July 10, 2002

by Nigel Marsh - Hope Communications

BARCELONA, WEDNESDAY Misguided and threatening, or energetic and principled - how you view the protestors at the Barcelona AIDS2002 depends on your stand on some issues, your belief in the application of pressure instead of debate ... and your love of loud noise.

Piercing whistles and rhythmic chanting have become common background noise during the 14th International AIDS Conference at Barcelona, as activist groups find dramatic ways to make their point.

Many of the demos are strategically located near the Media room, and while reporters will generally respond, the strategy is rapidly losing its appeal. This afternoon, as another chorus of shrill whistles and shouting warmed the air, correspondents barely glanced up. "Is this the Coke one, or the prisons one?" asked one reporter, not even looking up from her keyboard.

'The Coke one' was one of the more visually well-prepared protests. Act-Up members had produced a giant Coke bottle and other paraphernalia, and covered them with various posters and messages designed to prick the corporate conscience of a range of multinational corporations. In these cases Coke suffers most because of the visual immediacy of its logo and branding. The mining corporation Anglo-American was also in for it. "Coke and Anglo, you can't hide, we charge you with genocide," trilled the protestors in between speech-making on behalf of the companies' employees in Africa.

Inside, 'the prisons one' was under way at the same time, with Red2002 drawing attention to the fact that prisoners in Spain have to share needles when doing drugs, leading to an excessive HIV transmission rate. Their sloganeering was in Spanish, a language too sybillant and beautiful for truly aggressive shouting, but I can confirm that the phrase, 'Do people who are deprived of their freedom have to be also deprived of their right to health?' sounds more catchy in Spanish.

Yesterday we had 'the drugs one', with gleeful protestors taking over a drugs company stand, bedecking it with banners, and objecting to the excessive profits being made by drug companies who won't lower the prices of anti-retrovirals and other treatments in order to help more people in the developing world. And, of course, there was 'the Tommy Thompson one', where Act-Up protestors made it onto international television through the simple expedient of not letting the US Health Secretary speak, and complaining about the slow progress of world governments in filling the coffers of the Global Fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria and other target-related issues.

There is even a semi-official protest group, who were on the agenda of the opening night and who make occasional appearances on the streets outside the ceremony. A costumed man walks horizontally down a 100m tower, letting off fireworks, while another rides on top of a fluffy two meter high face across the busy six lane road, stopping the traffic as he comes, and complaining about the lack of international political will to put money into the AIDS issue. Meanwhile, 'Mr Astrolabe' is playing amplified electronic drums inside his cage. You had to be there to understand, and to tell the truth even that didn't help much.

For the most part these protests are relatively good-humored and non-destructive, and the politicians and stall-holders take it on the chin. Secretary Thompson doubtless got more airtime for his defence of American spending on the world's greatest crisis than he would otherwise have achieved. And doubtless UNAIDS director Peter Piot is pleased, having started the week by telling everyone needs to do more to remind our leaders to fulfil their promises. The one exception to the jollity of the protests might be the Spanish health secretary, who in Sunday night's opening ceremony went through a speech that no-one could hear over the whistles and cat-calls, growing visibly angrier and ending with an apparently obscene gesture. That protest was successful on the purely technical level, though it was weaker on basic philosophy because no-one in the bemused audience was clear until they read the next day's newspapers whether the point was to complain about the lack of visas accorded to delegates from developing nations, the Spanish government's attitude to HIV/AIDS, or just a general Catalonian objection to the government.

One reason for the benign nature of most of the protests might be the otherwise clubby atmosphere in the conference. Among the 14,000 people in the conference there are an awful lot who know each other and who have been to these conferences before. And there is a genuine sense of cameraderie and fellow-feeling among delegates who may be HIV positive, or researching AIDS, or working to mitigate the effects of the pandemic in a host of ways. There is a real sense among many here that the world has still not woken up to the realities of the situation, and it somehow goes against the grain for them to start fighting among themselves. But with more than a hundred journalists on hand, some temptations are too hard to resist.