Editorial

Oberlin should join African AIDS fight

While hundreds of thousands of Americans protested against a war in Iraq last weekend expressing concern over possible civilian casualties, approximately 5,500 people died from complications of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa.
In fact, it’s likely that more civilians will die in Africa from AIDS in a single weekend than will perish in the Desert Storm reprise. Forty percent of the population is infected; which is 24.5 million of the world’s 34.3 million HIV positive men and women live in Africa.
AIDS has created 13.2 million orphans; 12.1 million of them live in the African subcontinent. By 2010, the UN speculates there will be 42 million children orphaned by the epidemic. It simply boggles the mind.
In 1999, 10,000 Americans died of AIDS. In 2000, 2.4 million Africans were consumed by the disease.
The handful of students who are organizing a response to the devastating epidemic should be roundly lauded. They are not part of a chic movement, and they have turned to confront a terrible specter.
The African AIDS crisis will be remembered by future generations as a genocide levied by Western governments and pharmaceutical companies. We are quietly sentencing millions to death by turning a blind eye; already, it is a near certainty that more will die forgotten in Africa than in any previous holocaust in world history.
We should ask ourselves: if 25 million people were infected from AIDS in Europe, would we not float a sort of AIDS Marshall plan? Surely, we would pay it more heed. It is simply abominable that we continue to allow the residue of colonialism and the legacy of racism to poison our decision-making. We are tacitly endorsing the silent suffocation of an entire continent.
We do not suggest that protesting against a war in Iraq is without virtue, but we do suggest that Oberlin realize the limited scope of the Iraq question in terms of real numbers of people. A member of the Oberlin global AIDS contingent once told an editor that he was simply amazed at the apathy students showed towards his cause.
Truly, Oberlin should be at the vanguard of this issue. The College, and its students, faculty and staff have long been the progressive voice of reason in United States. It is embarrassing that we have let this issue languish. It is depressing that President Bush spends more time talking about it than Oberlinians.
We laud Bush for finally coming to his senses and acknowledging the scope of the crisis, promising to devote billions of dollars to the epidemic in his State of the Union Address.
In particular, we praise his decision to negate some of the patents of American pharmaceutical leviathans and offer condoms and safer-sex education, rather than his former message of plain abstinence. The billions of dollars the U.S. will commit, and the treatment programs it will enable, will save millions of lives.
But this, of course, is not enough. It will help, but will not solve, a burgeoning problem. More money, more time, and more concern is needed. The crisis in Africa deserves more front page space than anything relating to Iraq.
Students, faculty and staff should contact their representatives in Congress, as well as the President, to push for debt relief and the funding of additional treatment programs in these beleaguered countries.
They should encourage the United States to divert a larger share of its foreign aid to countries where people are dying exponentially, rather that simply languishing it on countries in economic hardship. A $26 billion offer to Turkey to launch U.S. troops into Iraq should be rejected as vulgar and unacceptable.
If we are to protest war in Iraq, we should look to the bigger picture and condemn a diversion of American resources to a less explosive, less immediate situation. The Iraqi people are suffering: this is true. But they are not dying by the millions each year.

Editorials are the responsibility of the Review editorial board—the Editors in Chief, Managing Editor and Commentary Editor—and do not necessarily reflect the view of the staff of the Review.