The New York-based group Human Rights Watch (HRW) has strongly criticized the Ugandan government, accusing it of pushing the abstinence line while downplaying the safe sex message.
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A “life-threatening” shift which HRW says is orchestrated and funded by the US.
It says the funding for abstinence is due to President George W Bush’s conservative Christian views, which are similar to those of Uganda’s first lady.
The US says it plans to spend more than $100m combating HIV/Aids in Uganda this year – of which more than $8m will be on the abstinence and faithfulness programme. Some of that money will be focused on the young.
This is a “condomless” billboard.
There is no mention of the word “condom” or “safe sex” it reads: “Thank GOD I said NO to Aids – driving home to my wife,” it states, before asking: “Abstinence – why not?”
“I would like to assure the world that we have continued to maintain abstinence, being faithful and the use of condoms as the principal strategy in the fight against HIV/Aids,” says Uganda’s Minister for Health, Mike Mukula.
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Until a few months ago, a free magazine promoting safe sex was distributed to secondary schools by a non-profit organisation.
But this recently became controversial and faith-based organisations were concerned the magazine was encouraging sex.
As a result, the magazine has been ditched, and that avenue for getting the safe sex message to the students has now gone.
Christian groups in Uganda and the US are behind the new emphasis Rogers Kasirye works in the slums of Kampala with street children and teenage prostitutes. Poverty has forced many of them into taking risks.
“It is an economic problem. Many of the young people we are working with are surviving on sex, and the only option or barrier they have is the condom.”
Reverend Gideon Byamugisha is HIV-positive and he hopes the US will carefully assess the way in which it influences policy in Uganda.
“We are still hopeful that America, being a strong and well-meaning country, will not go down in history as a country which exported ideas at the expense of people’s free will to choose.”
outstanding progress, far exceeding expectations, and creating an even more favorable climate for resource harvesting and the resultant generation of revenue for eager investors.
They really are trying to kill them…
This is will be more effective than the Rwandan genocide and blameless.
It seems that such insinuations weaken your message. More likely it’s a combination of wilfull, ideologically driven ignorance and sheer indifference to the effects of their lunacy.
A recent study in Uganda – I believe from March, but I failed to find it online – showed that the abstinence component of the so-called ABC approach could not explain the decline in AIDS incidence. Instead it appeared to be the ‘C’ part that has worked effectively.
Until now, it is precisely the frank recommendation of condoms that has most stood out in the successful Ugandan campaign against HIV/AIDS. A reversal of this policy will spell disaster. And it’s no secret that the Bush administration sponsors abstinence-only programs, some of which actually promote the lie that condoms are ineffective against infection due to small pores in the latex.
While I doubt that depopulation is the intended goal, I have no difficulty calling this evil.
are more relevant to the future (or lack thereof) of the US than whatever you or I may think about the motivation.
There is a wealth of material available regarding western activities in Africa for the last several hundred years.
I have heard many westerners make the argument that as in the case of indigenous people of the Americas, the west is unjustly maligned for the generosity with which it has done so much for what it considers its simple childlike brethren round the world, a pattern they now see repeated with respect to the Middle East and South and Central Asia.
Others may have a different view. I don’t think that the importance of perspective can be over-emphasized, and I have said before, I do not think that either you or I are going to change anyone’s mind on a message board, and in the case of western apologists, I am not even sure it would be humane to attempt to do so.
I don’t necessarily disagree with it, just don’t see how it relates to my comment above.
My point was that (i) the US support of abstinence-only programs probably isn’t a deliberate attempt at genocide; (ii) unsubstantiated allegations to the contrary weakens one’s credibility and distract from the crucial message that (iii) the abstinence-only approach is a recipe for disaster.
Well, what do you call it when the use targets the most successful AIDS reduction programme IN THE WORLD and enforces backwards-assed faith based bullshit…which will inevitably result in a genocide.
– ‘deliberate extermination attempt.’ It does not simply mean ‘mass death.’
You can look it up.
– of desiring and actively striving for the depopulation of Uganda through HIV/AIDS.
A few points:
(1) What exactly is the proof of this stunning allegation? Note that the standard of proof is high given the nature of the charges. It is not enough to simply note that a large number of Ugandans may die as a result of the policies in question: that does not prove intent. By analogy, the fact that a large number of Iraqi civilians have been killed in the war does not, by itself, prove that the Bush administration was aiming to depopulate Iraq.
(2) What is the Bush administration hoping to achieve by making genocide a policy goal? And what is President Museveni’s motive for taking part in the extermination campaign against his people?
(3) As decreased use of contraception also means more child births, can you even prove that the net effect of an abstinence-only program is substantive depopulation within a reasonable time-frame, say 10-15 years?
