Hajra Omarjee
12 November 2007
Johannesburg — THERE have been renewed calls from civil society for President Thabo Mbeki to step down at the African National Congress's (ANC's) conference in December.
This follows an exposé, published in Mark Gevisser's biography of Mbeki, that Mbeki remains an "AIDS dissident" and regrets having been forced to withdraw from the "debate" on the disease.
Treatment Action Campaign's (TAC's) Zackie Achmat said another term with Mbeki at the helm of the party would be "a tragedy" for SA and the continent.
Although Mbeki is not constitutionally eligible to stand for another term as SA's president, he has made himself available in the ruling party's presidential elections, due at the ANC's national conference in Polokwane next month.
But political analysts warn that Mbeki's campaign has been damaged by Gevisser's book. Gevisser writes in Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred, that Mbeki admitted he was still an AIDS dissident, and regretted bowing to pressure from cabinet colleagues to withdraw from the debate.
A reference in the book -- that a presidential paper that was hand-delivered to the author by a "presidential driver" in June this year likened HIV scientists to Nazis -- will also not amuse local and international activists.
The TAC said in its response that the latest news about the president's state of mind about the scientific approach to the pandemic was "deeply tragic".
It was largely the TAC's intense lobby to force the government to address the plight of HIV affected and infected people, which included judicial instruction, that led to the government's about-turn in 2003 in its HIV/AIDS strategy, when it began to roll out free AIDS drugs in public hospitals.
It was thought Mbeki, too, had had a change of heart on the issue rather than just capitulating to internal ANC and cabinet pressures.
The news that Mbeki remains an "A IDS dissident" has now been widely published in the international media. The BBC, Guardian and New York Times have all run the story.
Steven Friedman, senior research associate at the Institute for a Democratic SA, said he was not surprised.
"His opponents know he is an AIDS denialist and his supporters don't care." However, he said Mbeki might care about the international fallout of the book. "The international community may influence his (Mbeki's) decision on whether or not to stand next month."
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President Mbeki is not in denial!
What makes President Mbeki a visionary leader is his ability to see that although opportunistic diseases are decimating Africa, "African" AIDS cases are diagnosed quite differently than "AIDS" cases in the rest of the world.
I admire his rare ability to understand that the reason for this difference in diagnosing AIDS cases is because a sexually transmitted virus does not cause African AIDS cases.
Which makes a lot of sense when you consider that malnutrition is recognized as the single greatest source of immune-suppression in the world and factor in the extreme social and economic conditions.
Michael Ellner, President, HEAL (Health Education AIDS Liaison-NYC POBox 1103 - Old Chelsea Station New York, NY 10113 www.healaids.com
It has been with both astonishment and admiration that I have watched Thabo Mbeki insist on a truly South African approach to the understanding, prevention and treatment of AIDS and it's causes.
Without doubt it is a Herculean task not to bow to the unrelenting pressure from Big Pharma and it's desperate apologists to oversimplify these issues.
Far from being an 'AIDS Denialist', Thabo Mbeki would have us embrace the full knowledge of AIDS available to us after 25 years of research into this evermore complex syndrome and it's causes.
The only denialists there are those deny that AIDS is more complex than we thought. They deny the people's right to fully informed consent and the right of refusal. They deny that 25 years of research and billions of dollars later they have not cured a single patient, satisfying themselves instead by promoting questionable drugs with toxic and sometimes deadly side-effects to the most vulnerable among us. And they deny that it is the nature of science to evolve and change, shrilly shouting down those who ask tough questions about the status quo.
Well let's hope they don't manage to shout Thabo Mbeki down, because such voices as his are the only beacon of hope left in an establishment hopelessly and myopically addicted to consensus and the status quo. The very status quo which has failed to cure even one patient or properly explain how AIDS actually occurs.
Let me finish by quoting Michael Crichton, A.B. Anthropology, M.D. Harvard:
"Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right...The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus..."
What is an Aids denialist?
A discerning individual that is not falling for the propaganda that upholds the illusion of Aids as a specific, viral illness, based on meaningless testing and toxic, life threatening drug treatment as "life saving".
As such, I congratulate Thabo Mbeki for being called an Aids denialist, because he's one of the people who see through the matrix that keeps most people in a state of overwhelm and illness.