The HIV/AIDS pandemic is continuing its deadly spread across the globe, infecting 5 million more people last year and bringing the total living with the virus to over 40 million, the United Nations said Monday.
The Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), in its latest update on the figures, tried to lighten the gloom by pointing to Kenya, Zimbabwe and some Caribbean countries, where there is some limited evidence that infection rates may be dropping slightly. But in the worst-hit regions, notably sub-Saharan Africa, the trend is steadily upward, and in India there are suggestions that the scale of infection could be worse than the official figures imply.
Peter Piot, executive director of UNAIDS, said it was encouraging that prevention efforts had led to gains in some countries. “But the reality is that the AIDS epidemic continues to outstrip global and national efforts to contain it.”
At a press conference in New Delhi, India, he said Asia, which contains half of humanity, was particularly at risk. China and Burma, which he said had the worst epidemics in Asia, have been slow to acknowledge the scale of the problem. “In the world’s most populous nation, China, the overwhelming majority of the population does not know how the virus is transmitted.”
India, which has officially 5.1 million people living with HIV — a number not far behind South Africa’s — announced earlier this year that new infections had fallen dramatically to 28,000 in 2004, from 520,000 in 2003, sparking disbelief among volunteer groups.
Piot said he had two concerns with India’s data. One was that most of the sampling was done in rural areas when most of the affected population is in cities. The second was that in some states the surveillance of the disease was of “poor quality.” “It does not make sense that migrants from a poor state like Bihar who live in Mumbai do not then infect their wives when they come home. Something is missing.”
The UNAIDS report called for new efforts to prevent people from becoming infected, provoking protests from some activists who fear a slackening in the world’s efforts to get drugs to all those who need them. Only 1 million are so far on the drugs, while 6 million will soon die without them. Three million people died of AIDS last year.
The World Health Organization, which set a target of 3 million on treatment by the end of this year, stressed that treatment is now essential to prevention work because people will not be tested for HIV and therefore will not change their behavior unless drugs are available. “We can now see the clear benefit of scaling up HIV treatment and prevention together and not as isolated interventions,” said the WHO’s director-general, Lee Jong-wook.
However, Piot said the emphasis on prevention after a few years of vociferous campaigning for drugs was deliberate because the balance had tipped too far the other way. “We’re very concerned that prevention has slipped off the agenda,” he said. “From the developed to the developing countries, whether you look at funding or intensity of programs, most attention is going to treatment. In the long run, that is really bad.” He called for “a rapid increase in the scale and scope of HIV prevention programs.”
The report shows that while projects with commercial sex workers in Thailand and India and drug users in Spain and Brazil have borne some fruit, the most intractable problems are in sub-Saharan Africa, where 77 percent of those infected are women. Their social status is very low, they have few rights, and they are unable to negotiate with men for safe sex.
Some programs to try to improve the standing of women have been started in Africa, said Purnima Mane, director of policy, evidence and partnerships at UNAIDS. “It saddens me to say that the results are very, very small scale. I often worry whether they will remain sustained because the prevalent norms are so much against gender equality.”
In Kenya, Zimbabwe and Uganda, HIV prevalence rates, measured among pregnant women at antenatal clinics, have dropped, which is being attributed partly to changes in sexual behavior, with a greater use of condoms, but also to increases in death rates.
This article has been provided by the Guardian through a special arrangement with Salon. ) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005. Visit the Guardian’s Web site at http://www.guardian.co.uk.
The man thought to be al-Qaida’s head of global operations and the mastermind behind an attempt to assassinate the president of Pakistan was captured by the country’s troops after a fierce gun battle in the lawless tribal belt close to the Afghan border, officials said Wednesday night.
In an operation described by George W. Bush as a “a critical victory in the war on terror,” Libyan Abu Faraj al-Libbi was seized with another “foreigner” after a fierce firefight on the outskirts of Mardan, 30 miles northeast of Peshawar, the capital of the rugged North West Frontier province. President Bush said Libbi was “a major facilitator and a chief planner” for Osama bin Laden and that his arrest “removes a dangerous enemy.”
It recently emerged that U.S. forces have trained Pakistani helicopter pilots and army commandos in tactics to tackle al-Qaida’s mountain refuges in the country’s tribal area.
Pakistani authorities, who had said they felt they were closing in on Libbi, were quick to capitalize on what they believe is the most important terrorist to be captured since the arrest of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, al-Qaida’s purported No. 3, two years ago in Karachi, Pakistan’s financial capital.
