MBEKI IN THE USA
MBEKI'S ELOQUENT
DIPLOMACY DUCKS
AND WEAVES
26th May 2000
By FINTAN DUNNE
AidsMyth Dissident
News
With Thabo Mbeki's tour of the UK and USA drawing to a close, the smooth diplomacy
of the last week must leave him well satisfied. Before the trip he faced a
barrage of international condemnation over his questioning of the HIV-AIDS
link and the role of AZT as a treatment. For a while it looked like this foreign
venture might prove a debacle. But a well crafted and diplomatic stance by
Mbeki deflected criticism and disarmed opponents.
Well before his first public utterance on AIDS, Mbeki was well aware of the
risk he was taking. Celia Farber reports a seminal conversation between Mbeki
and Anita Allen - the SA journalist who first alerted him to the flaws in
the establishment theories. "I'm going to be slaughtered, you know,"
Mbeki told Allen when responding to her suggestion to instigate a panel of
inquiry, after he had perused her 100 page dissident dossier. But Mbeki was
not going to be a willing sacrifice.
From the beginning, he answered critics by implying it was hardly his
fault if scientists had spent 15 years disagreeing on the causes of AIDS.
Opponents also found it difficult to argue against his assertion that African
AIDS required a custom-designed African solution. Anyway, argued Mbeki, where
were either the funds or infrastructure to supply AIDS medications?
The key strategy was to
buy Mbeki time, allowing the hysteria to abate, while his AIDS Panel deliberated.
Mbeki floored the AIDS establishment with one blow, and then denied ever having
thrown a punch at all. He threw them into the ring with the AIDS dissidents.
It is now up to dissident scientists to land the next punch while Mbeki adopts
the stance of referee. Mbeki has both hands firmly in his pockets for now.
Had he taken a hard line in the USA, he might never have shaken off the media-drawn
cartoon caricature. Now he has a reputation as a rather eloquent and thoughtful
statesman. Furthermore, he has driven home the point that tackling the
poverty of underdevelopment will likely alleviate African mortality, whereas
mortgaging the Continent's future for expensive AIDS drugs will only worsen
the problem.
Despite tiptoeing through a political minefield, Mbeki still managed to relentlessly
poke holes in the current AIDS paradigm. One moment denying he had questioned
the role of HIV, then wondering aloud how AIDS has morphed from a homosexual
disease to a heterosexual one.
In the last month Mbeki has taken two steps forward and then one step back.
If the AIDS Panel ends in deadlock, the pharmaceutical corporates may sink
into a quicksand of competing theories. Mbeki is unlikely to throw them a
rope. Indeed the timing of the AIDS Panel final report - just ahead of the
Durban AIDS conference - can hardly be coincidental. It may allow Mbeki to
hole that conference below the waterline.
Back in his antiapartheid protesting days, Mbeki once lost a tooth to the
heavy-handed tactics of the British police. He has since learned to duck
and weave with agility.
The next few months should be very interesting.
AidsMyth Dissident News
http://www.aidsmyth.com
mail@aidsmyth.com
Copyright © 2000 Fintan Dunne
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