(1) He has dismissed credible information that abstinence campaigns do not work in fact it leads to more exposure. That is called willful neglect. And it is done purposely since the information is widely available.
(2) Museveni is ill (physically). Many have speculated that he is being “rewarded” and also his wife is a fundalmentalist. motive for taking part in the extermination campaign against his people? This is Uganda home of Idi Amin who killed 1/3 of his population.
(3)As decreased use of contraception also means more child births these children are born infected with HIV and will also die
1. Bush has also dismissed credible information that man-made CO2 emissions cause dramatic global warning.
Which does not prove, nor is it plausible to suggest, that Bush desires and aims for a runaway greenhouse effect. Mutatis mutandis, this applies to any number of idiotic policies pursued by the fool.
2. You failed to answer my query about the Bush administration’s motive.
As to Museveni, all you offer is (i) a claim about his health; (ii) the speculation that he is ‘rewarded;’ (iii) the fact that he is married to a fundamentalist, which hardly explains why he would crave to exterminate his own people.
This is Uganda home of Idi Amin who killed 1/3 of his population.
Are you saying that Ugandans have a special propensity for genocide?
By the way, Museveni has been in power nearly 20 years, which (except for Acholiland in the north) have been a time of progress for Uganda. If he wished to follow in Amin’s footsteps, don’t you think he is a curiously late starter?
3. these children are born infected with HIV and will also die
No, not all or even a majority. You need to show, by means of a differential equation based upon statistics, that the net result would be significant depopulation within a reasonable time-frame (since few politicians tend to exert themselves to impact the distant future).
Sounds like natural selection.
If you were to take the stance that a country is like a person, then too much medicine can cripple and inhibit health.
Most other continents went through periods in their history just like what Africa is going through. The difference is that they didn’t have more advanced countries “helping” them through it.
They settled in, had a nice long period of genocide and atrocity, and eventually, most folks learned to work things out and a stable infrastructure formed around their community.
The difference in Africa, of course, is that it’s laden with resources, we were light years ahead on the timeline of progress, and we’re doing our best to save every failed community and flawed old-world paradigm we can get our bleeding heart hands on.
It could be argued that humanitarian efforts play a part in keeping the population artificially inflated, existing on a more meager subsistance through international subsidy than the resources of the region would provide a natural density.
Of course, international business being what it is, there is a certain vested interest in keeping the local governments small and weak.
3. Once again just a claim with none of the documentation I requested.
I don’t have any more time to waste on this; you are clearly not taking it seriously.
If you live in Xland, whether you believe that your king is killing the people of Y on purpose, by accident, or not at all, will affect your life less than what the people in Y think, and by how many corpses they are surrounded when they think it.
My argument is that I do not believe that it is likely that anyone will change anyone else’s mind on a message board, and in some cases, I do not think that it would be humane to try.
Agreed
It has been proven beyond a doubt that this methodology does not work. EDUCATION which they are trying to DENY to the mass population is the most effective means.
I know people from Uganda who are surprised at the number of WHITES coming in in droves and “marrying” just anyone and buying land.
Aids is not just a health catastrphe but also an economic one. Who is going to run the country and economy in 10 years when 50% of the population is infected as in most of the Southern African countries.
There is an old saying:
When the Missionaries first came to Africa
The Africans had the land
and the Missionaries had the Bible
The Missionaries taught the Africans how to bow their head and pray
And when they looked up
The Missionaries had the land
And the Africans had the Bibles
This is just another Colonization… they always sent in the missionaries first with bibles and small pox infected blankets…. why are we so surprised this is not the first time.
If you want to persuade the citizens of Xland that their king is in fact killing the people of Y, and that they ought to make him stop, then the nature of the motivation you ascribe to their king may well affect your success.
Anyhow, sticking to what is plausible and provable has merit in itself, tactics aside.
almost a young woman now, who lies dying, having reached the end of a short life of terrible choices. Despite the fact that neither her pimp nor her drug pusher have called to ask about her, sent her flowers or gifts, and despite the fact that her once-pretty face is scarred from beating, she still believes that the drug dealer is her true friend, the pimp the love of her life, the only man who has ever truly loved her. Where you see two soulless wretches, degenerate and criminal, she sees nobility, strength, and hope. Will you try to convince her that the drug dealer, the pimp, do not care about her suffering, will not mourn her passing? That on the contrary, it is they who have killed her?
Even if you should succeed, what will you have won? Only the knowledge that the only comfort she had in her final hours, false though it may have been, it was real to her, and it was shattered by your hand.
Being right is not always a victory that one wishes nor should one seek.
Is your allegory in defense of political ‘noble lies’?
Specifically, are you arguing that we ought to accuse the Bush administration of deliberately seeking to depopulate Uganda, even if we do not believe this to be the case?