Libbi allegedly took over as al-Qaida’s operational chief after Mohammed’s capture. The Pakistani information minister, Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, told reporters that Libbi, who was seized on Monday, was “a very big catch” and hinted that Pakistani troops had picked up the trail of bin Laden. “We will be looking at all his links. Our forces are moving toward the right direction.”
It was unclear whether U.S. forces would interrogate Libbi. “No, we will keep him with us,” replied Ahmed to reporters’ questions. He said Libbi was the architect of an attempt to assassinate Pakistan’s president, Pervez Musharraf. “There are cases against him here,” he said.
Musharraf narrowly escaped an attempt on his life in the garrison city of Rawalpindi when two car bombers tried to ram their vehicles into his motorcade in December 2003. Fifteen people were killed and 45 injured in the attack, the second attempt on the president in two weeks.
It is accepted that Libbi was linked to Amjad Farooqi, a Pakistani militant killed by security forces in southern Pakistan last September. He had hatched the Musharraf plots, aided the murderers of the U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl and was associated with several hard-line Sunni Muslim Pakistani militant groups.
Pakistan’s leadership claims to have broken the back of terrorism in the country, and 700 al-Qaida suspects have been arrested. Most of them have been handed over to the U.S. and taken to Guant´namo Bay.
Some analysts have questioned whether Libbi’s importance has been overplayed to mask the failure of U.S. and Pakistani forces to find bin Laden. They say he is not on the FBI’s list of the world’s most wanted terrorists. “He looks like a middle-ranking al-Qaida individual who had some links with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,” Sajjan Gohel, of the London-based Asia-Pacific Foundation, told the BBC.
Meanwhile, U.S. and Afghan troops backed by jets and helicopters killed about 20 suspected Taliban militants on the day that a new U.S. commander took charge in Afghanistan. One Afghan police officer also died, and six U.S. servicemen were injured during the gun battle Wednesday in Deh Chopan.
If proof were needed that the 21st century will be about the struggle to shape Asia’s destiny, then it came from the mouth of Condoleezza Rice last month. In New Delhi for the day during her trip across the continent, the U.S. secretary of state told the Indian prime minister that America’s newest foreign policy goal was to “help India become a major world power in the 21st century.”
A State Department briefing elaborated by saying that Washington understood “fully the implications, including military implications, of that statement.” Sealed by the promise of a visit to New Delhi by President Bush later this year, these unequivocal statements imply that America wants India to be a permanent friend. The message is that India is not a great power, but it has the potential to emerge as one.
Asia is in a period of dramatic change, a time dominated by the breathtaking rise of China. Such upheaval suits the White House, which considers turmoil important because it offers hitherto unrealized opportunities. These moments are America’s chance to determine the future of the world.
The Bush administration has torn up its previous policies toward the subcontinent aimed at denying weapons to India and Pakistan, states engaged in a nuclear-tipped arms race. In a dramatic reversal, the White House announced that Pakistan will get F-16 jets, the sale of which were barred in 1990 out of concern for the country’s then undeclared nuclear weapons program. Simultaneously, the White House announced that it will allow U.S. companies the right to provide India with the next generation of multirole combat aircraft.
More acute is the talk of large transfers of nuclear reactors to India, currently denied such technologies under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Washington’s latest move suggests that the agreement’s periodic review next month might be more radical than many realized.
By accepting both South Asian nations as regional partners, Washington says it has snapped the link between India and Pakistan in policymaking. There is a deliberate echo of the aftermath of the Egyptian-Israeli detente in the ’70s, when both sides agreed to peace, got multibillion-dollar arms packages and became U.S. allies. The difference now is that the hot spot of Kashmir still burns.
Diplomacy is rarely a zero-sum game, but the signal from Washington is that these gains will be someone else’s loss. Although now cloaked in the language of human rights and democracy, the Bush doctrine is still the one articulated in his first term: to prevent the emergence of a hostile rival.
The only competitor on the horizon is China. Its military rise, economic clout, self-confidence in Asian affairs and unpredictable behavior make the world’s biggest Communist country a real threat in the eyes of the Bush administration.
In Europe, the shared perception of a common enemy that was the foundation of Washington’s Cold War alliances has disappeared. The confusion in Brussels over whether or not to sell arms to Beijing confirmed to the White House that a new set of attitudes needs new allies. Washington identifies with trends that promote freedom and democracy (although the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib and the detentions at Guantánamo without charges dim this moral claim). New and old U.S. alliances in Asia now encircle China — not that this is openly acknowledged.
