SACP Does not Question that HIV causes Aids Response to Today's Sunday Independent Lead Article

10 September 2000

The leading article in today's Sunday Independent quotes the SACP as saying The party had not studied the issues of whether HIV caused AIDS. This is far from the truth and does not represent what we actually said in our interview with the Sunday Independen t.

The Sunday Independent report makes nonsense of public SACP statements positions on HIV/AIDS and access to affordable treatment. For example, when he addressed the NUM National Congress in April, SACP General Secretary, Blade Nzimande said, Let us not fool ourselves, HIV causes AIDS. The SACP also supported the Global March for Access to HIV/AIDS Treatment held in Durban during through several media articles, tens of SACP volunteers mobilising for the march and an SACP speaker at the march itself.

Given all this public knowledge which the Sunday Independent has access to, what motivates the Sunday Independent to misrepresent the SACP position on HIV/AIDS?

In short, our position on HIV/AIDS, which was explicitly stated to the Sunday Independent, is:

• The SACP does not question the link between HIV and AIDS.
• The SACP is extremely concerned about the social, economic and health implications of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and calls for urgent action by all stakeholders to address the epidemic and the problems it poses.
• The SACP argues for a human rights based and holistic response which dynamically links prevention, access to information, awareness, care, support, access to social services, management and access to treatment.
• The SACP supports the struggle for affordable treatment. Barriers to affordable treatment are the drug companies and the cost of drugs.
• The SACP has not sufficiently studied the complex issues about anti-retroviral HIV/AIDS drugs so as to comment to the extent that three COSATU affiliates are doing in their call for access to anti-retroviral drugs. The SACP has set up an HIV/AIDS desk, w hich is exploring this question and will report in due course.

Interestingly we note that the Sunday Independent article completely ignores a substantial part of our response, as summarised above, to the questions they posed in the interview. Again we ask, why did the Sunday Independent chose to misrepresent our posit ion? It seems that the journalist concerned either does not understand the SACP position summarised above or confuses access to basic and life-saving essential HIV/AIDS drugs with access to complicated anti-retroviral drugs.

Finally, the SACP is getting increasingly concerned at how the Sunday Independent has systematically misrepresented SACP statements on four occasions in the last 6 weeks.

CONTACT

Mazibuko K. Jara (surname Jara)
Department of Media, Information and Publicity South African Communist Party
Tel: 011 339-3621/2 Fax: 27 11 339-4244
Cell: 083 651 0271 Email: sacp1@wn.apc.org