The Treatment Action Campaign confirmed on Wednesday it would go ahead with a programme of civil disobedience, starting on Human Rights Day, in support of its demands for a national HIV/Aids treatment plan.
”We are about to embark on the civil disobedience campaign where, if necessary, we are prepared to break laws and risk arrest,” TAC spokesman Mark Heywood told a media conference in Johannesburg.
”This is not a decision we have come to easily or taken lightly because we respect the government, our Constitution, and we are a constitutional law-abiding organisation.
”But with 600 people dying every day from HIV/Aids, that’s a lot of life, and in a country with equal rights and democracy, this is not a radical demand.”
The TAC hopes its protests will force the government to commit to signing a framework treatment and prevention plan agreement which the TAC says was negotiated at the National Economic Development and Labour Council last year.
Heywood said TAC campaigners were aware of the steps they were embarking upon and the risk they were taking but ”valued their own lives and that of those around them”.
”(The) TAC was formed four years ago and since them we have done all in our power to try and tell the government that we would work with them on a rational plan on the HIV Aids issue and medication for victims … but the health minister must now be aware that partially because of her negligence so many people have died without receiving antiretrovirals,” he said.
Heywood said the Congress of South African Trade Unions, the SA Medical Association and churches all supported efforts to put in place a treatment plan but the government was ”a thorn in the side”.
It was shameful that a country which had available resources could not supply antiretrovirals to the poor when poorer countries like Botswana and Nigeria were rolling out the medication to their victims.
He said if Judge Edwin Cameron, certain members of parliament and hundreds of people on medical aid were able to afford antiretrovirals, ”it does not mean that the poor people who are quiet but cannot afford medication, should not have access to it”.
Heywood said the chief executive officer of Nedlac, Philip Dexter and other members of the health and labour departments were scheduled to discuss the Nedlac agreement on HIV/Aids with parliament’s health portfolio committee on Wednesday.
”If the government calls us today (Wednesday) to arrange a meeting with Nedlac we will call the demonstrations off.”
Heywood also expressed concern that Finance Minister Trevor Manuel had described antiretroviral drugs as ”a lot of voodoo”.
Manuel told parliament on Tuesday that spending government money on antiretrovirals was a waste of very limited resources.
Also speaking at the TAC media conference, Reverend Douglas Torr, from the Anglican Diocese of Johannesburg said his church supported TAC.
”The Anglican Church in Southern Africa remains committed to seeking an adequate treatment plan for all HIV/Aids sufferers and we would like to see the provision of this medication in our hospitals.”
Torr said: ”The church is committed to the sanctity of human life and we feel we have to do something to support the people because of so many deaths per day.”
Posters reading ”Wanted: Manto Tshabalala-Msimang and Alec Erwin For Not Stopping 600 HIV Aids Deaths Everyday” were pasted around the hall at the media conference where a workshop was due to start for TAC campaigners. – Sapa