What was most important, according to Kofi Annan

Over the past two weeks the BBC World Service has been running an AIDS season and we’ve heard many aspects of the illness but today we want to get a sense of your personal contribution mad whether you think that you’re winning the battle. So I want to start by asking you about the enemy. When did you first realize what a serious enemy you were up against with AIDS?
    Annan: I think it was when I discussed the issue with the World Health Organization and the UNAIDS mad looked at the figures and the statistics and the devastation it was causing in many African countries and the attitude of the leaders. We needed leadership. We needed leadership at all levels. But it was most important to get the Presidents and the Prime Ministers speaking up and that was not happening and I thought we should do whatever we can to raise awareness and to get them involved.
    BBC: And is your sense of the problem, is it all from talking to leaders and talking to officials or have you been out there on the ground talking to sufferers?
    Annan: I’ve been out there on the ground talking to sufferers, in fact my wife and I were in Lima just last week and we had a rather painful experience with a group of women who had set themselves up to help AIDS sufferers. They had with them a nine years old. The mother and the father had died of AIDS. She was left with her grandmother who was illiterate and didn’t know what to do. When we met them she was getting no assistance at all so I called my UNDP colleague there, the resident coordinator, and I said "can’t we do something for this girl?" And of course he’s going to try and see if PAHO, the WHO’s regional organization can help her. But we were both quite struck, we knew this was happening but we hadn’t expected--I’ve seen the situation in parts of Africa where I’ve visited AIDS patients in villages where you see grandmother and lots of grandchildren, no mother, no father and yet you go to a place like Mozambique, a small clinic which is doing a lot, which is following pregnant women, ensuring that the children are born free of AIDS and following the mother to try and protect her so that they can have their mother as well and they do not become one of the 14 million plus orphans. And I’ve also lost some very close friends, including people who worked here in the UN and that also hits you.
    BBC: So you’ve watched individuals struggle through the course of the illness?
    Annan: Exactly, so for me it’s not statistics, it’s not statistics. I’ve seen the human suffering and the pain and what is even more difficult is when you see somebody lying there dying who knows that there’s medication and medicine somewhere else in the world that can save her but she can’t have it because she’s poor and lives in a poor country. Where is our common humanity? How do you explain it to her that in certain parts of the world AIDS is a disease that can be treated and one can live with and function but in her particular situation it’s a death sentence. It’s a tough one.
    BBC: And how do you explain it?
    Annan: You try to explain to them about what you are trying to do and what you are trying to get the governments to do to increase assistance, not only in areas of treatment, prevention and education and getting the youth and the women’s organizations involved, it may not necessarily help her particular situation but at least its good for her to know that action is contemplated, action is on the way, if it will not save her it will save others, that in itself is consoling but its not good enough. This is why I’m rather pleased with Dr. Lee’s approach of trying to get the AIDS medication to three million people in five years. Today we have three hundred thousand people on the medication.
    BBC: This is the World Health Organization initiative?
    Annan: Yes.
    BBC: We’ll talk about that in a moment but first I want to get a sense of how you feel when you’re faced with these people asking you "why can’t I have the drug?"
    Annan: It is extremely difficult and I can tell you I’ve really tried very hard. You may know that I’ve had several meetings with the chairmen of the seven top pharmaceutical companies to press for reduction in the prices of these medications, to get across to them that whilst I respect and support intellectual property, it is extremely difficult not to make the medication accessible to the poor and that we need to be able to balance--and they have reduced some of the prices and in some cases like neverapine in some countries they’re giving them away free.
    BBC: This is the drug for mother-to-child transmission for pregnant mothers?
    Annan: Exactly, which I consider the cruellest of all transmissions. So you press and push and try and get as much as you can and governments are becoming engaged, but for the person who is lying there, in some cases like the child I mentioned in Lima, you are able to get them some assistance but it doesn’t always happen that way, with others you cannot immediately get them assistance.
    BBC: And does that make you feel angry or does it make you feel distressed?
    Annan: Both. I feel angry, I feel distressed, I feel helpless and I feel that to live in a world where we have the means, we have the resources to be able to help all these patients, what is lacking is a political will. How do you generate that political will to ensure that assistance roaches them and of course with somebody like myself who tries to speak for the poor and the voiceless you sort of feel you’re failing, you’re not getting enough done and you walk away a bit depleted and upset, really upset if not depressed.
    BBC: What more can you do though, when you ask yourself what more can I do, what answers do you come up with?
    Annan: I think we should continue our efforts to mobilize the societies to play a role. We should get the leaders to speak out against discrimination, the stigma that is attached to it. We need resources, we need resources, to assist these people. We are operating at a relatively low level. We estimate that by 2005 we will need ten billion dollars worldwide per annum to fight the disease. Today I’m trying to see if we can get three billion a year for the next five years going into the global fund I would want to see one billion dollars from the European Union per year for the next five years, one billion dollars from the United States government and one billion from other sources. But multi-year commitment over the next five years and of course the rest of the resources will have to come from elsewhere.