Former US President Bill Clinton on Wednesday said the world has a stake in helping Africans survive Aids and in using the knowledge gained to help other regions of the globe where the disease is growing at alarming rates.
”I believe reversing the Aids (pandemic) is the most important issue that is facing the whole world,” Clinton said. ”It should unite all people”.
”Even if Rwanda and Africa have the most cases of Aids, the disease is growing faster in other parts of the world,” Clinton told patients and government officials at a dusty health centre outside the Rwandan capital.
Earlier he had signed an agreement committing the William J Clinton Foundation to help Rwanda provide drugs and care to HIV/Aids patients, train health workers and develop health services.
Clinton, who is accompanied by actors Kevin Spacey and Chris Tucker, is in Africa to promote efforts to fight Aids and encourage economic development.
The rate of HIV/Aids infection in the tiny central African nation is among the highest in the world, partly due to the 1994 genocide during which HIV-positive Hutu extremists deliberately raped minority Tutsis and politically moderate women from the Hutu majority to infect them.
More than 500 000 Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus were killed during the 100-day slaughter. Many are now living and dying from the Aids virus they contracted during the chaos and violence accompanying the genocide.
”Rape and deliberate infection of people with HIV were used as weapons during the genocide, and more people contracted the disease while living in the refugee camps during the chaos,” said Etienne Karita, head of the Treatment and Research Aids Centre.
”This contributed greatly to the spread of Aids, which was initially confined to urban areas.”
Karita said only three percent of the rural population was infected with HIV before the genocide; a survey conducted in 1997 indicated that the figure had jumped up to 10%.
The urban infection rate, which was estimated at 25% of the population, remained the same despite the widespread killings and flights into refugee camps in neighbouring countries, Karita said.
About 11% of adults in Rwanda’s estimated population of eight million live with HIV; up to 15% of those infected have developed full-blown Aids, Karita said.
”We will do our best to help in the education, treatment and prevention (of Aids in Rwanda),” Clinton said before heading to a luncheon meeting with President Paul Kagame and a visit to a genocide memorial site. ”You deserve that.”
He was expected to travel to Maputo, Mozambique late on Wednesday.
After visiting Ghana, Nigeria and Rwanda, his tour will also take him to South Africa. He returns to the United States on Sunday.
In 1998, Clinton became the first US president to tour Africa while in office. During the trip he made a brief stopover at Kigali airport where he expressed unqualified regret over the genocide and held an emotional meeting with survivors.
The United States joined in the UN Security Council vote that removed nearly all the UN peacekeepers from Rwanda as the genocide got underway. – Sapa-AP