I just want to be clear on this.
So what exactly “is” their purpose of weakening a successful campaign against AIDS in Uganda?
If an outside government enters a starving dieased ridden country and says that the only way will will give you money is if you stop taking the medicine that is healing you people… wouldn’t you consider that that country is liable for the genocide.
They know damn well that their actions will ensure certain death for thousands. This is exactly what the fundalmentalist are doing in Africa. I guess they consider themselves Christians because they will pray over the dead bodies.
See my reply above.
Like I suggested in my first comment, the most plausible motivation for the policy-makers in question is a mix of (i) a misguided belief that abstinence-only is effective against the spread of HIV; and (ii) abhorrance of contraception (among Catholics) and of extra-marital sex (among both Catholics and Protestants).
I daresay these are more credible motives than a desire to depopulate Uganda for its own sake, as implied by the accusation of genocide.
The success of UGANDA was due to early education of the use of condoms. This ABC shit has been recently implemented tied to US funding.
Uganda was the Golden Boy of Aids reduction. In a continent which has some countries (South Africa, Swaziland etc) with AIDS rates of nearly 50% for Uganda to have a rate of 6% is near a miracle.
Uganda was on the road to epidemic porportions like these other countries had it not been for the aggressive government pushing of condoms.
Now this is being reversed as mentioned in article due to misguided GOP fundalmentalist who want to legislate what happens in other people panties.
The US envoy to the Global AIDS convention was rounded boo’d last year by the international community and the hopes that they had in fighting this epidemic were crashed when they heard Museveni spouting Bush’s backwards-assed rhetoric.
The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has limited the number of its employees at the conference to 50, down from 236 at the last meeting in Barcelona in 2002. The measure primarily affects researchers at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, many of whom had already had abstracts peer reviewed and accepted. Attendees from other agencies and universities and HHS employees in Asia are not affected.
As of early June, more than 50 presentations from US government researchers have been canceled. Direct financial support from the US, previously the meeting’s biggest contributor, has been cut to $250,000 from $1.1 million in 2002. The European Union, Canada, Sweden and Thailand all contributed more than that amount, says conference director Mats Ahnlund.
The Bangkok conference is not the only one to have lost US government support. At the Global Health Council meeting in June, the organization’s president Nils Daulaire blasted the HHS and other US agencies for cutting funds after “a small clique of right-wing extremists” objected to participants who don’t oppose abortion.
Some in the administration are still upset over activists’ heckling of Thompson in 2002. In an open letter to Lange in May, five Republican members of the House of Representatives complained about Thompson’s “rude reception” in Barcelona and about “a seeming bias against the scientifically proven success of programs that promote [sexual] abstinence and faithfulness.”
It IS the only effective method. Not saying condoms can’t be made available, but why make that the first thing you teach a child?
Abstinance first with a healthy fear of death. The only safe sex is no sex, condoms are just “slightly less risky sex”.
Of course, folks need to be educated about condoms, too. But I’d rather abstinance than condoms on the billboards.
Do you have sex?
If so, why do you think other will not?
It should be strongly discouraged. If you don’t know the person you’re having sex with well enough to not need a condom, then you shouldn’t be having sex with them in all likeleyhood.
If you consider the large amount of AIDS in africa that is spread through rape, pedaphilia, and mother-to-infant contact condoms as any sort of curative are laughable.
Yeah, and abstinence is a surefire method against rape, pedophilia, and mother-to-infant contact?
And anyway, it’s better for the AIDS pandemic to run its course without intervention, this being a case of natural selection, right? Cf. your crap above, which deservedly earned my first troll-rating on BT and was real close to getting a 0.
I’m getting tired of your bullshit. If you think this is a joke, take your humor elsewhere:
Do you have sex?
wrong place
I’m not laughing about the situation, please forgive me if my position is somewhat clinical.
What would have happened if there had been a superpower of the US’s class during the time of the black plague, that was intent on fighting tooth and nail against the progress of the infection? If they fought to keep each infected victim alive as long as possible and sent out medicines to alleviate the symptoms and prolong life?
I’m not trying to crack wise here, merely to suggest that the cause of the current situation may be traced to relief provided in the past, and that relief provided now may add to future sufferring.
I could care less about ratings or being ignored, Sirrocco. I’ll just drop my opinion on whichever subject strikes my fancy, however you react to my opinion is up to you.
– we were talking about preventive measures. You know, like, preventing spread of HIV from one person to another?
Apparently, in your world, the best preventive measure is the mass death of untold millions without relief. The second best is preaching abstinence to those that may survive. Condoms, despite their proven efficacy, are worthless.
Oh, okay then. I see the light.
