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World
leaders urged to keep promises
to fight AIDS
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 DAKAR(December
4,2008)
- Several hundred African anti-AIDS campaigners paraded giant puppets
of U.S. President-elect Barack Obama and French President Nicolas
Sarkozy on Tuesday to demand that they deliver promised funds for
plans to fight the disease.
Waving some banners reading "African children are watching you"
and others supporting AIDS victims, the demonstrators, most of them
dressed in white, marched through a central avenue of the Senegalese
capital Dakar. They included many children.
Giant puppets, each nearly four metres (yards) high, represented Obama,
clad in a blue jacket, red bow tie and red-and-white striped trousers,
and Sarkozy, dressed in a black coat with a handerchief in the French
colours spilling from a top pocket.
A big red-and-yellow spiky ball representing the AIDS virus was carried
between them by marchers wearing white gloves.
The campaigners, gathering on the eve of an international conference
on AIDS in Dakar, said the demonstration aimed to remind the U.S.
and French leaders not to forget their multi-million dollar commitments
to anti-AIDS programmes.
"They have to walk the talk ... the pledges they have made must
be fulfilled," said Velephi Riba, a spokesperson for the Save
the Children charity which helped organise the march.
Save the Children said that as governments in the rich developed world
grappled with the global financial crisis and provided tens of billions
of dollars for financial rescue packages, their leaders should not
renege on public pledges to help the planet's poorest, including those
suffering from AIDS.
"HIV and AIDS-impacted children in Africa -- who have never heard
of Wall Street -- should not pay the price for the global economic
decline," said Ame David, another spokesperson.
According to Save the Children, U.S. President-elect Obama had recently
pledged to provide at least $50 billion by 2013 for the global fight
against HIV and AIDS.
France, which holds the rotating European Union presidency, was a
leading contributor to HIV-responding initiatives in Africa with funding
of 360 million euros ($458 million) yearly.
"Obama and Sarkozy must not drop from these pledges by a single
dollar or euro," Riba said.
An estimated 33 million people worldwide were living with the HIV
virus, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, at the end of 2007. AIDS has
killed 25 million since being identified in 1981.
An estimated 2.7 million people become infected each year.
Among the Dakar marchers, 11-year-old Abdoulaye Maria carried a banner
calling for help for AIDS sufferers.
Asked what AIDS was, he answered shyly: "It's a sickness".
And how should it be avoided? "I don't know". |
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