6th Fleet Focus: African Partnership Initiative Stigma and Hypocrisy

The African Partnership Initiative (API) has begun in the Gulf of Guinea region, and Eagle1 has an outstanding summery up well worth reading in full. When I read it, I called up a doctor friend of mine who volunteers in Sao Tome & Principe in dealing with HIV/AIDS.

His organization will be working with the API, but he says not every western NGO has stepped up yet.

He made an interesting point. In that area there is a stigma from people regarding others with AIDS, and it leads to people with AIDS not getting treatments because they don't want others to know they have it.

He sees some of the other NGOs demonstrating the same stigma towards the API. While all the NGOs are trying to breakdown the stigma of AIDS, he sees some of the NGOs in hypocrisy because of their stigma over the US military.

For an example of the stigma, the media recently reported on it.

When Maria (not her real name) took the brave step of speaking to the media in Sao Tome about her HIV-positive status, she had no idea what she was letting herself in for.

Although she had her back turned to the cameras, her voice was not disguised and it did not take long for people in her community to identify her. "After that, everyone knew it was me - at least, they thought it was me," she told IRIN/PlusNews.

The stigma attached to being HIV positive in the tiny twin-island state of Sao Tome and Principe is huge. No one living with the virus has so far gone public about his or her status, and health workers say that discrimination presents the biggest challenge to curbing the spread of the epidemic.

"This is our biggest problem at the moment. If we don't start accepting that AIDS is a normal disease like others, we are going to make things even harder," said Dr Alzira do Rosario, coordinator of Sao Tome's national AIDS programme.

That story makes his point clear as day. Westerners think they can preach removing stigma's from AIDS when they are struggling with their own stigma of the military involvement in the African Partnership Initiative. Read Eagle1's summery; he takes those pinheaded hypocritical fools to task, rightfully so. API may be enabled by military power, but ultimately it is a humanitarian and security service that the region is in desperate need of.

The use of soft power enabled by military power is critical in dealing with security and humanitarian issues in troubled regions in the 21st century, but the distaste of too many regarding involvement of the DoD in anything, period, is a major hurdle in leveraging this soft power. Programs like Global Fleet Stations are designed to be a counterweight to disruptive influences in impoverished places like Africa, supplying order and opportunity through safety and security initiatives in places overrun by corruption and lawlessness enabled by violence. Overcoming that western stigma is one of the major hurdle of implementing the "Safety and Security" aspect of the new 21st Century Cooperative Maritime Strategy of the 21st century.