Clinton administration declares
AIDS a security threat
April 30, 2000
Web posted at: 6:45 PM EDT (2245 GMT)
In this story:
Review of efforts to combat global AIDS
epidemic
Lott says AIDS not threat to U.S. security
'Numbers of people dying is quite severe'
AIDS and government instability
RELATED STORIES, SITES
From staff and wire reports
WASHINGTON -- The Clinton administration has
declared AIDS a national and global security threat,
saying it has the potential to destabilize governments.
President Clinton's advisers in the National Security
Council will lead a review of U.S. policy to fight AIDS
and look at the disease's effect on international stability.
Jim Kennedy, the White House
Deputy Spokesman, said the
administration now believes AIDS is
"more than a legitimate ongoing
health threat, but also has the
potential to destabilize governments
such as African or Asian nations,
which makes it an international
security issue.
According to a report in The
Washington Post, the designation
means that for the first time, the
National Security Council is involved
in fighting an infectious disease.
The move will elevate AIDS research and work on the
federal level to include the council and the Department
of Defense.
Review of efforts to combat global AIDS
epidemic
The council is directing an urgent review of the
government's efforts to combat the global AIDS
epidemic, which is particularly disastrous in southern
Africa. Sixty percent of the 16 million people around the
world who have died from AIDS since the 1980s lived in
sub-Saharan Africa.
The Washington Post said those efforts have led to a
doubling of the budget request, to $254 million, to
combat AIDS overseas.
In January Vice President Al Gore told the United
Nations, "The heart of the security agenda is protecting
lives -- and we now know that the number of people who
will die of AIDS in the first decade of the 21st Century
will rival the number that died in all the wars in all the
decades of the 20th century."
Earlier this year Clinton developed a White House
interagency group to fight AIDS and asked Congress for
$100 million for AIDS prevention, care, public health
infrastructure and education in the African and Asian
countries hardest hit by the AIDS epidemic.
The topic will be a focus for the president at the
U.S.-European Union summit in Portugal in May and the
G-8 meeting in Japan in July. He will also push
Washington's allies to acknowledge the security threat
and assist in both research and resources.
Lott says AIDS not threat to U.S.
security
Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott,
R-Mississippi, said on Fox News
Sunday, "This is just the president
trying to make an appeal to certain
groups."
Lott said he did not consider AIDS to
be a threat to national security -- "not
our national security."
The Post said the new push to fight
AIDS was spurred by U.S. intelligence reports that
examined the consequences of the disease as its spreads
around the world. The reports looked into the broadest
impact of AIDS on governments and societies.
One intelligence report prepared in January projected
that a quarter of sub-Saharan Africa's population is likely
to die of AIDS.
In Africa, AIDS is primarily a heterosexual disease that
is hitting the middle- and upper-class populations hard.
'Numbers of people dying is quite severe'
"The numbers of people who are dying, the impact on
elites -- like the army, the educated, the teachers -- is
quite severe," Leon Fuerth, national security adviser to
Gore, told the Post.
Fuerth, who acknowledged to the Post that the budget
request is inadequate to the task, said AIDS in Africa is a
"slow-motion destruction" affecting the "viability of
these societies" and the "stability of the region. And it
isn't as if this disease is going to stay put in sub-Saharan
Africa."
The report said that based on current trends, south Asia
and the former Soviet Union could also be on a course to
disaster with the HIV-infected population in Russia
alone projected to exceed 1 million by the end of 2000.
"The thing that's most staggering, and people are just
beginning to grasp, is that Africa is the tip of the
iceberg," Office of National Aids Policy co-chairwoman
Sandra Thurman told the Post.
The Post said the interagency working group is
scheduled to finish drafting in May its proposals for
combating AIDS.
AIDS and government instability
The January intelligence report, posted on the CIA's
Web site, said the "relationship between disease and
political instability is indirect, but real." The report said
the consequences of AIDS appear to have "a particularly
strong correlation with the likelihood of state failure in
partial democracies."
The study quoted research that held out the prospect of
"revolutionary wars, ethnic wars, genocides and
disruptive regime transitions" because of AIDS.
White House Correspondent Major Garrett, The
Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
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