A friend from Kenya once told me that she was writing a book about Africa specifically for American readers entitled: “Send Money and Shut the Fuck Up.”
That always sounded like sage foreign policy advice to me.
Unfortunately, the Bush administration is following the exact opposite doctrine, a fact that was made painfully clear last summer during the president’s “historic” five-day, five-nation African tour.
Bush was the stereotypical tourist: According to the New York Times, he spent three of his four nights at a luxury hotel in South Africa, visiting Botswana and Senegal for six hours each and Uganda for only three.
On the first day of his trip, Bush took 15 minutes to visit Goree Island, once the center of the West African slave trade. Eschewing my friend’s “Shut the Fuck Up” doctrine, he delivered a speech carefully crafted to denounce slavery without actually apologizing for America’s rather significant role in the enterprise.
Bush also managed to find the bright side of the slave trade when he insinuated that God allowed it to happen so that America’s racial conscience could be awakened. God sure has a funny way of teaching white people life lessons! Mysterious indeed.
At almost every stop during his whirlwind tour, Bush repeated a pledge to provide $15 billion over the next five years to assist Africans in their ongoing fight against AIDS. He urged Congress to “fully fund this initiative for the good of the people on this continent.”
It didn’t take Bush long to betray the expectations of a continent. His administration requested only $2 billion for fiscal year 2004 and then pressured congressional Republicans to defeat a bill that would have added the extra $1 billion needed to fully fund the initiative. A second bill to add $300 million was also killed in committee by Republicans.
Bush decided to clarify his position, saying his plan was to provide gradually increasing assistance over the next five years.
Sounds good to me. I mean, what’s the hurry? There are only 8,500 AIDS-related deaths per day.
The administration’s justification for using a gradual approach is that “money is not the issue” due to a lack of infrastructure to absorb it.
That is simply untrue, says Asia Russell of Health Global Access Project. Drawing on research from UNAIDS and the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health, Russell said in a press release, “Annual spending on AIDS in poor countries needs to reach $10.5 billion by 2005 just to utilize poor countries’ existing infrastructure alone.”
While Bush is quietly underfunding his own program, he is actively sabotaging international efforts to deal with the AIDS pandemic.
On Aug. 26, he stopped financing to a respected health program after accusing one of the member groups, Marie Stopes, of involvment in forced abortions in China; the administration admits it has no actual evidence to support the accusation.
And currently the White House is trying to kill an effort to commit $1 billion next year to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, despite the fact that Bush promised this money in May. The multilateral Global Fund has been chronically underfunded since its 2001 inception. As a result, it has been forced to downsize and finance fewer proposals.
None of this surprised me. Bush has always used the AIDS crisis as a means of scoring cheap political points with his right-wing constituency. Early on, Bush nominated Jerry Thacker for his President’s Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS, a man who called homosexuality a “deathstyle,” referred to AIDS as a “gay plague” and advocated curing homosexuals through religion. Bush eventually withdrew Thacker’s nomination after public outrage.
Bush’s pick to head his U.S. Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief raises different, but equally troubling questions. Randall Tobias was the CEO of Eli Lilly, a member of a pharmaceutical coalition lobbying Washington for increased intellectual property rights, which would hinder developing nations’ access to generic anti-retroviral drugs.
Pharmaceutical giants like Eli Lilly are also huge Republican campaign contributors, but I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.
Although he has no actual public health experience, Tobias parrots the administration’s rhetoric about the effectiveness of abstinence-only education. One-third of the president’s AIDS package is earmarked specifically for these programs, which the American Medical Association, World Health Organization, National Institutes of Health and many other expert groups claim to be less effective at preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS than the alternative: comprehensive sex ed.
Bush touts Uganda as the poster nation for the success of abstinence-only policies, when they actually used the ABC educational model — Abstinence, Be faithful, Condoms. The most significant factor in Uganda’s success was the enormous jump in condom use, according to the Allan Guttmacher Institute, a family planning research group.
What is sometimes overlooked in this discussion is that $15 billion over five years is not nearly enough to get the job done. One relatively easy solution that should be discussed more is debt relief.
Sub-Saharan Africa, where 70 percent of the 43 million people living with HIV worldwide reside, squanders about $15 billion each year in debt payments to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, according to figures compiled by Health GAP.
Bush has refused to pressure international financial institutions into canceling these crippling debts. For Nigeria, debt erasure would mean relief to the tune of $30 billion. When Uganda saw limited debt relief, it increased its health spending by 270 percent. So far, the only country whose debt the Bush administration seems willing to forgive is Iraq’s.
Progressives use the word “evil” to describe virtually every action by the president, from tax cuts to environmental rollbacks. While these are bad policies that often involve misleading the public, they are far from acts of evil.
Bush’s litany of unkept promises, deceitful rhetoric and cynical opportunism in the face of a growing AIDS pandemic, however, is evil.
Pure evil.
I fear that the future will look back on our generation as monsters for our relative silence about this holocaust. It is time for all good-hearted Americans from all sides of the political divide to make our feelings known:
Send the money, Bush, and then shut the fuck up!