* Civil Society Prepares for 'Civil War'
http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/interna.asp?idnews=21383
* No Democracy Without Access to Information
http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/interna.asp?idnews=21371
* Come To Us, People Tell Leaders
http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/interna.asp?idnews=21363
MORE NEWS ON THE COMMONWEALTH MEETING IN PAMBAZUKA NEWS...

I started to subscribe to the Pambazuka Newsletter immediately after a Human Rights Training Education conference recently, and am very pleased with it. I have already found lots of articles to use for my MA thesis, my freelance journalist work as well as just personal interest. The latest editorial on HIV/AIDS was one of the best articles on the topic I have read in a very long time, and I have sent it to friends all around the world. Thanks for the access!

We are seeking a consultant who will work together with the National HIV/AIDS Steering Committee comprising six ministers (health, education, cultural, religion, information and family development & social affairs), the National HIV/AIDS Technical Committee, local NGOs, religious leaders and community leaders, to assist in developing a national HIV/AIDS policy for Somaliland as a major strategy towards HIV/AIDS prevention and control.

This book is written for policy-makers, managers, and programme staff in development and humanitarian organisations, to promote debate about the changes that need to be made to their programmes if they are to work effectively in a world which has been changed for ever by the pandemic of AIDS.

I am a member of Amnesty International. From the Internet I have just read your editorial, A Gendered Dimension to the Zimbabwean Crisis (Pambazuka News 133). The conditions you describe are deplorable: The poverty that drives young women to slave marriages and prostitution, and the runaway inflation and obviously no open and fair market for food distribution.

Many thanks for your newsletter which continues to provide a wonderful source of important information and conscientisation. I would like to suggest a new section be added which relates to the real Development and Aid - which is actually from Africa to the North. This section would provide information about, for example, the numbers of health workers, teachers and other skilled professionals who are being 'imported' by countries in the North after we have paid to educate and train them - thereby saving the 'importing' countries billions of dollars, and at the same time stripping our countries of vital social capital. It would also keep readers up to date with the profits that are going to the North from businesses which market and sell our cultures (or music, or medicines etc etc). And what about all those wonderful cheap holidays and holiday homes that are being bought by Northerners. Their trips here provide them with extraordinarily cheap access to exotic holiday breaks where they can also feel human and in touch with real human values enabling them to go back refreshed and able once again to participate in their work settings. These excursions must be almost priceless? What do you think?
PZ Replies: Absolutely agree and thanks for the letter. We hope to have an editorial on this subject in the future. We are also going to have some new sections introduced shortly, one of which will be an African Diaspora section, which will hopefully highlight the issues you mention.

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) can play a key role in development and poverty reduction. But ICTs can only become an effective tool for development and poverty reduction if they are an integral part of a broader, more comprehensive national development strategy. Donor agencies need to ensure that their ICT programmes and strategies are better adapted to the specific needs and circumstances of individual developing countries and to become better informed through more information sharing and more rigorous analysis of recent experience of ICT-for-development programmes.

A UN General Assembly committee ended its session on Monday in New York, approving draft resolutions on human rights in three countries, among them the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Under the draft's terms, the UN General Assembly would condemn the continuing violations of human rights and international law in the Congo, and condemn all massacres and reported perpetration of acts of mutilation and cannibalism, cases of summary or arbitrary executions as well as the continuing recruitment and use of child soldiers.

Dozens of junior army officers and soldiers have been arrested in Conakry, the capital of Guinea, in a series of swoops on army barracks and private homes, relatives of the detainees said on Friday.

A committee set up by the government of the Central African Republic to oversee implementation of recommendations made at the end of a national reconciliation forum in mid-October has revised the country's transition calendar. A communique read on Sunday on state-owned Radio Centrafrique by the committee's chairperson, Catherine Samba-Panza, said the country's constitutional referendum would now be held in September 2004 instead of mid-2004.

Army representative in Parliament Lt. Gen Salim Saleh has resigned over allegations of corruption and abuse of office. In a letter, Saleh listed three reasons for quitting. "My first reason is the unending allegations of corruption and abuse of office, which have ranged from the bungled helicopter purchase, my role in the privatisation of former Uganda Commercial Bank to last year's allegations of plundering Congo's natural resources. All these allegations have come and passed but have left me very perturbed."

