Mbeki Turns Aids Row Into Race Issue

President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa has caused a race row by making a scathing attack on white people who link HIV/Aids to the alleged promiscuous and predatory behaviour of black Africans.

Mr Mbeki turned a parliamentary debate on HIV and rape into a broadside against "bigots" who he said regarded black people as "sub-human disease-carriers".

The president was asked about his silence on a pandemic which infects 5.6 million South Africans, more than in any other country, and replied that the real issue was prejudice, which endured a decade after apartheid.

"I will not keep quiet while others whose minds have been corrupted by the disease of racism accuse us, the black people of South Africa, Africa and the world, as being, by virtue of our Africanness and skin colour, lazy, liars, foul-smelling, diseased, corrupt, violent, amoral, sexually depraved, animalistic, savage and rapist."

Using language which disconcerted some of his own supporters, Mr Mbeki said certain white people regarded black people as "rampant sexual beasts, unable to control our urges, unable to keep our legs crossed, unable to keep it in our pants."

The main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, said the comments were a a disgrace which made false accusations of racism, and the president was ignoring a disease estimated to kill at least 600 South Africans every day.

Since succeeding Nelson Mandela as president in 1999 Mr Mbeki has queried the connection between HIV and Aids and the safety of anti-retroviral drugs, citing research by dissident scientists who have suggested that the disease is not transmitted by sexual contact.

Critics said he had fallen for crank theories, and after a wave of protest inside and outside South Africa he announced that he would "withdraw" from the debate.

The government started a national treatment programme earlier this year but the target of treating 53,000 people by March has slipped, prompting lobby groups to complain about a lack of urgency.

Earlier this month Mr Mbeki broke his silence and edged back into the controversy in a column on the African National Congress party website which lambasted white commentators for complaining about high rates of sexual violence.

Official statistics showed that serious crime was falling, he said, but people who were racist and wanted the country to fail falsely claimed South Africa was the world's rape capital.

This prompted the opposition to table written parliamentary questions about the extent of rape and its contribution to the spread of HIV.

In reply Mr Mbeki said he would not discuss Aids but would stick to the central issue, which was the bigotry that thrived a decade after the end of white minority rule.

"Millions of Africans in our country, in Africa and the world did not fight against apartheid racism and white domination to create space for them to continue to be subjected to dehumanising, demeaning and insulting racism," he said.

Tony Leon, leader of the largely white Democratic Alliance, said Mr Mbeki had ducked a simple yes-or-no question about whether he was prepared to lead the fight against HIV/Aids.

"Instead ... he recited a litany of racist caricatures that bordered on the pornographic and implied that the DA believed them." He accused the state broadcaster, SABC, of editing reports of the debate to spare Mr Mbeki embarrassment.

The Johannesburg paper the Sunday Times said Mr Mbeki had reason to harp on race, but his "rising anger" had prompted hyperbole and "unpresidential venom" which demeaned the debate.

"For a man who claims membership of the African intelligentsia, that is a crass representation of the challenge we face as a nation seeking redemption after a history of unspeakable bigotry," it said.