia forms the crux of Shell’s argument. The area, formerly known as Ovamboland, has been the site of much military action, including the SADF’s staging area for the attack on Cuban forces in Angola. It also served as a training ground for IFP cadres, who spread instability in KwaZulu-Natal in the 1990s.
A Save the Children study found that along truck routes in northern Namibia, the HIV- infection rate was as high as 30%. But in Eehana, a remote village with a military base, the HIV rate was between 10% and 20%, much higher than one would expect, Shell says. The study also examines HIV rates at nearby secondary schools, and finds them much higher than expected – a sign, Shell says, that students are being infected by soldiers in the military compound.
“This clustering was very probably due to the military base, as the settlement is relatively isolated,” Shell says.
“Nobody has presented a convincing explanation for the pronounced regional variance in the provincial breakdowns, and within provinces there seems to be an equivalent ignorance. The Trojan Horse hypothesis should be considered in terms of the uneven spread of the epidemic in the province.”
Shell argues that many soldiers – whether SADF or liberation forces like Umkhonto weSizwe, which were later assimilated into the South African National Defence Force (SANDF)- returned to South Africa infected with HIV. When integrating the army personnel in 1994, the SANDF leaders decided that there would be no testing of soldiers for HIV, in what Shell characterises as a political issue. He calls the decision “a tragic and conceivably catastrophic watershed event for the history of Aids in South Africa”.
Once veterans returned from foreign wars between 1992 and 1994, they were distributed all over the country and “became an almost perfectly randomly distributed set of sites” to kick-start the Aids epidemic, Shell says. “A better blueprint for spreading Aids” could not be devised, he said.
But Mark Heywood, head of the Aids Law Project, says Shell uses his valuable research to draw “wrong, dangerous and in some cases inexplicable” conclusions. “He chooses to ignore some real issues brought out in his paper,” Heywood says.
The research indicates there should be better counselling of soldiers about the risk of Aids and how to manage the disease once infected, Heywood says. The government should concentrate prevention efforts in communities that surround military bases, he says, and pre-employment testing of new recruits is ineffective in keeping Aids out of the army.
“The military has factored into the spread of HIV in South Africa, but his conclusions are totally, totally wrong,” Heywood says. “This is an attempt to simplify a complicated issue, an attempt that does not stand up to scientific scrutiny.”
Shell says his paper does highlight some of those issues, and notes that the army is culpable for not taking a more forceful stance in preventing the spread of HIV/Aids among its soldiers and the communities living around military bases. Had the army taken a more proactive stance, perhaps a considerable number of HIV/Aids cases could have been prevented, he says.
Major Louis Kirstein of the Department of Defence denies that the military is the sole cause of HIV in South Africa. “It would be regrettable if the SANDF is singled out as a single factor in the current HIV epidemic in South Africa,” he says. “The current severity of the HIV epidemic in our country calls for greater co-operation between all organisations.”
He went on to say that the SANDF is committed to prevention of HIV transmission both within its forces and among the community at large.
Shell also cites several specific examples of military personnel behaviour that bolster his argument. One involves an elderly woman in the Eastern Cape who was violently raped by several soldiers, and eventually died from her injuries.
Shell also cites extremists within the security forces who used Aids as a way to control or eliminate “undesirables”, mainly blacks. Shell cites a plan allegedly hatched by Eugene de Kock and two underlings, Willie Nortj and “Brood” van Heerden, to infect Hillbrow prostitutes.
According to separate affidavits filed by Nortj and Van Heerden in Denmark, in 1990 four askaris (named Ydam, Stretcher, Sebole and Vietnam) were diagnosed as being HIV- positive. They were placed as security guards in two Hillbrow hotels, and their assignment was simple: infect black prostitutes with Aids. According to Nortj, the order came from De Kock.
In his testimony to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, De Kock denied that he concocted the plan or ordered the men to infect prostitutes. “It is a known fact that most regular clients of black prostitutes are white men. I wouldn’t have achieved anything by infecting prostitutes.”
Shell says that it only takes a small number of seed individuals to start a pandemic of Aids. In this case, the model would start with four HIV-positive askaris and four infected prostitutes being injected into an HIV-free population of one million people.
Shell assumes that 43% of the population is not at risk, and also assumes a low in- migration. Shell says that by 2026, the eight HIV-positive individuals would have been the direct cause of 365 788 Aids deaths.
“That is the havoc which [these four men] could still wreak,” Shell said.