Washington, DC — In a letter to U.S. President George W. Bush Monday, 85 inter-faith religious leaders said more effort is needed from the United States if the HIV/Aids fight is to be effective. "Unfulfilled commitments" have been made to the people of Africa and the Caribbean, the group wrote.
Some of the signatories conducted a half-hour vigil outside of the U.S. Treasury Department Monday morning calling for bolder leadership from the Bush Administration around the dual crises of global Aids and debt.
In their letter, the group asked for a commitment for at least US$5 billion "to fight the linked scourges of global aids in your 2005 budget request and by supporting complete debt cancellation for impoverished nations." Three out of four Aids deaths occur in Africa which contains the world's greatest concentration of impoverished nations, said Reverend Seamus Finn who leads the Washington, D.C., office of the Justice, Peace, and Integrity of Creation Office of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate.
A frequently-cited reason for the great poverty in Africa and other underdeveloped nations, is their great debt burden. "President Bush only asked the Congress for $2bn of the $15bn he announced last January for the fight against Aids and other infectious diseases. The Senate added $400m to that. But in 2001, the latest year for which there are accurate figures, African nations spent more than US$9 billion on debt repayment," said Marie Clarke, National Coordinator of the Jubilee USA Network.
Over a lunch with reporters, sprinkling their remarks and arguments liberally with passages from the Christian Bible and the Jewish Torah, members of the group who had been demonstrating in front of the Treasury Department insisted that religious organizations like theirs have made a new commitment to the HIV/Aids fight. "This is the issue Jesus talked so much about," said Reverend James Wallis, Convener of Call to Renewal, a national federation of churches and other faith-based organizations working to overcome poverty. "As you have done to the least of them, so you have done to me."
Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters
Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox
Although the Bush administration "made a lot of interventions" to try and block a full appropriation of $3bn for the HIV/Aids effort in the FY 2004 budget... we were fairly close to getting the full $3bn," said Adam Taylor, Executive Director of Global Justice and also Associate Minister at Shiloh Baptist Church in Washington, DC. On HIV/Aids, he says, there is a consensus in Congress that President Bush will find increasingly difficult to defy: "Many members on both aisles of the Congress are way ahead of the President on this."
And, said Rabbi David Saperstein, Director of the Religious Action Center of Jewish Reform, he has been "struck" by how a key part of Bush's core political support - evangelical groups, "are increasingly engaged by this issue."
To have an alliance between these groups and other religious organizations on HIV/Aids, "to me, is very significant," adds Reverend Wallis. The "voices of faith" joined by "the voices of politics" are sending a message to the people in the White House, "that you had better pay attention," says Wallis.
