By Nick Kotch
Religious leaders in Arab countries are often portrayed as super-conservatives when it comes to social issues but Sheikh Ahmad Turky does not fit that mould. Turky, the Imam of Cairo’s El Nour mosque, is one of the Moslem and Christian clerics who are ready to speak out on behalf of the growing number of HIV+ people in the Arab world.
“We are fighting the disease, not the patient. Even if the patient was practising homosexuality or adultery, which are sins that we are fighting, we must not take out our feelings on the patient who needs our love and support,” Turky told 30 Arabic-speaking journalists at a workshop in Cairo in September.
The stigmas of social isolation and rejection, sustained by politicians and the media among other forces, afflict the daily lives of people living with HIV/AIDS in countries stretching from Morocco to the Gulf. The problem was underlined in a media survey presented at the workshop, which was organised by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) with the Reuters Foundation.
The survey of 280 newspaper articles about HIV/AIDS published in Arab countries during a three-month period found plentiful examples of disinformation, inaccuracy, insults and stigmatising language, the researchers said. There were references to homosexuals using the Arabic word “shaz”, roughly translated in English as “queers”, instead of the more straightforward “methly”.
“In our region the stigmatisation is in our daily behaviour,” said Dr Redha Kamoun, another speaker at the four-day workshop. Kamoun founded a Tunisian NGO that tries to protect and promote the rights of people with HIV. That is an uphill battle in a region where activists say most presidents have never been seen in public with their HIV+ citizens.
The workshop was organized by UNDP’s HIV/AIDS regional programme in the Arab States (HARPAS).
Compared with the pandemic’s epicentres, such as southern Africa, the Arab region has escaped fairly lightly so far, making it easier to sweep the problem under the carpet. But statistics used by HARPAS show that more than half a million people are now living with HIV and at least 68,000 were newly infected in 2006.
“If current trends continue, it is predicted that countries in the region will face infection rates of four percent by 2015,” the workshop was told.
Experts identified the extremely low rates of condom use by men who have more than one sexual partner as a key cause of infection; Dr Atef Bakhoum, presenting a “Back to Basics” lecture on the scientific and medical background to the spread of AIDS in the region, said 80 percent of transmission to women is taking place within marriage.
Two HIV+ women who spoke to participants anonymously both said they contracted the infection from their husbands. Both gave emotional personal accounts of the rejection and hostility they had faced and eventually overcome.
Working in groups on the first day, the journalists were honest about their low level of knowledge about the disease and how it is spread, as well as frank about the media’s often thoughtless approach to facts and confidentiality.
Language is not helping: the arabic word “mo’di” is the same for “infectious” and “contagious”. This feeds the problem of stigma because people are even more fearful than elsewhere that HIV can be spread by mere touching.
Wanted: a new word for one of the meanings.
Reuters journalists Nadia El Gowely and Nihal Abdelkader, both Cairo-based, worked closely with participants on practical exercises, editing stories, giving detailed feedback and discussing guidelines for improving coverage of HIV/AIDS. The lead facilitator at the workshop, Nick Kotch, the Reuters Foundation consultant for Africa, spoke about the experience of media in South Africa where more than 10 percent of the population is HIV+ and, after 2.2 million deaths, the pandemic is a major driver in politics, the economy and development.