EVELYN LEOPOLD, United Nations | Thursday
WITH red ribbons emblazoning the New York skyline, the first high-level UN Aids conference opens next week, attended by 180 nations, many from nations hardest hit by the killer disease.
Louise Frechette, the UN deputy secretary-general, said governments, aid bodies and UN agencies had been more active than expected at the United Nations and elsewhere.
”The likelihood that this special session will have an impact on real life is high,” she told a news conference. The conference officially opens on Monday and ends on Wednesday.
To mark the meeting, the United Nations plans to run a plastic red Aids ribbon across 550 lit up windows in its high-rise complex along Manhattan’s East River.
Only the 15-member UN Security Council is sidelining the event, scheduling two public debates between June 25 and 27 as well as a vote on the re-election of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, whose five-year term expires on December 31.
At least 24 heads of state and government from the worse-affected countries in Africa and the Caribbean, including Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland, are scheduled to speak at the UN General Assembly session.
But few Western nations, outside of Portugal, are sending their top officials, although many will be represented by cabinet ministers. The conference is to end with a declaration spelling out targets for national Aids programs and guidelines for UN bodies.
Of the more than 36 million people now infected with HIV, the virus that causes Aids, 25 million are in Africa, although the disease is spreading rapidly through the Caribbean, India, China as well as Russia and eastern Europe.
The conference is being held 20 years after the first Aids case was reported, with the United Nations slow in conducting a high-level campaign against the virus.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) through most of the 1990s gave little priority to Aids, forcing UN officials to create UNAIDS in 1995 as a coordinating group. And only in the last year has Annan made the fight against the disease his ”personal priority,” using his platform to persuade governments and businessmen to intervene.
He has proposed a war chest to fight Aids that would be administered by the World Bank and an independent board of directors. He estimates some $7-billion to $12-billion a year is needed to stop and begin to reverse the disease.
But few expect that amount to be raised unless it is taken from other foreign aid.
”I cannot be sure we will see all the money, but I think we will see billions of dollars,” said Gro Harlem Brundtland, the current WHO director-general, who revived the Aids programs.
”Over the past 18 months there has been change of sentiment about the shared, global responsibility for a situation of this kind,” she said.
Unlike other diseases that may have killed more people in the last decade, Aids strikes young sexually active men and women, thereby decimating a generation of productive workers.
Of the 26 million Africans suffering from the virus, only some 10,000 are being treated with antiretroviral drugs while the rest are left to die. Among developing nations, only Brazil has defied statistics and set up a free treatment program.
UN figures show more women than men were among the 2.5-million people who died of Aids in 2000. ”Too often women and girls cannot say no to unwanted and unprotected sex without fear of reprisal,” said Noeleen Heyzer, executive director of the UN Development Fund for Women.
But the document for delegates to approve stumbles over frank discussions of sex — particularly involving homosexuals, prostitutes, drug injectors and prisoners, most nations say have to be reached rather than stigmatised. – Reuters