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 Stuart Flavell, GNP+ Coordinator |
 Major Rubaramira Ruranga |
‘The dawn of a new positive leadership’ was the theme of the conference held in Uganda last month.
The largest-ever gathering of people living with the virus attracted nearly 800 delegates from 80 countries to the five-day meeting on the shores of Lake Victoria.
The main debate of the conference was whether HIV prevention campaigns or universal provision of antiretroviral drugs were the best way to beat the epidemic.
The conference chairman Major Rubaramira Ruranga, himself openly HIV positive, paid tribute to Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni for his leadership against the disease.
“I have for the first time got the freedom to live in peace and live openly with HIV,” he said, “and I think I’ll probably now die of old age rather than from Aids.”
“Action, not lip service, is urgently needed,” he said: “I implore the leaders of the world to treat people with Aids as they would treat their own family.”
Major Ruranga criticised those who were trying to make big business out of people living with HIV, and said that there are over 2,500 HIV organisations in Uganda alone, serving an HIV positive population of 1.5 million.
He described how: “Sixty per cent of our population cannot even afford half a dollar a day. They can’t even afford to buy salt, let alone HIV drugs.
“No one else knows the disease like us...I’d like to remind all those people who are still hiding and not coming out with HIV, to realise that there is no other choice than to come out.”
Stuart Flavell, international co-ordinator of the Global Network of HIV Positive People (GNP+), the conference organisers, paid tribute to activists from around the world for fighting and winning important battles over the last twenty years.
“Access to treatments makes prevention possible and gives hope,” Flavell said: “It allows people to make better choices and to be safe. There’s no incentive for people to test if there are no treatments.”
Milly Katana, a leading Ugandan activist and member of the Global Fund Board, pledged: “The stand I took was ‘No one under the sun will catch HIV from me’.”
While Museveni hid his head in his hands, Katana continued: “Mr President, despite the leadership you have given on this issue, there is still a lot of stigma and prejudice in our communities.”
But when President Museveni finally spoke he received rapturous applause from the mass of conference delegates.
“Reduction of HIV in Uganda was not due to condoms but due to behaviour change,” he claimed.
“Uganda does not earn enough from coffee exports in order to afford expensive anti-HIV drugs for all that need them,” he said.
The Global Fund to Fight Aids, TB and Malaria is the largest fund of its kind, with over $3.4 billion currently pledged up to 2008.
This was the optimistic picture
painted by Kate Thomson from the Global Fund, in her address to the Uganda
conference.
The Fund aims to drastically increase resources to fight HIV, TB and Malaria, Thomson explained, and after three rounds of grant-giving has already donated funds of $2.1 billion to projects in 125 countries around the world.
But it is the role of HIV positive people themselves in the Board decision-making process that makes its structure unique.
Not only do HIV positive people, and their own agencies around the world, draw up funding proposals but they also act as monitors of how the money is spent, Thomson said. They are the Fund’s “ears and eyes on the ground,” as one delegate put it.
But there were some disturbing stories from other delegates at the conference about a lack of involvement of HIV positive people, particularly in Africa. And there was concern from others that monies could be hijacked by corrupt local politicians and tribal chieftains.
One delegate told the meeting: “I was asked to sign a proposal without even reading it,” and another: “The whole system is rotten.”
 Kate Thomson |
The conference debated whether the Global Fund would stand the test of time and actually work.
Similarly, there was concern that without the active involvement of people living with HIV, the Fund would just limp along and be open to corruption.
But Kate Thomson said that the Fund is still a young organisation and is bound to go through some early teething problems.
She used the words of Nelson Mandela to sum up the importance of the Fund: “The Global Fund is the last chance to turn the tide of the epidemic. It is our lives that hang in the balance.”
A new generation of HIV positive leaders is needed to continue the fight for the rights of people around the world living with the virus, Ugandan activist Milly Katana told the conference.
Katana urged the participants to build on the legacy of community activism that shaped the early response to the epidemic and called for new partnerships between HIV positive peoples and governments in both the developed and developing world.
“We people with HIV cannot wait for things to be done for us. As individuals living with HIV we have to act ourselves.”
Highlighting continuing human rights abuses against HIV positive people around the world, Katana spoke of people with the virus in China being thrown into jail, with their organisations’ offices raided and of staff being arrested.
 Milly Katana |
Charting the struggles and successes of HIV activists in fighting for access to treatments and the rights of people living and dying from the disease over the last 20 years, Katana, who sits as a full voting member on the Global Fund to Fight Aids, TB and Malaria, said we must not fight on our own and not be fatalistic or depressed, even while millions continue to die from the disease.
“People living with HIV and Aids must seize the opportunities that the world is providing us,” she said, “and must not leave it up to others.
“We need to educate the population about death, the fact that HIV/Aids does not necessarily mean death and that every human being will die at some point in time.”
Katana called for a new generation of HIV positive leaders who were in touch with and listening to their communities around the world.
“We as people living with HIV/Aids must be ready to transform,” she said. “We have to seize the opportunities because the ball is our court. It’s up to us.”
UKC collaborates with Ugandan HIV charities