HOWARD BARRELL, Cape Town | Friday
PRESIDENT Thabo Mbeki believes the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is part of a conspiracy to promote the view that HIV causes Aids.
Mbeki also thinks that the CIA is working covertly alongside the big US pharmaceutical manufacturers to undermine him because, by questioning the link between HIV and Aids, he is thought to pose a risk to the profits of drug companies making anti-retroviral treatments.
Mbeki fingered the CIA in his address to African National Congress MPs at a caucus meeting in Parliament last Thursday.
Mbeki also told the ANC caucus that the fact that South Africa under him was emerging as a leader of attempts by the developing world to get a better deal in the international economic system was a threat to the US and other major Western powers.
In what was described as a “rambling” address, Mbeki said that if one agreed that HIV caused Aids, it followed that the condition had to be treated by drugs and those drugs were produced by the big Western drug companies. The drug companies therefore needed HIV to cause Aids, so they promoted the thesis that HIV caused Aids, he said.
Mbeki said his advisers were trying to find out who was spreading the idea that he was “deranged”. These reports were clearly part of a campaign against him and his government.
He appealed to MPs to join him in fighting off this campaign.
The struggle he and the government were waging for a better economic deal for developing countries and against the propaganda being put out by the drug companies and, covertly, the CIA were all linked, he said. MPs should not be afraid to take on these powerful international forces, he added.
Mbeki’s remarks last Thursday disrupted desperate attempts by government spin doctors – both inside South African and abroad – to lay to rest the HIV/Aids controversy in which the president has embroiled himself and to repair the battering Mbeki’s image has taken.