(UNITED NATIONS) Associated Press - January 9, 2003

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - Rich countries are committing "mass murder by complacency" by failing to contribute enough money to defeat the AIDS pandemic that is ravaging Africa and killing millions every year, top Canadian UN official Stephen Lewis said.

An appeal launched by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in April 2001 for $7 billion to $10 billion US annually to combat AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria has received just $2.1 billion. The Global Fund created to disperse the funds will be running out of money at the end of the month, Lewis, the UN's adviser on AIDS in Africa, said.

"We could prolong and save millions of lives if we had the resources," Lewis told a news conference Wednesday.

"We don't have the resources."

In a scathing indictment, he said African leaders are increasingly committed to fighting the killer disease but the money isn't there and a war against Iraq would compound the funding crisis.

"It's legitimate to ask: what's wrong with this world? What's wrong with the rich countries?"

"Why are they willing to jeopardize the integrity of the most hopeful financial instrument we have to combat the cruellest disease the world has ever seen?" Lewis said.

"A major newspaper in the United States, reflecting on the paucity of resources, used the startling phrase 'murder by complacency.' I differ in only one particular: it's mass murder by complacency," he said.

He urged the Group of Seven major industrialized countries - the United States, Britain, France, Japan, Italy, Germany and Canada - to make new contributions in the immediate future, warning a war in Iraq would "eclipse every other international human priority, HIV/AIDS included."

Lewis, who visited four devastated countries last month and is returning to Africa later this month, said: "There is no question that the pandemic can be defeated...with a joint and Herculean effort between the African countries themselves and the international community."

He said he would continue to hammer at that message - and stress that all over the continent, Africans are engaged in AIDS initiatives and projects which would halt the pandemic if expanded throughout their countries.

Worldwide, there are 42 million HIV-positive people, with sub-Saharan Africa home to 75 per cent of them, said UNAIDS, the UN's AIDS agency.

"I don't think the world can live much longer losing three to five million people every year, year after year. At some point, the cumulative impact of that has to impress itself on the minds and policies of the political leadership of the western world," Lewis said.

"This pandemic cannot be allowed to continue and those who watch it unfold with a kind of pathological equanimity must be held to account. There may yet come a day when we have peacetime tribunals to deal with this particular version of crimes against humanity," he warned.

As examples of the problem, Lewis said impoverished Lesotho has one of the highest HIV rates on the continent and "a most impressive political leadership" committed to fighting the disease but insufficient funds to save "countless lives."

While Zambia's former president, Frederick Chiluba, disavowed the reality of AIDS, its new president, Levy Mwanawasa, is now trying to combat the disease but faces a daunting task with few resources, Lewis said.

He said there is now solid evidence AIDS and hunger are linked. In Malawi, for example, he said 50 per cent of poor households are affected by chronic illness due to HIV/AIDS.

The pandemic also threatens education because large numbers of teachers are dying. It has led to increasing sexual abuse of children and adolescents and it has created an "astronomical number of orphans," escalating the reality of orphan street children, orphan gangs and orphan delinquency, he said.