/ 17 April 2002

Mr President: how many more must die?

Johannesburg | Sunday

THE most fundamental crisis in the Aids epidemic was South Africa’s struggle to identify, confront and act on the truth about Aids, said Justice Edwin Cameron of the Supreme Court of Appeal recently.

Speaking at the launch of ”A Broken Landscape”, a new book of photographs on HIV/Aids in South Africa by Gideon Mendel at the SA National Gallery, he said the Aids crisis was one of illness, suffering and dying.

”Dying on a larger scale and in conspicuously different patterns from before; on a scale globally that dwarfs any disease or epidemic the world has known for more than six centuries,” the judge, who himself got Aids in 1997, said.

The judge said another crisis in Aids had been engendered by people in the country who denied the facts about Aids.

”There are those who deny that Aids has introduced new patterns of disease and dying to our sub-continent.

”They deny that these new patterns are the result of an infectious agent, a virus, one that is mostly sexually transmitted.”

These people also rejected the most signal truth in the Aids epidemic; that the destructive activity of the virus within the body can be contained by carefully administered and properly monitored antiretroviral medications.

Cameron said the denial of the facts about Aids was not only an outrage against the truth but it was an insult to South Africans who are living with and dying from the effects of the virus.

”You come here today because you have hope. We learnt lies under the apartheid system but we knew the truth would set us free. We have anger but we also have hope,” Cameron said.

Many people among the crowd who came to the launch had the words ”I’m HIV positive” emblazoned across the front and back of their T-shirts.

Posters adorned a large hall in the gallery where the launch was held.

Some of the posters proclaimed: ”Mr President: how many more must die?”, ”Nevirapine for pregnant women with HIV/Aids now”, ”Reduce military spending: One fighter jet equals antiretrovirals for 11 800 patients for one year”, and others.

Some of the photographs on display in the gallery were gut-wrenching with people just skin and bones, reminiscent of prisoners of war in the concentration camp of Belsen in Nazi Germany.

The pictorial book says three-quarters of the world’s 36-million people living with HIV/Aids are in Africa. ”An epidemic is quietly decimating the poorest nations on earth, a slow-burning tragedy on a monumental scale.”

A Broken Landscape describes what the epidemic means to some of the individuals, families and communities whose lives it has transformed.

It is the result of eight years by photographer Mendel, featuring images and testimonies gathered from six countries: Malawi, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Some of the stories are about people dying from Aids and are about people fighting against Aids in a situation where the stigma of Aids is a critical obstacle to its prevention and treatment.

The launch was hosted by the SA National Gallery and the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC).

Earlier on Saturday at a rally in Tembisa, outside Johannesburg, United Democratic Movement president Bantu Holomisa said his party would not rest until every person living with HIV/Aids received the care and attention they deserved in terms of the Constitution.

Holomisa said he had a ”growing anger” with the government’s thoughtless approach to HIV/Aids. – Sapa