HEALTH-BURMA: Regime Resists HIV/AIDS Programmes

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Aug 15 2006 (IPS) – While a major international conference on HIV/AIDS opened Sunday in Canada with a message to help those affected by the disease, on this side of the globe, in Burma, the ruling military regime moved to arrest sufferers and campaigners.
On Friday night, a pioneering attempt by a group of Burmese living with HIV to conduct an awareness campaign in the South-east Asian country ended in 11 of them being arrested by the authorities in Rangoon. They were released on Monday after a police inquiry.

The victims were members of an informal group who had rallied under the banner, Friends with Red Ribbon , which symbolises the colour and design recognised internationally for the battle against AIDS. They were planning to hold a Buddhist traditional merit making service for their friends who passed away with HIV/AIDS , revealed a news alert by the U.S. Campaign for Burma, a Washington D.C.-based organisation lobbying for human rights in Burma.

There are about 52 members in this group. Some of them are former political prisoners, says Bo Kyi, joint secretary of the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP), a group based along the Thai-Burmese border that campaigns to free the over 1,300 political prisoners in Burmese jails. One member of this group, Than Lwin, who had AIDS, died two days ago.

The Red Ribbon group launched this effort to educate the Burmese society about AIDS because they were feeling very isolated and vulnerable, Bo Kyi explained during an interview. They were people with HIV from Rangoon and from other parts of the country.

This crackdown by the police on the grounds that the members had not got police clearance to stay overnight at the Buddhist temple in the Thingangyun township was not the first of its kind. In September last year, a house rented out in Rangoon to serve as a home offering care and counselling for people with HIV was also forced to close.
The weekend s action by the junta in Myanmar, as Burma has been renamed, has prompted the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) to question the military regime s attitude towards combating the pandemic. This is not a very helpful course of action on the part of the Myanmar government, J.V.R. Prasada Rao, head of the Asia-Pacific office of UNAIDS, said during a telephone interview from Toronto, venue of the week-long 16th International AIDS Conference. It sends a very negative message.

But doctors from Burma, familiar with the military regime s stance towards the virus and towards people afflicted with it, are hardly surprised. There is very little support for the people with HIV to conduct advocacy programmes or awareness programmes in the open. You are not encouraged to work independently, Dr. Cynthia Maung, who runs the Mae Tao clinic in Mae Sot, along the Thai-Burmese border, told IPS. Everything is controlled by the officials.

The junta s unsympathetic stance towards people with HIV in Burma adds to a growing list of concerns that have earned it notoriety. The current estimates by UNAIDS and other international agencies of people with HIV in Burma range from 360,000 to 610,000 people. The adult prevalence rate stood at between 1.3 percent to 2.2 percent people infected of the country s 50 million people.

Myanmar has one of the most serious epidemics in the region, UNAIDS stated in its 2006 annual report earlier this year. The infection rates exceed those in the two other South-east Asian countries that had long been viewed as the epicentre of the deadly virus in the region Cambodia, which has a 1.6 percent adult HIV prevalence rate, and Thailand, which has a 1.4 percent adult prevalence.

But the Burmese regime which till late 2003 refused to admit to an emerging AIDS crisis and kept the issue hidden from the public appears reluctant to ease the pain of its suffering citizens. In August last year, it succeeded, after imposing tough internal travel restrictions, to force the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria to quit the country. At the time of its departure, the Global Fund, an international agency that offers grants to combat the world s three major killer diseases in over 125 countries, had committed to spend 98.4 million dollars over a five-year period in Burma. Of that, 54.3 million dollars was for AIDS-related initiatives.

This slash in funding for AIDS programmes came on the heels of a revelation by the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based think tank, that Burma was the main source of all strains of HIV that had spread across a wide arc in Asia, with Kazakhstan, on one end, and southern Vietnam, on the other.

What adds to this troubling picture is Burma s high number of patients with tuberculosis (TB), which has become the leading killer of people afflicted with HIV. Burma has 97,000 new cases of TB every year, according to the World Health Organisation.

Rather than helping people with HIV, the military regime tries to isolate them and create problems between them and the rest of the people who do not have HIV, says Bo Kyi, a former political prisoner, himself. It does not want anyone to speak loudly about AIDS. If you do, you get into trouble.