S. Africa police ripped for firing on AIDS activists
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Activists condemned South African police on Thursday for firing rubber bullets and smoke grenades at AIDS protesters marching on a hospital to demand the government improve access to life-prolonging drugs.
Forty people were injured and 10 treated for gunshot wounds after police fired on protesters at a hospital in the Eastern Cape region on Tuesday, said the country’s leading AIDS activist group Treatment Action Campaign, which organised the march.
“The police started beating people…then shooting at them,” said TAC Deputy Chairwoman Sipho Mthati. “It really was excessive force - it’s not like they were burning tyres or throwing stones, it was a peaceful protest in a hospital.”
TAC said it would press charges against police for excessive force and New York-based Human Rights Watch called on the government to investigate the incident.
Police spokesman Superintendent Gcinikaya Taleni said hospital managers asked police to disperse protesters, who had forced their way into wards and were stopping doctors and nurses from doing their jobs.
“We used minimum force to remove them - rubber bullets and smoke grenades,” he said.
Around 700 protesters, many of whom live with HIV, marched to the Frontier Hospital in Queenstown in the southeast of the country to demand the hospital provide anti-retroviral (ARV) AIDS drugs to more HIV-positive patients.
The TAC said the public hospital was treating fewer than 200 people with ARVS while 2,000 needed them, and said less than 10 people had started treatment this year.
“It’s a shocking irony that people demonstrating for essential medicines should be met with rubber bullets and tear gas,” said Jonathan Cohen, researcher with New York-based Human Rights Watch’s HIV/AIDS programme.
The TAC was nominated last year for the Nobel Peace Price for its campaign to speed ARV drug delivery in South Africa, which is battling the world’s biggest caseload of people living with HIV.
New figures this week showed more than 6.5 million of the country’s 47 million people may now be HIV-positive. Critics say the government has been slow to act to curb the spread of HIV and to treat those already infected.
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