soldiers in Somalia five months earlier and didn’t want to become embroiled in Africa again.”It’s simply beyond belief that because of Somalia hundreds of thousands of Rwandans needlessly lost their lives,” he said. “I don’t know how Madeleine Albright lives with it.” At the time, the U.S. secretary of state was America’s ambassador to the United Nations.In Washington, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher, when asked about this comment, said Albright “has talked about the difficulty at the time she felt of being the U.S representative at the U.N. and her feeling that we should have done more.”Clinton also made quite clear during his 1998 trip to Rwanda that “the international community, together with the nations in Africa, must bear a share of responsibility for the tragedy,” he said.Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. ambassador to the Unitstatement called the report another important contribution to shedding more light on the Rwanda genocide and to grappling “with the complex challenges of preventing genocide.”A French Foreign Ministry in Paris noted that two French panels have already reported on Rwanda and said the government would study the OAU report. “We agree to look truth in the face and to draw lessons from this genocide,” in the field of conflict prevention, for example, the spokesman said.The Vatican’s U.N.

observer mission said it had no comment on the report.The panel concluded that France was closer than any other government to the Habyarimana regime and knew what was happening, but did nothing to stop the genocide before it began.Like the French government, the Catholic and Anglican hierarchies were blamed by the panel for failing to use “their unique moral position among the overwhelmingly Christian population to denounce ethnic hatred and human rights abuses.”The United Nations had a 2,500-strong peacekeeping mission in Rwanda when the genocide began, but governments pulled out all but a few hundred troops after 10 Belgian peacekeepers were killed.An independent report on the U.N. role in the genocide, commissioned by Annan, concluded in December that the organization and its members lacked the political will and resources to prevent or stop the genocide.It cited the Security Council failures, but the OAU report is far less diplomatic in blaming the key players.Rwanda’s U.N. Ambassador Joseph Mutaboba told reporters after the press conference that “for the first time we have heard what we knew was true – and it has been said in very crude terms.”The report traces the roots of the genocide back to Rwanda’s colonial rulers from Germany, and then Belgium, who along with Catholic missionaries fueled ethnic divisions by fostering the belief that the country’s minority Tutsis were superior to its Hutu majority.It then links the genocide to the current unrest in central Africa, particularly the civil war in Congo, where the Security Council has delayed deployment of a peacekeeping mission because of continued violations of a 1999 cease-fire.The panel called on Annan to establish a commission to determine a formula for paying reparations to Rwanda and to identify which countries have an obligation to pay them.The report notes that the United States, the United Nations, Belgium and the Anglican church have apologized for their failures in Rwanda – but not France or the Catholic Church.The other panel members were Former Botswana President Ketumile Masire, former Mali President Toumani Toure, former Liberian minister Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, former Indian Supreme Court Chief Justice P.N. Bhagwati, Algerian Senator Hocine Djoudi, and Lisbet Palme, head of the Swedish Committee for UNICEF and widow of assassinated Prime Minister Olof Palme.. It all began, the story goes, with a sleepless night. Thabo Mbeki, South Africa’s President, was surfing the internet in the small hours of the morning when by chance he came across a website questioning the accepted scientific position on Aids

It all began, the story goes, with a sleepless night. Thabo Mbeki, South Africa’s President, was surfing the internet in the small hours of the morning when by chance he came across a website questioning the accepted scientific position on Aids.
From that moment, it is said, Mr Mbeki wondered whether HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus discovered in 1983, could really be responsible for the medical tragedy unfolding in his country.Mr Mbeki was so impressed with the online arguments of the Aids “dissidents” – who question almost every aspect of HIV orthodoxy – that he decided to phone one of them in confidence for a personal chat.His call to Professor David Rasnick of the University of California did not remain in confidence for long.

Word soon got out that the leader of South Africa was actively courting a group of scientists whose views have been variously dismissed as “fringe” and “criminally insane”.Although nearly all scientists who have had anything to do with Aids or HIV are in little doubt about what ultimately causes the underlying collapse of an Aids patient’s immune system, Mr Mbeki had apparently been persuaded there might be something else at work. For instance, he wondered, quite reasonably, why the disease was affecting South African men and women in roughly equal numbers, although in the West it was confined largely,although not exclusively, to homosexual men and heterosexual drug addicts.More than anything else, Mr Mbeki felt the situation in Africa was unique and therefore demanded a uniquely African solution.He did not want Western solutions being forced on him and his country, especially by Western drug companies keen to sell their wares. Mr Mbeki believes the poverty of his nation and the dire prevalence of such lethal infections as malaria and tuberculosis might be just as much to blame for the Aids epidemic as HIV itself, although he stopped short of actually stating the virus was not the cause of Aids.But for many scientists Mr Mbeki might just as well have denied HIV’s role in Aids altogether when he decided to pack a “presidential Aids advisory panel” with the Aids dissidents.The panel of 33 scientists has met this week to hammer out a joint statement. On the one side was Professor Rasnick, and the arch-HIV sceptic Professor Peter Duesberg of the University of California, Berkeley, and a collection of other dissident acolytes, including some who question whether HIV even exists.On the other side were the “mainstream” Aids researchers, including Luc Montagnier, who discovered HIV when he was at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.For the many thousands of Aids doctors who have battled against this disease for the past two decades it came as a complete shock to find such a powerful politician lending weight to what they consider to be a totally discredited and time-consuming distraction.For them, arguing over whether HIV causes Aids was one diversion too far. Although over the past 17 years scientists have learnt more about HIV than any other virus, they are still far from finding a cure or an effective vaccine. Yet the cause of Aids – the transmission of HIV – is almost entirely avoidable by relatively simple changes in sexual behaviour, which can be undermined by a government whose leader is so publicly toying with the views of a fringe few.Mr Mbeki probably had the best of intentions when he decided to reopen an argument that has been debated and settled many times in the past. Yet for a head of state to be quite so careless in his choice of words, arguing as he did that ignoring the dissidents was akin to burning heretics at the stake, is indefensible.The journal Nature carries a declaration signed by nearly 5,000 of the world’s leading medical scientists, including a dozen Nobel laureates.They reaffirm their position that the scientific case in support of HIV as the causes of Aids is undeniable and is as strong as the evidence for believing in the viral causes of polio, measles and smallpox.What Mr Mbeki will say to the conference could do much to limit the damage his dalliance with the dissidents has caused.