YouSaid · the spoken record

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9

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2000-01-10

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2000-01-10

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1

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un-security-council

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1. “The rich nations rail extensively against the mistreatment of two journalists in my country, an event we have admitted to be judged in court, and yet we are supposed to accept that withholding available therapies from those who need them is not an offence against human rights, the right to health being one of the paramount, universal rights. The disease affects everyone - poor, rich; urban, rural; employee, employer, unemployed; educated, ignorant; married, single; young, old; resident, tourist. As Mary Fisher, a wealthy socialite infected by her husband, succinctly pointed out at the United States of America's Republican National Convention in Houston some years ago, "HIV asks only one thing of those it attacks: 'Are you human?"' I thank the Council for listening.”

   2000-01-10 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.4087 (2000) · source

2. “We need to examine and correct those obstructions to our provision for this disaster. In Zimbabwe we lose nearly 1,000 people a week to HIV/AIDS; 15 per cent of those are children under five who have contracted it through their parents; 27 per cent of expenditure in our health institutions is in treating, usually unsuccessfully, HIV-related conditions; we have no access to modern therapies; breastfeeding is universally practised, and access to what the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) calls acceptable alternatives is not feasible for any but a few well-off urban families. The question we ask is, is this merely lack of understanding or a new form of racial discrimination, another ethnic cleansing process?”

   2000-01-10 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.4087 (2000) · source

3. “No country, let alone one undergoing extreme financial distraint as a result of flawed macroeconomic policies, adverse terms of trade, an economic reform programme which has left just about every Zimbabwean worse off and a debt service burden consuming more than 38 per cent of the Government budget, interest rates alone being four times the allocation to the total health budget - no country can carry the weight of the health, economic and social effects of the devastation wrought by AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. This is why we welcome the concern shown by the Security Council, through its current President, the United States of America, and the opportunity to present not only our statistics, but also a few of our achievements and our proposals, to this highly influential body, confident that our voice will be heard.”

   2000-01-10 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.4087 (2000) · source

4. “The fiscus introduced an AIDS levy at the rate of 3 per cent on income tax and corporate tax to provide secure financing for the activities of the Council. A previous attempt to create a cross-sectoral national AIDS council foundered because it depended too heavily on donor support and because of inadequate inputs from the Ministry of Health, as well as having no executive function. This innovation was launched by our President on World AIDS Day, 1 December 1999, at a day-long convention in the capital, attended by more than 5,000 people. Particularly challenging were the presentations and requests from school-age children developed by the Children's Parliament, which had held its latest session in September. The challenge now is to deal with the epidemic effectively, consistently and fully.”

   2000-01-10 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.4087 (2000) · source

5. “Suffice it to say that the small cohort of voluntary blood donors - about 8,000 - has consistently shown very much lower rates of HIV seropositivity, and these rates are progressively declining as well, showing a dramatic reduction in seroconversion rates since 1994 and indicating that positive behaviour change is realistically achievable. Zimbabwe, uniquely in Africa, has screened all donated blood for HIV since September 1985, when the first case was identified in our country. By the end of 1999, the National AIDS Policy for Zimbabwe had, after three and a half years of wide consultation throughout the country, been completed, and the statute establishing the National AIDS Council, which involves all stakeholders, was approved by Parliament.”

   2000-01-10 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.4087 (2000) · source

6. “In Zimbabwe the rates of sexually transmitted infections for individuals peaked in 1990 and have been going down since then. The rates of new HIV infection peaked in 1995 and have been going down since then. Zimbabwe, nevertheless, is currently experiencing one of the highest prevalence rates of HIV seropositivity in the world, but of course the rate is derived from extrapolation of sentinel surveillance data, and the sites were chosen originally with a View to detecting newly arising infections early. Thus, antenatal populations, STD clinic attenders and hospital in-patients form the main cohorts of our national statistical construct. Whether these rates will change as a result of our national Voluntary Counselling and Testing centres, where healthy people seek to determine their HIV status, is information that is eagerly awaited.”

   2000-01-10 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.4087 (2000) · source

7. “We have accepted the repeated canard from international agencies that, except for one country, there is no political leadership in Africa on the issue of AIDS. Yet, surprisingly, many of us, my own country included, have achieved the impossible. We have induced our own populations to understand that the exercise of a completely normal, necessary and entirely pleasurable human function can have fatal consequences. I note from the manner in which the Western entertainment industry, so-called, promotes the hedonistic fruits of promiscuity, with no intimation of the potentially fatal results, and the rapid growth of the numbers of young, northern hemisphere women who are becoming HIV-positive, that metropolitan countries have something to learn from us.”

   2000-01-10 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.4087 (2000) · source

8. “Now, with respect, ladies and gentlemen, comrades and friends, the proverbial chickens are coming home to roost. Africa may be the world's largest man-made island, as a result of the Suez Canal, but man's insatiable desire to explore and exploit distant and unknown, not to say dangerous, destinations will always overcome any cordon sanitaire, any island mentality or any sane or logical precautions that science, medicine or propriety may prescribe. So it is futile for the global community to turn its back on the ethnic destruction which the current epidemic is wreaking in my country and my continent. We have become used, even inured, to the verbal abuse to which some of our leaders have been subjected.”

   2000-01-10 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.4087 (2000) · source

9. “The world has recently been through a highly expensive and largely uncoordinated exercise to eliminate the risk of some people losing some money, some places losing some data and some people disrupting their busy schedules. To some of us, in the real world, this only induces a sense of wonder that intelligent beings in the metropolitan countries can be so oblivious, so colour-blind, to what has happened in the African continent over the past 15 years. Some $600 billion is estimated to have been spent on the millennium bug - a largely irrelevant threat, certainly, to us - while the world at large has laconically observed the exponential growth of the HIV epidemic in areas not materially linked to the growth of the international economy.”

   2000-01-10 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.4087 (2000) · source