60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

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254 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness ation where the landless people fi ght over land. Once the land is theirs, there is a clear victory. With this campaign, the political dimension is indisputably there, but the camps of aggressors and enemies, and the clarity in wins and losses, are by defi nition unclear. We have sought to show in this article that the TAC argument does not need to be built on the assumption that there are no other alternatives. It can be based on an argumentation that this is a good, even the best alternative indicated by diff erent calculations and studies. Or, activists can argue that the popular discourse in general directs the government to this option anyway. Or, that the ANC needs to follow up on its own promises. Further, and maybe most importantly, the South African Constitution can and has been used. TAC-initiated litigation has shown that ARVs are what the Constitution promised its citizens – but of course there is room for negotiation, which is why the government has trouble trying to prove its point (Heywood 2005). To conclude, the TAC has many lines of argument: it sometimes uses ‘the only option’ discourse, sometimes ‘the wise option’, and sometimes a ‘politically right option’. While this shows that the TAC is thoroughly strategic and political, it is important to keep in mind that its politics are in line with the politics of scientifi c knowledge, the long-term promises of the ANC, the Constitution, and individual politicians. With such promises and commitments taken together, there indeed is ‘a case’ of mass violence. People die while politicians have promised to provide services that can keep them alive. This, however, is a diff erent claim than politicians murdering citizens on the basis of their assumed rights. The earlier version points to a political fi eld in the making, a fruitful ground for democracy: TAC believes that the delay by government in acting on its own policies and recommendations is leading to immense suff ering and loss. It is also creating new inequalities in SA. MPs have access to ARVs. People with medical aid have access to ARVs. Parastatals such as Transnet and Eskom provide employees with ARVs. The SANDF is designing an ARV programme. It is only the poor, those employed in the informal sector and small and medium sized enterprises, and the unemployed – ie those who are totally dependent on the public health service – who, as a matter of policy are denied these medicines. […] our protest is against political negligence and unjust policies which willfully withhold life-saving medicine and other resources from people in desperate need. 7 7 ‘Dying for treatment: TAC Briefi ng Document on the Civil Disobedience campaign’, TAC E-Newsletter, 10 March 2003. http://www.tac.org.za/newsletter/2003/ ns10_03_2003.html (last accessed 14.2.2007).
a luta continua! – south african hiv activism, embodiment and state politics 255 Conclusion: Antiretroviral treatment as body politics? Can lack of a certain kind of pill, here antiretroviral medication, in a public clinic, be read as mass violence? Despite the agreed importance of the inter-linkages of health and political order, in the popular thinking and political apparatus health is often still perceived as a technical issue of biomedicine administered by some devoted, dull public health people, who are involved in rather neutral, straightforward, medico-technical work. The disconnection between an obvious interest in the socio-political nature of health within social sciences and a biomedicalisation of contemporary epidemics calls for further attention. The major problem in this debate, especially when the object of inquiry here is access to ARV treatment, is the question of the ‘medical’ that seems to haunt social scientists. In mainstream social science medical interventions are seen as a distraction from more social and political agendas. The activist agenda can be helpful here, as it seems to off er a way to grasp the political nature of biomedicine. This, however, is also an area where the activists operate with a double agenda, both politicising and neutralising. A major part of the activist discourse argues that there is no body free of politics. Furthermore, politics is not here seen as the dirty business of politicians, but as a positive, constitutive feature in everyday lives. The policies, the physical vitality of the organs, and the daily lives together contribute to what is the reality of living with the illness. Similarly, there are no neutral agendas, there is no pre-discursive embodiment and there are no politics-free zones where stakeholders can unite in terms of absolute good: the body cannot escape the social order, it materialises only through political battles. How can the activist agendas be situated in terms of such a view on body politics? We have argued that the TAC has a politicising agenda that has been helpful in re-formulating HIV/AIDS politics, but there is also a growing tendency of depicting the policy scenario in ‘human rights’ and pure science frameworks that operate with a de-political agenda. What are the perspectives on the state and the illness that may allow the activists to frame the SA government (in)action as mass violence? Inaction can be read as murder in diff erent perspectives used by the TAC. First, in a political model where the government holds all power, and has the possibility of letting people either live or die, the state holds individual lives in its hand like fl ies. This, however, is a model of a state that does not hold in contemporary democracies, and complex health care systems. Second, in a rhetorical space opened up by the human rights discourse, such an accusation can be used as a rhetorical tool to point to the urgency of government action. The
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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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This Development Dialogue is publis
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60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

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