SOUTH AFRICA: Former South African President Mr Nelson Mandela has made his strongest public stand yet against President Thabo Mbeki's controversial HIV policies by meeting a seriously ill AIDS activist who refuses to save his own life until the president makes anti-retroviral drugs widely available to the poor.
Mr Mandela made a high-profile visit on Saturday to Mr Zackie Achmat, leader of the Treatment Action Campaign, which recently won a constitutional court case forcing the government to provide HIV-positive pregnant women with anti-AIDS drugs.
The meeting comes two weeks after the former president called at an international conference on AIDS for greater leadership in fighting the disease. His speech appeared directly targeted at his successor.
Mr Achmat, a gay former prostitute and anti-apartheid union activist jailed by the white regime, has declined to take drugs to combat HIV even though he is regularly afflicted by serious opportunistic infections which threaten his life.
His immune system is collapsing and he has recently been bedridden with acute bronchitis.
Mr Mandela hugged Mr Achmat and said he is "a role model and his action is based on a fundamental principle which we all admire".
"What I've come here to do is to find out under what conditions he will then be able to take treatment. I have a case to take to the president to acquaint him with \ position," Mr Mandela said.
Mr Mbeki is not likely to want to hear what his predecessor has to say. Although Mr Mandela has been circumspect in his attacks on the government's heavily criticised AIDS policies, he has nonetheless made plain his discomfort.
South Africa has the highest number of HIV infections in the world.
About 4.7 million people, one-in-nine of the population, carry the virus, which scientists predict will claim nearly six million lives within a decade.
Anti-retroviral drugs are readily available in private hospitals to those who can afford them but have been all but banned from state clinics, leading to what some have described as "AIDS apartheid".
In April, under a hail of domestic and international ridicule, Pretoria said it had lifted its bar to universal access to the drugs. But Mr Achmat and others accuse it of continuing to drag its feet. - (Guardian Service)