Friday Forum: Don’t overlook Africa

Online Poster

Online Poster

By Online Poster

(U-WIRE) GAINESVILLE, Fla. –

Wednesday marked the 17th annual World AIDS Day, an important opportunity to view the African continent’s myriad problems through the prism of the deadly disease. AIDS ravages populations already facing genocide and war. African political instability and poverty largely go ignored by the global community. A staggering number of Africans die each year from AIDS-related causes, and 37.8 million people are infected worldwide.

The global scourge of AIDS is a national-security threat to the United States. Sub-Saharan Africa, the area of the world hardest hit by the virus, claims just 10 percent of the world’s population, but 60 percent of the world’s AIDS victims, according to the United Nations. With populations destabilized by the plague and oppressed by dictators, there is little chance for the world community to combat the virus from the top of the political structure down to those suffering from AIDS.

But the AIDS epidemic is not the only threat posed by the conditions in Africa. The same corrupt dictators who pocket foreign aid and prevent AIDS-fighting drugs from reaching sufferers run the diamond trade in West Africa, and terrorists have been buying the diamonds and using them to finance their operations. Instead of putting money in banks, which leaves a trail that can be easily sniffed out, diamonds are an easily transported and converted currency. Terrorists are banking on the fact that the West will not pay much attention to the world’s second-largest continent. They have been right.

Sudan, once a haven for Osama bin Laden, hosted genocide in the Darfur region while the global community and the United Nations looked away. A decade ago, the rest of the world sat paralyzed as Rwandans massacred one another with machetes. The world’s complacency toward Africa must be eliminated. Governments should make it more favorable for Western companies to invest in African nations, supplying them with breaks to encourage economic growth.

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Before any real improvement can be made, Africa must be modernized, but not in the sense the continent’s colonial occupiers believed. Education is the first and most important way to both fight the AIDS virus and plant the seeds for real democracy on a continent ruled by bloodlust and greed.

There are bright spots. Uganda, a country that has lost more than 1 million people to AIDS since 1983, has made strides in reducing the prevalence of HIV, slashing the virus’ presence by 12 percent since the early 1990s.

The United States and particularly the nations of Western Europe – which carved up Africa in brutal colonizing efforts for centuries – have an obligation to lend economic and medical might to loosening AIDS’ grip on the continent. President Bush has earmarked $2.4 billion to combat the disease – a much-needed step in the battle against the pandemic. Bush and his counterparts in the world’s other wealthy industrialized nations should call on the leaders of the developing world to fight long-held misconceptions about the disease and aggressively work to educate their citizens about how to prevent the spread of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. All of Africa – and indeed, the world – must face the grim facts.

Staff Editorial