AN IRON curtain of AIDS

about 20 kopecks (2p)”, says Marina. “If our needle means someone gets a bread roll to eat, I don’t think that’s an awful thing.”

“Officially, needle exchange is now a Good Thing,” explains Natasha, “ and our president, Leonid Kuchma, announced that 2002 was ‘The Year of the Fight Against Aids’ and said ‘these projects have every right to exist’, but his decree never got signed!” At the top level, politicians acknowledge ‘Something Must Be Done’. But local police chiefs still confiscate needles and arrest users.
Stigma is all-pervasive anyway. “My parents say, ‘We taught you to play the piano and study English, and you are working with drug users,” sighs Marina.

Back in Moscow, AFEW’s Ilona van der Braak says: “Russians are very practical people. ‘Tell us how to stop Aids, and we’ll do it,’ they say. There are few cultural taboos as such against sex education. It’s more to do with a fear of being dragged down to the level of those who are failing to cope in the post-Communist world.” This fear occurs among medical staff, too. Doctors routinely post notices on their surgery doors saying they will not treat drug users - for anything.
Grass-roots resurrection
In this climate of social alarm and head-scratching

Photographer John Ranard

among politicians, the only thing people with HIV could do was to organise themselves. In Ukraine at least, first and hardest hit, this has been pretty

Marina Braga of Faith Hope Love Project, Odessa

successful. The growth of the all-Ukrainian Network of People Living with HIV and Aids (UNP+) has been as explosive as the epidemic.
In less than two years a group of HIV positive people who had met through Narcotics Anonymous chapters became a countywide organisation that gets on to government committees. UNP+ now has a support group in 20 out of Ukraine’s 25 provinces. There are about 25 harm reduction projects serving about 15,000

people.
From UNP+’s point of view, the worst discrimination comes from the doctors themselves. “They