Eric Feferberg/Agence France-
Presse-Getty Images
Wangari Maathai tried to calm a
storm over her AIDS statements.
Posted on 12/10/2004 5:26:08 PM PST by Pharmboy
Eric Feferberg/Agence France-
Presse-Getty Images
Wangari Maathai tried to calm a
storm over her AIDS statements.
OSLO, Dec. 9 - Just a day before she is scheduled to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, the Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai tried Thursday to defuse a controversy over reports that she said "evil-minded scientists" in the developed world intentionally created AIDS to decimate the African population.
Dr. Maathai, a 64-year-old biologist, whose Green Belt Movement is credited with planting millions of trees in an attempt to reforest Kenya, said that her recent statements about AIDS and H.I.V., reported in the African press, were taken out of context. She said she had meant only to pose alternative theories about the disease's origin to counter the belief by some Kenyans that AIDS was a curse from God.
"We in Africa don't really understand the disease yet," she said in an interview. "We just know we're dying from it."
In a statement issued by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which selects the Peace Prize laureate, Dr. Maathai said she was "shocked" by the controversy and added: "It is therefore critical for me to state that I neither say nor believe that the virus was developed by white people or white powers in order to destroy the African people. Such views are wicked and destructive."
But the statement also said, "I am sure the scientists will continue their search for concluding evidence so that the view, which continues to be quite widespread, that the tragedy could have been caused by biological experiments that failed terribly in a laboratory somewhere, can be put to rest."
The Joint United Nations Program on H.I.V./AIDS estimates that Africans from the sub-Saharan region account for more than 60 percent of the 39 million people worldwide who are infected by H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. The most prominent scientific theory about the origin of AIDS is that a virus common in African apes mutated naturally and passed to humans in the mid-20th century before igniting a pandemic in the 1980's.
Among dissenting theories - rejected by the vast majority of scientists - is one put forward by the British journalist Edward Hooper suggesting that H.I.V. emerged from a well-intentioned project by American and Belgian researchers to develop a polio vaccine in what was then the Belgian Congo in the 1950's. According to The East African Standard, a daily newspaper in Nairobi, Kenya, Dr. Maathai has gone much further, likening AIDS to a "biological weapon."
"Do not be naïve," she was reported to have told participants at an AIDS workshop in her home city of Nyeri, Kenya, on Aug. 30. "AIDS is not a curse from God to Africans or the black people. It is a tool to control them designed by some evil-minded scientists."
On Oct. 9 - a day after the Norwegian Nobel Committee named Dr. Maathai the 2004 Peace Prize laureate for her part in planting an estimated 30 million trees and her activities on behalf of women's rights - the same newspaper quoted her as saying, "I may not be able to say who developed the virus, but it was meant to wipe out the black race."
Amos Kareithi, the reporter for The East African Standard who wrote both articles, rejected Dr. Maathai's assertion that her words were taken out of context. "I will not back off even a single word," he said. "What I wrote was the truth."
The reported comments caused a stir in Norway, where the credibility of the Peace Prize is a matter of national pride. Stig S. Froeland, a professor of immunology at Norway's national research hospital, Rikshospitalet, said that making Dr. Maathai a Peace Prize laureate could "give fuel to all these murky areas and conspiratorial hypotheses."
Nobel officials have declined to comment on the controversy. But when asked Thursday whether the committee had known in advance about Dr. Maathai's reported views on the causes of AIDS, the committee chairman, Ole Danbolt Mjoes, said, "We did not."
She deserves the Nobel Prize in the tradition of Yasir Arafat and Jimmy Carter. Yecchh.
This is what happens when someone hires a plumber to fix a television.
Once again, a Nobel Prize goes to an absolute waste of food and oxygen.
She's a biologist??? I agree, Pharmboy, she is in appropriate company.
Sad. Stupid and sad.
Bingo. The Nobel committee jumped the shark when it awarded the prize to those two losers. The award is meaningless from that point on.
I have reputable reports that the disease is more prevalent among better off families in better off African countries where children received immunization shots. A more likely explanation than "evil scientists" is improper medical procedures--such as improper sterilization of needles.
This is not a scientist.
"We in Africa don't really understand the disease yet," she said in an interview. "We just know we're dying from it."
If you know you're dying from it then you understand half of it. The other half is you get the disease from taking body fluids from a person who is infected with it.
Understatement of the year.
Good to see that the Nobel committee is keeping with their tradition of choosing "winners" based on politics rather than substance.
I'm not much on Nobel Peace History.
Has anyone ever won it that actually deserved it?
The Nobel Peace Price has become a joke.
How did this idiotic woman affect peace by having others plant trees?
Where is the Freeper LOVE????
Let's all pitch in and get her some new clothes...
She makes about as much sense as the Nobel "Peace Prize" Committee does.
BTW, is Gunnar Berge's leg still in a cast?
He's received a hell of a lot of kicks in it.
No system is perfect. About once a decade the voting procedure stuffs up, and the prize is given to a meritorious candidate.
Congressman Billybob
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