Washington’s ties with South Korea, Japan and India are justified on the basis of liberty and shared ideology rather than a balance-of-power argument. The United States has not articulated its new Asian policy, but its trusted Asian ally, Japan, has. Tokyo is aware of the potential threat to its shores: Chinese submarines use its waters, and defense analysts argue that Beijing is developing submarines and missiles disproportionate to the threats in its neighborhood.
In a speech in New Delhi, Yukio Okamoto, the special assistant to the Japanese prime minister, spoke of Indo-Japanese cooperation to restrain a powerful China that wishes to alter the status quo to right perceived historical wrongs. As two democracies, where English is the language of administration, India and America share common values. There are reasons for a partnership between Washington and New Delhi to engage with China. India dreams of great-power status, has a boundary dispute with China, is irked by its missile technology transfers to Pakistan and has lost out to Beijing in securing oil fields in Africa.
India too is an element in China’s calculation. But how big this is may become apparent after the Chinese prime minister’s visit to New Delhi April 9. The thought of the United States becoming a weapons supplier to India would alarm Beijing. Aware that bonds are yet to be forged, China is wooing Delhi with promises of free-trade agreements and security pacts.
What America wants to do to China in the early years of this millennium appears similar to what it did to Russia in the last decades of the previous century. On offer to India is an opening — as well as a means to reduce China’s influence — by joining Washington to challenge Beijing.
If that sounds familiar, it is because it was another U.S. secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, who invented this particular form of triangular diplomacy in Asia. Then, in the early 1970s, the game was played to strengthen China at Moscow’s expense. The question in Asia is whether America’s newest friend will become a tool rather than an ally.
It is a five-hour journey through beautiful scenery in the northern foothills of the Himalayas. But when 20 passengers Thursday morning board two coaches under the snowcapped peaks in Srinagar, India’s state capital in Jammu and Kashmir, they will be embarking on the world’s most dangerous bus trip. Wednesday’s spectacular attack by suicide bombers on a heavily guarded tourist center, which had been home to the passengers for the last three days, underlined the determination of some to stop the group of elderly couples from being reunited with long-lost relatives from across the border in Pakistan’s portion of Kashmir.
The quiet of a sunny Srinagar afternoon was ripped apart by the crackle of submachine fire and the dull crump of grenade explosions. As the two gunmen ran amok in the center, the complex of wooden buildings quickly began to burn. People ran screaming toward the inferno, hoping that family members had not been consumed by flames. Five people were injured in gun battles between Indian troops and the attackers. One guerrilla was killed while the other escaped into the night.
Both India and Pakistan claim Kashmir, and its predominantly Muslim population, for themselves and have fought three wars over the state since Britain left the subcontinent 58 years ago. The region now lies divided between both countries, and its two halves have been sealed since partition.
Tracing the 80 miles from Srinagar to Muzaffarabad — the capital of the Pakistan-controlled part of Kashmir — along the dizzying gorges and icy slopes of the Jhelum Valley past apple orchards and saffron fields, the bus route is the first link between Indian and Pakistani portions of the divided state.
Thursday’s opening of the road is the most tangible benefit of a 14-month-old peace process between India and Pakistan for those living on the floor of the valley. Wednesday night the Indian and Pakistani governments made it clear that despite the attack on the safe house in Srinagar’s highest security zone, the bus trip should go ahead. “We always knew that there would be trouble and the bus starting was not going to end the militancy. But we will go on regardless,” said Omar Abdullah, a Kashmiri M.P. in India’s Parliament.
But the armed separatist groups, which appeared until recently to be patronized by Pakistan as a legitimate freedom struggle, say that such moves are part of an Indian plot to pacify the insurgency. They warn that those taking the five-hour ride will be entering not a vehicle but a “coffin.” That threat alone caused five people to drop out. But most decided to run the risk. When the Bhat family left their family home earlier this week, they took their most precious possession: a black suitcase packed with presents for grandchildren they had only ever seen in photographs. The bag was all 65-year-old Mohammad Abdullah Bhat and his wife Fatima could grab before they were forced into hiding by death threats, personally delivered to their home.
The message came from the same Islamic militant groups that launched the suicide raid Wednesday. For the Bhats, however, it was not political considerations but family that drove their desire to get tickets for Thursday’s historic journey. Bhat has not seen his brothers since the partition of British India in 1947. A half-century has passed in which he missed funerals and weddings. Desperate to bring his family together Bhat married his daughter, Wazira Begum, to his younger brother’s son 17 years ago.
But the blood feud between two nations, born from the womb of the empire, ensured that Bhat’s family remained apart. He spent a small fortune traveling to New Delhi only to be repeatedly denied visas to travel to Pakistani Kashmir. In the intervening years, Bhat has missed seeing his four grandchildren and his own daughter grow up.
