Egypt has embarked on a troubling anti-Aids campaign, of sorts. Rather than redoubling its efforts to arrest the spread of the killer virus, the government has been rounding up people who are HIV-positive.
In moves described as a widening “crackdown” by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, police have recently arrested 12 men suspected of carrying the virus, four of whom have already received one-year prison sentences.
“This not only violates the most basic rights of people living with HIV. It also threatens public health by making it dangerous for anyone to seek information about HIV prevention or treatment,” the two groups warned in a joint statement.
Although Egyptian police have denied that the men were taken in because they were HIV-positive, they have been forced to take HIV tests and to submit to intrusive examinations intended to ascertain whether they have engaged in homosexual acts.
This cynical attempt to link Aids with homosexuality is another troubling aspect of these cases. In addition, linking Aids with sexual orientation is likely, in a country where sexual education is relatively modest and largely informal, to lull heterosexuals into a false sense of security.
This all brings back haunting memories of the early years of the Aids epidemic, when terrified Christians conservatives tried to “rationalise” HIV as being divine wrath against “sodomites” and managed to convince many segments of society that it was the “gay disease”. Gay friends have even suggested to me that the advent of Aids set back their cause by years. Luckily, however, it has recovered in the west; their Arab counterparts are not so fortunate.
“Arbitrary arrests, forcible HIV tests, and physical abuse only add to the disgraceful record of Egypt”s criminal justice system, where torture and ill treatment are greeted with impunity,” Amnesty International”s Hassiba Hadj-Sahraoui said.
In recent years, the Egyptian regime and its security services have worked hard to prove their credentials as equal-opportunities oppressors. While Egypt”s unlawful “state of emergency” over the past quarter of a century has been traditionally used against the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists, it has also, since the shocking Queen Boat fiasco of 2001, been employed to crack down on homosexuals.
This approach was probably motivated by the need on the part of the regime, which had never really bothered with Egypt”s discreet gay community before, to counter allegations that its anti-Islamism was anti-Islamic, and to steal some of the Islamists” moral thunder.
But by refocusing attention on the “moral” side of HIV/Aids, the government is endangering and undermining its own and other attempts to staunch the spread of the disease. These effort include its plans to produce generic antiretroviral drugs, the country”s decision to join Unicef”s international campaign to combat Aids among children, and numerous initiatives from the health ministry and in civil society. It also overlooks the fact that many people with HIV got it from their monogamous partners, from blood transfusions or in the womb.
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The Guardian