As a one off investment in meeting the Millennial Development Goals, the World Bank and IMF, non-G7 bilaterals and private creditors must cancel the outstanding debts owed to them by low income countries whose feasible revenues and levels of donor aid are not sufficient to finance their nationally owned development goals. This is according to a paper from CAFOD; Christian Aid; Eurodad; and Jubilee Research that sets out the policy actions required by the World Bank, IMF, and bilateral donors if their stated commitment to the fulfilment of the MDGs is to be taken seriously.

Mozambican Prime Minister Pascoal Mocumbi last Thursday officially launched a national survey on perceptions of governance and corruption in the country as part of public sector reform started in June 2001. "The proper functioning of the public sector is a condition sine qua non for consolidating democracy in the country since it will allow the established public powers to respond to the demands of society, and to exercise the State's role of guaranteeing citizens' rights," he said at the launch.

Medact, together with the People’s Health Movement and GEGA, is planning the publication of the Global Health Watch, a report providing a civil society view on the state of the world’s health. In preparation for this report, Medact is calling for testimonies from civil society on the different issues covered by the report. We will launch this call in several waves: firstly, we are looking for testimonies on the effects of the marketization of:

1. Health care provision in the developing world. Issues we are particularly interested in are:
* the effects of privatisation and commercialisation on access to health care and the quality of health care. For example, has privatisation led health providers to see health care as a business rather than a public service? Has it resulted in an increase in user fees? Have profit-motives led to an increase in unethical practices such as using cheaper drugs that do not work?
* ways in which advocacy has improved access to health services (such as report cards for public services; participatory budgeting; and health consumer protection groups).

2. Water, sanitation and electricity services.
* What is the effect of privatisation on access to these services? How does reduced access to water, for example, affect the poor? What is the effect on cost and quality of these services?

The testimonies will feed into and support arguments put forward in the publication. They will also be organised thematically and geographically and available for public access on the web. Testimonies should be no more than 800 words in length. We hope that the Global Health Watch will form a mechanism to express and amplify civil society’s concerns about the increase in marketisation and commercialisation of key public services and goods. Join us in this venture by helping us collate the testimonies of the unheard. Please e-mail Patricia Morton at [email]patriciamorton@medact.org

It is with great pleasure that I write this missive to introduce myself, as the newly appointed Cultural Program Coordinator at the Goree Institute. I look forward to continuing the legacy of providing cultural programs that are designed to ignite social change on the continent and throughout the Diaspora. The institute looks forward too expanding the link between culture and sustainable development. For a long time development has been exclusively defined in terms of tangible’s such as, dams, factories, houses, food and water, which are all in fact extremely essential. It is important, however, to include culture within the development paradigm as a means of achieving a satisfactory intellectual, emotional, moral and spritiual existence. This development allows groups, communities and nations to define themselves and their futures. The Goree Institute is expanding its cultural program in directions that respond to the current cultural environments, that we are committed to serving. The institute looks forward to providing fresh programming that is engaging to the intended populations. In short, programming that encourages self-reliance in Africa and throughout the Diaspora. The institute appreciates your continuous commitment and support. We look forward to strengthening and expanding these relationships to achieve the shared objective of realising cultural growth and development in Africa!

"I am talking of millions of men who have been skilfully injected with fear, inferiority complexes, trepidation, servility, despair, abasement." (From. Discours sur le colonialisme, Aimé Césaire)

Records on wealth declaration should be made accessible to the media and the public if they were to help in the fight against corruption, a Uganda government official says. Mr Jotham Tumwesigye, Uganda's Inspector-General of Government, said both the media and the public were the government's partners in the fight against graft. He was addressing a workshop organised by Transparency International Kenya Nairobi.

Who and What is the Zimbabwe Freedom Movement? The struggle for democracy has consumed this country for the past three years, yet the entire community of free thinking Zimbabweans and the Movement for Democratic Change, themselves have remained committed to the course of non-violent change. Let us not forget that Zanu PF used the ruse of dissident activity in Matabeleland in the 1980's to allegedly quell the situation. Thousands were tortured, raped and died in the Gukurahundi under the pretext of unfounded allegations.

