Cuts will affect Global Fund aid contributions

‘Commonwealth anti-gay conundrum’

continues from previous post

By Lionel Gayle

It is an open book that most governments of the Commonwealth believe there’s a direct link between sexual lifestyles and the proliferation of the deadly HIV/AIDS within their respective borders. And it’s an expensive exercise to medicate the afflicted.

Presently, they rely on the Global Fund (to fight AIDS, TB and Malaria) to buy their antiretrovirals (ARVs) – the anti-HIV or anti-AIDS drugs, and the paraphernalia to prolong the lives of their affected citizens. And it’s working.

Even though “the annual number of new HIV infections has steadily declined” worldwide and thus, fewer AIDS-related deaths, the UK-based HIV/AIDS charity, AVERT, says at the end of 2009 the Caribbean had an estimated 240,000 people living with HIV and a death count of 12,000 caused by AIDS. (http://www.avert.org/caribbean.htm)

The Caribbean, where women constitutes 50 per cent of adults living with HIV, is “the second-most affected region in the world,” after sub-Saharan Africa, where an estimated 12.5 million people were found living with HIV at the end of 2009 after AIDS killed about 1.3 million.

As the United Kingdom cites human rights breaches in these member states and threatens them with financial aid cuts, unless they drop their homophobic behaviour, most governments are toughening their stance against the temptation to repeal their sodomy laws.

Not many Caribbean countries, it seems, take British Prime Minister David Cameron’s threat seriously. At the end of the three-day Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Perth, Western Australia (October 28-30, 2011), he reiterated his country’s intention to cut back “aid from governments that do not reform legislation banning homosexuality.”

In the BBC report in which Cameron said “British aid should have more strings attached,” the BBC website said the cut “would not reduce the overall amount of aid to any one country.”

That is hardly any comfort for Bajan writer Peter Simmons. In a recent NationNews column he called the UK’s intention a “Threat to ignore,” while noting that Barbados’ British assistance had been “negligible.”

But Ian McKnight, Executive Director of the Caribbean Vulnerable Committee Coalition (CVC), told the Antigua Observer newspaper that “Turning a blind and haughty eye” to the threat “will erode the Caribbean’s gains over the last 10 years in reducing deaths” from AIDS.

After drawing attention to the UK’s contribution to the Global Fund he said: “When they pull that out I would say at least 90 per cent of what it cost our countries to provide free treatment will be gone. Most of our countries do not have the local domestic money to foot this bill.” (http://www.antiguaobserver.com/?p=66652)

Meanwhile, the Global Fund has denied Uganda $270 million “needed to put over 100,000 more people on lifesaving ARVs,” a story in Uganda’s daily newspaper, NewVision (November 15, 2011) said. The reason is, “the country’s policies are deemed harsh on sexual minorities.” (Less than 50 per cent of Uganda’s 700,000 with HIV/AIDS are on ARVs).

Several African newspapers, accessed online, had reported that about two weeks before Cameron’s post-CHOGM threat, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Ghana were among African countries who “condemned” the PM after the UK had threatened to cut aid because of their harsh laws against homosexuals.

Ghana’s President John Atta Mills was prompt with his response when he scoffed at the UK’s proposal in a Daily Nation story after Cameron’s Australian interview with the BBC. Under the headline “Ghana tells off UK over threats on gays,” Atta Mills said he wouldn’t “decriminalise the practice of homosexuality even at the risk of suffering aid cuts that might follow the threats of Prime Minister Cameron.”

 

 

In Zimbabwe, The Herald newspaper (November 10, 2011), in an opinion piece, took Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai to task for flip-flopping on the gay issue. The paper accused the PM of telling the BBC on his visit to London that “homosexuality, although controversial, should be decriminalised.”

 After pointing out how Tsvangirai had agreed with President Robert Mugabe on the matter, the newspaper accused him “of wanting to please Westerners,” adding that he contradicted himself “because you want all people to view you as if you are the one who is good.”

Zimbabwe, the former British colony called Southern Rhodesia, is not a member of the Commonwealth. It withdrew from the group in 2003 when the Commonwealth refused to reinstate the country after it had been suspended from the union in 2002 “for breaching the Harare Declaration.”