“I live in hope,” said Stephen Lewis to a capacity crowd last Friday at Convocation Hall. “But I also live in rage.”
Lewis, the 2005 Massey Lecturer, was giving the last of five cross-country talks on the AIDS epidemic in Africa, in a series he titled “Race Against Time.”
“The Millennium Development Goals will not be reached in Africa,” Lewis bluntly opened, referring to the UN plans to halve poverty and disease by 2015.
“We are in a desperate race against time, and we’re losing. It’s simply impossible to reduce poverty, hunger, gender inequality, disease, and death significantly at their present pace, and other than the contrapuntal beat of hyperactive rhetoric, the necessary acceleration is nowhere evident.”
Lewis, a former Canadian ambassador to the UN, currently serves as the UN Secretary General’s special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa. His dispiriting experiences formed the basis for his lecture, which attacked the international community for its “heartless indifference and criminal neglect” toward Africa.
Lewis laid out ten measures that he said would help to rehabilitate African nations that have been devastated by AIDS, ranging from the creation of a special UN agency for women-who have been hit hardest by the pandemic-to solid commitments from Western governments to meet aid pledges of 0.7 per cent of their GNP, to the creation of an international coalition of social workers to address the large and growing population of AIDS orphans.
Lewis saved his most trenchant and emotional comments for the end of his talk, when he delved into what he delicately called “matters of controversy.” He accused the UN of self-censorship, charging that it has refrained from criticizing countries and regimes that have taken inadequate action.
“One learns, sometimes through painful experience, that as a UN bureaucrat, it’s not always possible to criticize individual countries without arousing indignation and anger, not to mention threats of retaliation,” Lewis said. “But all of that caution is thrown to the wind in the presence of the pandemic.
“I am personally persuaded that the toll on society from AIDS, the threat to the very underpinnings of African survival, is so intense that the normal diplomatic proprieties must be abandoned. I would argue that it’s morally irresponsible to embrace silence when there’s so much at stake.”
Lewis criticized a $15 billion U.S. aid program called the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) because it has excluded several countries in which AIDS is most acute, like Swaziland, Malawi, and Lesotho, and because aid dollars come with the requirement that programs emphasize abstinence education over condom use. He also attacked “recalcitrant African countries” like Zimbabwe, where Robert Mugabe’s government has disrupted AIDS relief efforts, and Swaziland, where the polygamist king builds palaces while 42 per cent of his adult subjects are infected.
Lewis emotionally compared the amount now spent annually worldwide on arms-which will cross the $1 trillion mark in 2005-with the amount pledged, but not yet actually given, by developed nations for AIDS relief: $50 billion. “The military total outstrips the human need 20 to one,” he said. “Can someone please explain to me our contemporary balance of virtues?”
“All of us are quiet,” Lewis said hauntingly. “Nary a peep from the UN family. How is this silence anything other than complicity?”
