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Congressman
Elijah E. Cummings |
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Congressman
Elijah E. Cummings |
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(5/6/00 Baltimore AFRO-American Newspaper)
by Congressman Elijah E. Cummings
Last Sunday, Senate Republican Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi engaged the Clinton Administration in a media debate about the President's determination that AIDS has become a threat to national security.
The Director of the White House Office of National AIDS Policy, Sandy Thurman, declared that the global AIDS epidemic has become so serious that it threatens to destabilize nations and the economies of whole continents. Senator Lott, however, does not believe that the AIDS epidemic in Africa is a threat to our national security.
Senator, I respectfully - but vigorously - disagree.
Last January, the national security implications of AIDS were outlined in grim detail as part of a U.S. National Intelligence Council (NIC) analysis. The NIC concluded that AIDS is "sweeping the globe, posing a crisis in Africa today and threatening India and the newly independent nations of the former Soviet Union in the future."
In "The Global Infectious Disease Threat and its Implications for the United States," the NIC predicted that AIDS and other infectious diseases will continue to kill at least 170,000 Americans annually and account for more military hospital admissions than all battlefield injuries combined.
The international implications of the disease are even more compelling. The UN reports that between 11 and 14 million Africans have already lost their lives to AIDS. An additional 23 million Africans are infected with the HIV virus. Without treatment, they face a death sentence.
In its analysis of Sub-Saharan Africa, the NIC paints a chilling prediction. Unless we act effectively now, AIDS and related diseases will slow Africa's economic growth to a standstill and threaten the region's evolution toward more democratic societies.
AIDS and related diseases will weaken the military capability and peace-keeping efforts of these countries as 10% to 60% of their armies become infected with the HIV virus. "The cost will be highest among officers and the more modernized militaries in Sub-Saharan Africa and increasingly among Former Soviet Union states and possibly some rogue states," the NIC predicts.
The security analysts conclude that an Africa and world in which AIDS continues to proceed unchecked would be one in which armies led by dying men and women conduct unrelenting civil and international war.
"We have to respond to this because we've never seen a crisis like HIV and AIDS globally," Director Thurman stated last Sunday. "We're beginning to understand that this epidemic not only has health implications, but has implications as a fundamental development issue, an economic issue and a stability and security issue.''
The White House has designated about $325 million to fighting AIDS worldwide this year, most of it going to Africa. "The President wants an additional $100 million for fiscal 2001," ONAP Director Thurman noted last Sunday. A large focus of America's effort would be finding a vaccine.
I commend the Administration's leadership, but I believe that we must do much more. Both morally, and from a security perspective, the global AIDS crisis is the greatest international challenge since World War II.
As UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has observed, "No company and no government can take on the challenge of AIDS alone. What we need is a new approach to public health combining all available resources, public and private, local and global."
That is why I have joined Congresswoman Barbara Lee of California in co-sponsoring the AIDS Marshall Plan Fund for Africa Act. Our proposed legislation would commit an additional $200 million annually toward a coordinated international effort to prevent, treat and defeat AIDS in Africa.
The Administration's new AIDS initiatives build upon this call to greater commitment, Senator Lott. You were off the mark last Sunday when you suggested that the White House AIDS announcements were "just the President trying to make an appeal to, you know, certain groups."
President Clinton was calling on America to come to Africa's assistance, and people are beginning to listen and respond.
America's national security, as well as our morality, demand a new level of action in the struggle against AIDS a Marshall Plan for Africa.
-The Honorable Elijah E. Cummings represents the 7th Congressional District of Maryland in the United States House of Representatives.