“We are not political people. Wazira was the apple of my father’s eye and he has missed her every day since she left,” says Ishrat, Bhat’s youngest daughter, who was 5 when her sister left. “My father knows the risk he is taking. But he says he is an old man now and even if he is killed because of this bus he will die happy because he would have seen my sister and her children.”
Thursday’s road opening also signals a new working relationship between India and Pakistan, which in the past have seen hopes of peace raised only to have them dashed a few months later. Aware of the bus’s significance, Indian authorities have gone to great lengths to spruce up Srinagar and surrounding towns. Highways and bridges are decked out with lighting and bunting. Fresh coats of paint are being applied to homes and shops along the route. There are signs in Urdu proclaiming “Army and People together with peace as a destination.”
However, the heavy presence of troops, roadblocks and guns poking out of heavily fortified bunkers lends the place a surreal air. There are signs of a nascent peace, but the look is of a city under siege. The steady weekly toll of killing still continues and has cost, depending on whom you believe, between 30,000 and 80,000 lives in 16 years. The war has seen torture and disappearances become a feature of life in Kashmir.
The insurgents appear dazed both by Pakistan’s support for the bus service and Islamabad’s seemingly new Kashmir policy, with some even going as far as calling President Musharraf a traitor. The political wing of the separatist movement, the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, is more circumspect. Its hard-liners blame Washington for pressuring President Musharraf to make peace on India’s terms.
Pakistan “is under tremendous pressure from the USA and Kashmiris are very angry with the Pakistani government for accepting this bus,” said Syed Ali Geelani, considered the most hard-line leader of the Hurriyat. “It will not change anything for us.”
The king of Nepal seized power Tuesday when he sacked the government, put senior politicians under house arrest, declared a state of emergency and put the army on the streets. King Gyanendra promised to restore democracy and order after nearly 10 years of civil war between Maoist rebels and government forces.
Speaking before phone lines were cut, diplomats in Kathmandu said armored vehicles were patroling the streets. Tuesday night the capital’s airport and Nepalese Web sites were shut down.
It is the second time in two years that King Gyanendra has dismissed the prime minister, Sher Bahadur Deuba, and the fourth time he has sacked a prime minister in less than three years. Nepal has had no parliament since 2002.
The monarch’s statement promised to “restore democracy and law and order in the country in the next three years.” He defended the suspension of democracy and citizens’ rights in the “larger interest of the Nepalese general public,” adding that he would chair the new administration.
Political analysts said the king seemed to be trying to return to the days when his family ran the country as feudal autocrats and living Hindu gods, before democracy arrived in 1990. Supporters of the palace say he has become frustrated by politicians’ ceaseless infighting.
In taking power he has shelved several provisions of the Constitution, including the freedoms of press, speech and expression, the freedom to assemble peacefully, the right to privacy and the right not to be held in preventive detention.
Amnesty International said it was alarmed that the emergency could be used to justify the disappearance and summary execution of human rights activists, a trend that had become an ugly feature of the fighting in recent months. Deuba, the former prime minister, told the Associated Press that politicians would “oppose this step,” which “directly violates the Constitution and is against democracy.”
India, Nepal’s main trading partner and supplier of military aid, described the royal coup as a matter of “grave concern” that would strengthen the Maoists and undermine democracy. The British Foreign Office called in the Nepalese ambassador and made it clear that security and development aid, worth 41 million pounds a year, had been put at risk.
Britain, the U.S. and India have provided arms and training to the Nepalese army, which has tripled in size in fewer than 10 years. Washington is thought to have supplied 20,000 M-16 rifles, night-vision and communications equipment and counterinsurgency training. But none of this appears to have quelled the revolt. More than 11,000 people have been killed and hundreds have “disappeared” since 1996.
Gyanendra became king in June 2003 after his nephew, Crown Prince Dipendra, opened fire on his assembled family. Drunk and high on drugs, he killed his parents, Queen Aishwarya and King Birendra, his brother, a sister, an aunt, two uncles and two cousins, then himself. Gyanendra was in western Nepal at the time.
Announcing his takeover Tuesday night, he said politicians had failed to hold elections and restore peace. A coalition government fell apart last month over plans to call elections in April. The Maoist insurgents said they would disrupt polling. The Maoists oppose the monarchy and want it replaced by a “people’s assembly.”
Nepal has a gross national income of 128 pounds and is the world’s 12th poorest country. Experts say there can be no peace unless the poverty, inequality and ethnic and caste discrimination that encourage the insurgency are tackled.
