IDEALS

LUSAKA, Zambia, (Jul. IPS – Africa is facing a “double emergency” with HIV/AIDS and conflict combining to threaten lives, according to a new report to be launched this week at the XIV International AIDS Conference in Barcelona, Spain.

 

Conflicts are accelerating the spread of HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, with young people especially at risk in a region already hardest hit by the global pandemic, says the Britain-based charity Save the Children in its July 9 report “HIV and Conflict: A Double Emergency.” (for full story click below)

 

“Unless HIV in conflict situations is addressed we are likely to see HIV clustering in conflict zones in sub-Saharan Africa in the medium term, fuelling infection in nearby ‘peaceful’ areas,” Doug Webb, HIV/AIDS Advisor at UK office of the International Save the Children Alliance, warned this week.

 

HIV spreads rapidly in war and situations of conflict. This is because large numbers of people are forced from their homes, leading to an escalation in sexual violence and exploitation and a breakdown in vital health and education services, which leaves people without access to HIV prevention and treatment services, according to the report.

 

Forced out of their homes by conflict, young girls are especially at risk from HIV infection. During their flight from war, girls and young women are often sexually assaulted and exploited by soldiers and rebel forces. Left homeless and destitute, girls often resort to bartering sex for food, money and medicines.

 

“Many young girls are forced to sell themselves to survive. We had no choice,” 18-year-old Goretti from Burundi is quoted as saying in the “Save the Children” report. “The girls who do this are 14 years and over, mainly poor girls and girls who have been displaced by the war — the war has definitely increased this sexual bartering,” says Goretti.

 

Goretti, which is not her real name, lives in a camp for internally displaced people in Burundi, a country emerging from years of conflict. She is HIV-positive, one of the 13 percent of young women believed to be living with HIV in Burundi.

 

“Many young girls in Burundi are infected with HIV, and many more are getting infected. Most are orphans or are displaced people who have no housing, nothing to eat and nothing to do. They are forced to become infected to survive,” Goretti says.

 

“Young widows in displaced sites can’t watch their children die from hunger so they sell sex to get money,” adds Claudine, aged 15, who also lives in the same camp as Goretti.

 

The problem of HIV/AIDS is being ignored in war-torn countries and countries where conflicts have just ended, according to the report. In Sierra Leone, where rape was common during one of Africa’s most brutal civil wars, the government has yet to draw up a plan on how to combat HIV.

 

Non-governmental groups are trying to fill this gap, but do not have funding to expand already stretched services to areas, previously held by rebels, the report says.

 

The so-called “double emergency” is greatest in Africa, where some 28 million Africans, 70 percent of people worldwide living with HIV, are infected with the virus that causes AIDS while most of the world’s conflicts are on the African continent.

 

According to the Save the Children report, 680,000 children have lost their parents to AIDS in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the continent’s largest war has been raging since 1998.

 

In Rwanda, up to 15,000 women were made pregnant when rape was used as a weapon during the country’s 1994 genocide. Of the 2,000 women tested, 80 percent were found to be HIV-positive.

 

The world’s largest child’s rights group, Save the Children used the July 7-12 Barcelona conference on HIV/AIDS to call on the global community to take urgent action to curb the spread of HIV/AIDS in conflict-affected countries.

 

The group says this can be done if donors increase funding to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which should then ensure conflict-affected countries get the lion’s share of funding.