60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

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240 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness years the emphasis has been on state accountability for the wellbeing (or illness and death) of citizens. The TAC can be defi ned as one of the new social justice movements pointing at links between global injustices and individual lives, linking suff ering and deaths to larger social structures. Their way of highlighting the body and health adds a dimension to ‘materiality’ that most social movements seldom discuss, including embodiment and high-tech biomedicine (see Ndour 2008). The ‘embodiment of violence’ means for the activists a simultaneous signifi cance of the level of the cell and the virus, the level of community and national politics, and the level at which global intellectual property rights and a neo-liberal bio-economic order are maintained. Accusations of criminal acts among politicians who do not show commitment to leadership in the face of the AIDS epidemic – that is, lack of political will being interpreted as a crime – have occurred before. The Malawian activist Chatinka Nwoma, during a rally at the Durban AIDS conference in 2000, is documented to have ‘grabbed the microphone, pointed to a building behind her where World Bank offi cials and drug company experts were discussing the cost-eff ectiveness of global AIDS treatment, and shouted to a sea of African faces like hers: ‘There is a crime being committed here! You cannot have 42 million people dying and have the issue be about money!’’ (d’Adesky 2004: 7). Similarly, the Wola Nani activist Gary Lamont used the following language in a speech on the SA government’s lack of policy regarding antiretroviral treatment provision to pregnant women: ‘Every month that the government withholds these drugs is a cumulative act of genocide for thousands’ (Fassin 2007: 52). The question here is whether such a connection is reasonable. Can mismanagement of health issues be interpreted as intentional murder and violence? More specifi cally we ask what kind of theory of politics of embodiment lies behind the activist view? What kind of relationship between the state and the individual body does this accusation entail? How are TAC ‘body politics’ actually theorised? This article discusses the connection suggested by the activists between state responsibility and individual AIDS-related deaths. It asks what kind of a view on the political body lies behind the claim that the current HIV situation can be described in terms of mass violence. Here we discuss the activist agenda on health and politics by contrasting it to the theoretical approaches on embodiment provided by mainstream social sciences and post-structural theorists.
a luta continua! – south african hiv activism, embodiment and state politics 241 HIV and politics – urgency and negligence What is the context of HIV and state politics in a general sense? Countless narratives of AIDS testify that there is no doubt that AIDS is about very intimate suff ering (Fassin 2007). How can it at the same time be argued to be about politics, even mass violence, as activists claim? HIV, after all, is a tiny biological entity, a virus, and the infection happens in the natural processes in the body. It could be added that HIV touches upon the most intimate and anxiety-evoking arenas of public life, sexualities, which further opens a space for silence and hesitation (Richey 2008). It clearly diff ers from more obvious cases of mass violence (see Kössler in this volume). Alex de Waal (2006: 179) suggests that the HIV epidemic is like climate change: it does not arrive with a visible drama like other disasters, and therefore it can be made to be invisible in the political realm. Our reading of the discourses of the AIDS epidemic in Africa is that it has a peculiar discursive existence: it is silenced and privatised on the one hand, and politicised and exposed as few illnesses before on the other (see also Jungar and Oinas 2008). On a discursive level, AIDS emerged from the very beginning in the early 1980s as an illness loaded with political imagery, from a gay disease to an African catastrophe, evoking old colonial images of a Dark Continent (Patton 1997). At the same time it evoked biomedical sentiments and interventions, and traditionally medicalization tends to de-politicise (Oinas 2001). Thus, the context of HIV policies is a paradox: silence, negligence and political apathy have been and still are features of the discursive landscape (de Waal 2006); but at the same time there is an unprecedented media alarm, both constructive and scandalising. Further, among policy makers globally there has been a consensus about a growing urgency, as well as an increasing will to act, during the 2000s. The HIV/AIDS epidemic is seen as a major threat to African societies, aff ecting a wide range of areas from gender relations to economic and political development. High-ranking politicians across the globe state that HIV is a high global priority. All recent US presidents have used the alarm around the HIV epidemic in Africa when they have wished to demonstrate good will and their global responsibility. In 2000 the UN Security Council for the fi rst time held a special session on a health issue – the HIV/ AIDS pandemic. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria was established in 2002 as one of the largest fi nancial eff orts to battle against a set of three single illnesses. Yet, once again, despite the acknowledged urgency, critics maintain that little of the talk has been translated into radical re-oriented po-
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no. 50 | december 2008 Revisiting t
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Revisiting the heart of darkness -
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Acknowledgements The larger part of
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Dennis Brutus, born 1924 in then Rh
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The Voksenåsen Statement Genocides
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This Development Dialogue is publis
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