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Dr Peter Piot, Director
of the Joint United Nations Programme on Aids and HIV - UNAIDS -
is not happy.
This is as it should be. United Nations directors should be campaigners,
seekers for a better world. We want them to have kept a spark of
utopian zeal somewhere inside, a passion to make the world a better
and more just place, despite the inevitable politicking and compromise
involved in getting 190 diverse nations to agree on anything.
On the day we spoke he had just returned form the World Environmental
Summit in Johannesburg. Hence his dissatisfaction.
“I was frustrated, even angry. Everyone was talking about
‘sustainable development’, but Aids had just slipped
off the agenda again,” he says.
Piot, 53, has kept the sense of mission he had as a 60s activist
in his native Belgium. An academic epidemiologist, still with the
shy exactness of the professor he used to be, he has nonetheless
kept the passion for equality he cultivated in his youth in Antwerp.
“I was one of those 60s people with a low tolerance of injustice,”
he says.
“I first got involved in volunteering on an Aids helpline
there - the first set up within the gay community. And no, I’m
not gay myself, but thank you for asking the question. I prefer
it when people ask than |