On a side note, the bubonic/pneumatic plague is curable by antibiotics and containable by isolating patients, so if these advances had existed during the pandemics in Europe, the disease could have been wiped out before killing half the population as occurred in the mid 14th century (2/3 in some countries, including mine). So that analogy is a little beside the point.
Do you have sex?
Stop the boxer politics… Hey… Parker… get out of my draws!!!!
Exactly, how dare the US government get into the draws of these people and tie foreign aid to abstinece programme and deny them information regarding condoms…
Thank you, illustrated my point perfectly.
Condoms break, and AIDS can still be passed through other intimate non-condom protected sexual contact. All it takes is bodily fluid exchange, right?
I’m not saying that denying folks information about condom usage is a good thing, I’m just saying that the message needs to be Abstinance first. With as widespread a problem as they have in Africa, there is no such thing as safe sex. This needs to be made perfectly clear, that condoms are not an effective prevention and that any sexual contact carries with it the risk of contracting AIDS.
By saying, “It’s okay, have sex, the condoms will protect you” you’re instilling a false sense of security.
I don’t agree with the funding decisions of the current administration, but I also don’t agree that condoms are the holy grail of African social problems.
In other words, the condom issue isn’t really worth fighting over, as soon as the power shifts again that situation will resolve itself, and not a moment sooner. In the meantime, abortion and condom counseling are the least of the region’s actual worries.
Are either of these statements false?
The plague helped shaped Europe into the continent it became. The consolidation of resources among survivors made possible the Rennessaince, as one of the most directly measurable effects.
Africa has been locked in a state of suspended development ever since colonization first began. It has remained an impoverished “developing nation” for longer than the land that was to become America was even known to exist by the Europeans, despite an unparallelled richness and diversity of natural resources.
I was reading about one of the sponsor the children campaigns, which was run by a Christian organization. (This was several years ago.) Basically they would get people to sponsor a child, which then received minimal aid, such as food and vaccines, and basic school supplies. This one family wanted to know what had become of “their” child – since they had received photos and progress reports, so they went for a visit when the child was about 12 (sponsorship stops through the organization when the child reaches a certain pre-teen age – with encouragement to the sponsor to keep sending aid voluntarily). What they found was that the child had dropped out of school a few years before, was pregnant, no husband and with no prospects of ever evolving out of her current situation. There was no policy in effect to either educate these kids in any way or supply birth control to the families. The inhumanity of it all is just mind-boggling.
No disagreement there. These people are willfully and criminally deluded, or plain callous, or both.
Based on your ratings above though, I take it you agree with the ‘genocide thesis’: that the Bush administration is intentionally plotting to eradicate the population of Uganda, if not all of Africa, for some mysterious reason.
I don’t feel I was able to extract a rational defense of this allegation above. Want to give it a shot? Because I am baffled that someone subscribes to this – it seems to give us moonbat conspiracy nuts an undeservedly bad name.
Intentionally is perhaps a strong word. Ignorantly would be more appropriate (which doesn’t make it any more excusable). I think if they do have a goal it is to keep the 3rd world the 3rd world (future planning – in case we need something at some point), plus it serves to appeal to the agenda of the home front voter (the no condoms bit – anyway). That and the fact that our aid is conditional. These actions cause misery and death; there is no denying that. Our agenda is certainly Imperialist – not that that is something new, but we don’t want any competition anywhere along the way.
If we wanted to really help advance Africa we could do it at a fraction of what it costs us now. Much of fertile Africa has 2 growth cycles in a season, which is staggering, yet those few places that do have crops only use one cycle and are often stripped bare by raiding soldiers, thus reducing the desire for people to farm in the first place. Africa could support the world single-handedly and quite efficiently if it could be given an opportunity at this, thus becoming self-sufficient. Even in less fertile areas there are crops that can be utilized. Yet we send food to Africa? This is a question never answered and rarely asked.
– though I would say there is morally speaking a world of difference between even willfully ignorant policies and intentional extermination.
Re: agriculture, I nearly choked at this statement by another poster above:
Indeed. Never mind that we are talking about Uganda, a country so fertile that it could feed all of Africa on its own if efficiently farmed.
Yes, I read the exchange.
I’ll settle for “intentional policies” that result in “willfully ignorant extermination”, LOL.
Although I am new to this ‘site, after reading some of the comments here, I just had to weigh-in.
This is indeed, the Bush administration’s attempt to force christian doctrine, on the rest of the world.
And only the “needy” parts, you’ll notice.
This doctrine is straight out of the, “My way,or the highway,” playbook.
In other words, “You’ll do it my way, or you won’t do it at all.”
Not a surprise, and not hard to believe. The arrogance level of this non-administration is “sky high.”
Typical right-wing tactic, typical Bush.
A Bible in one hand, a check in the other.