AIDS a campaign issue in South Africa
ANC pressed on AIDS `holocaust'
Response an issue in S. African politics
By Andrew Quinn, Reuters, 3/9/2004
JOHANNESBURG -- South Africa's AIDS crisis grabbed the campaign spotlight yesterday as a powerful political challenger accused President Thabo Mbeki's African National Congress of standing idle as a "holocaust" engulfs the country.
South Africa's biggest AIDS pressure group, meanwhile, threatened to take the government to court before the April 14 elections unless it begins a promised public rollout of AIDS-fighting drugs.
Home Affairs Minister Mangosuthu Buthelezi, whose Inkatha Freedom Party, or IFP, is the country's second-largest black-led political party, said Mbeki's AIDS policy had led to disaster.
"HIV/AIDS alone is an issue which demands and dictates a profound change in the leadership of our country," Buthelezi said in a Durban speech outlining the IFP's AIDS policy. "South Africa faces a holocaust, and its leaders are complacent."
South Africa has the world's largest HIV/AIDS caseload with an estimated 5.3 million of its 45 million people infected.
Activists estimate about 600 South Africans die of AIDS each day, and the number of children orphaned by AIDS is projected to reach some 2 million by 2010.