Let us not forget the murder of Cain Nkala, a genuine war vet allegedly murdered just hours before he was set to expose the evil methods employed by Zanu PF sponsored thugs. Let us not forget that Nkala's murder supplied the pretext for Zanu PF youth to burn down Bulawayo's Movement for Democratic Change offices, while police idly stood by. The illegitimate Zanu PF regime is renowned for dirty tricks. Question the validity of the so-called Zimbabwe Freedom Movement (ZFM).

Peter Tatchell is undoubtedly committed to the defence of human rights, but we implore him to check his sources. Let this not be another excuse for Mugabe's thugs to spread mayhem and terror. True is the maxim -Those who live by the sword shall die by the sword.

President Thabo Mbeki has denied allegations that Deputy President Jacob Zuma once tried to solicit bribes from the French arms manufacturer Thales to shield it from a corruption probe. "There is no scandal," he told a French radio station. "There is not anybody, anywhere - in South Africa or anywhere in the world - who can produce one single fact to demonstrate corruption.

There are few moments in the history of AIDS that can call for celebration. The recent decision of the South African government to begin rolling-out antiretrovirals is certainly near the top of the list. But many persons might be tempted to celebrate more widely as December 1st, World AIDS Day, arrives this year, if only because AIDS has received such mainstream appeal that funds now appear to be travelling in all directions, and new programs are announced nearly everyday. Bill Clinton, once the designer of trade sanctions stopping countries like Thailand and Argentina from importing AIDS medicines, now announces generic drug price negotiations. Randall Tobias, a former executive at multi-national drug company Eli Lilly now claims to advance a $15 billion U.S. foreign AIDS budget. If there is anything we can be certain of, it is that AIDS now travels as a key cultural commodity in the most established institutions. But is this cause for celebration?

There is a temptation to announce that AIDS is finally “being taken care of”, that if the farther right-wing elements of U.S. foreign policy are placing the issue centrally, then something must certainly be getting done. The temptation is to call attention elsewhere, to claim that AIDS has received “enough attention” and may be distracting resources from other problems. But such a temptation is, sadly, completely out of order. Those who would rebut such statements would, rightly, point out that the $15 billion is not only disproportionately small, but has not actually been appropriated. They will point to the limitation of drug price negotiations and the sad fact that press releases consistently belie the sad truths about implementation and the non-existence of effective health programs in the vast majority of sites around the world. They will talk about the infusion of abstinence-only rhetoric; the problems at USAID; and the obstacles posed by the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA), Southern African Customs Union (SACU), and the new bilateral trade agreements. And they will be right.

But there are other reasons to be concerned; reasons that will likely go unmentioned. These reasons can be revealed when we examine the institutions that now claim to command AIDS, and ask some very simple questions about them: how have they constructed and envisioned their “target populations”? What are the approaches they assume to be effective? Who is to blame, who is to be accountable, and on what basis do “AIDS programs” come to be constructed in these institutions?

Even the oldest data on AIDS provide clear answers to these questions if we examine them for what they are instead of for what we want them to be. At present, the assumptions of institutions are to institute educational programs, add some antiretrovirals for those already infected, and perhaps offer “culturally competent” videos to reduce stigma in the community of concern. Such is the standard format of AIDS programming today. My contention is that such programming is based on questionable premises. If we look to data from Haiti, we hear the stories of persons who are not simply individuals making “risky decisions”, but those who must engage in sex for the sake of achieving greater priorities than long-term personal health: for tonight’s food, for tomorrow’s money, for some means of security. In South Africa, male miners are housed in all-male barracks, worked six days per week, and have letters sent to them informing them that their wives have left or entered prostitution for money. They are given alcohol and prostitutes to prevent them from rebelling, and are called “denialists” (equating their mentality to that of elite politicians) by social scientists who argue that they should be more worried about a disease that will kill them several years in the future than about their 42% injury rate.

Are “behaviour change”, “education”, and stigma-reducing videos the most appropriate interventions we have available to us in such contexts? Perhaps. But data suggest otherwise. A recent systematic review of evidence in the British Medical Journal indicates that “providing information about health risks changes the behaviour of, at most, one in four people - generally those who are more affluent”. Data on HIV reveal that most persons know of its means of transmission, yet lack the personal agency to act on such knowledge, as the conditions of their lives dictate that dictate that, as Paul Farmer has stated, "their risk stems less from ignorance and more from the precarious situations in which hundreds of millions live". Even the BBC, in their recent worldwide poll, can confirm such claims. So why can’t our responsive institutions?

The public response from institutions is that “structural violence” - or the structural realities of poverty, inequality and other problems of power - are simply too difficult to address. Such claims ignore that AIDS activists have changed massive structures for years, from the entire development process of medicines to the housing and healthcare policies of the largest multinational companies in southern Africa. The private reality is that to expose the root responsibilities behind AIDS - rather than focusing on individual behaviours and “cultural” problems - is to expose the institutions who now claim to champion interventions for the disease. The Clinton Foundation would rather not admit its role in creating an intellectual property system that takes public research and development dollars into private hands and leaves the diseases of the poor to market failure; for them, AIDS is a unique issue to be negotiated selectively, rather than addressing the industry that spends 27% of its profits on marketing and 11% on R&D even as it ranks #1 in the world and makes 19% profits as a percentage of revenue (three times the Fortune 500 average). The World Bank would rather not deal with the association between their policies on agriculture and the subsequent migration of workers and break-up of stable unions; for them, AIDS is an issue of building narrow and specific health services with a few token antiretroviral projects and some “bereavement counselling” for the masses.

The institutions who are claiming to champion AIDS do not understand what AIDS activists have long realized: that AIDS is not merely a unique circumstance, but a massive symptom of a much larger disease. That is why the AIDS drug victories in South Africa are not merely celebrated by AIDS activists there, but by land-reform and water rights movements. It is because AIDS drugs are not merely medically necessary, but are also metaphorical: they represent broader inequalities in the distribution of resources. And for institutions to address that would be to admit that AIDS does not “compete” with malnutrition or cholera or respiratory infections. Rather, to truly address AIDS is to address the resource inequalities that drive all of these syndromes forward in the poorest of places in the world.

What, then, are the tasks for this coming year? I would argue that they are two-fold: (1) to turn research and action towards “structural interventions”, and (2) to change the meaning of what it means to use terms like “blame” and “stigma”. The first task is straightforward but rarely pursued: our research agendas and program implementation still focuses on information and educational speeches, rather than testing how primary commodity prices and housing scenarios and migration patterns affect AIDS, and how the campaigns to reform these resource inequalities can be replicated systematically. The second task is more difficult. Many social scientists and public health workers are wonderful at describing social problems and blame and stigma among the “marginalized”. But few ask what it means to be a marginalized person who must deploy the language of the mainstream, stigmatizing and blaming themselves and their peers for the sake of reducing their “marginalization” and struggling to reach the level of “individual responsibility” needed to be accepted in another social world.

What we need is more than description, but a turn to local geographies to ask how the process of becoming “marginalized” occurs, and why so many of the poor must resort to the language of the rich to stigmatize themselves and subsequently adopt the language of individual “responsibility” for the sake of survival. The answer, once again, becomes one of resources and institutions and power inequalities. We need to examine the basic processes of power, not merely its end pathologies. Because only in our understanding of the processes of power can we hope to find the answers to offer the institutions, and only in our understanding of the processes of power can we hope to take back the meaning of AIDS.

* Please send comments on this editorial - and other events in Africa - to References for this editorial can be found by clicking on the link below.

* Sanjay Basu is at the Yale University School of Medicine, where he studies the influence of trade agreements and health system reform on the spread of infectious and metabolic diseases. For more information: http://www.worldaidsday.org/
- http://www.unaids.org/wad/2003/Epiupdate2003_en/EpiUpdate2003_en.pdf
- http://www.un.org/events/aids/worldaidsday2003.html

African experts meeting in Dakar under the auspices of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) deplored the lack of a consolidated African position in response to global policy proposals that have vast economic implications for Africa. They agreed that current debt relief schemes are inadequate, that increased debt relief is the most effective way to provide rapid additional funding for development, and that additional measures were also essential to advance the globally acknowledged goals of ending proverty. This is according to the latest issue of the AfricaFocus Bulletin, which contains information about the workshop.