Ronald Dellums

Poverty is now considered a major factor in the spread of HIV/AIDS. Lack of resources and education, as well as limited access to adequate health care among the world’s population, are increasingly seen as contributors to the AIDS crisis. While the plague is a global one, nowhere has its horrors been more vivid than in Africa, as the recent International Conference on AIDS, held in Durban, South Africa, attested.

To increase public awareness and address the global nature of the crisis, President Bill Clinton, in March, appointed Ronald V. Dellums chairman of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS. Since then, Dellums has used his new platform to push for massive, strategic AIDS funding around the world, especially in Africa. Dellums also helped Reps. Barbara Lee (D-Oakland) and Jim Leach (R-Iowa) win congressional approval of the Global AIDS and Tuberculosis Relief Act of 2000, which allocates $1.14 billion over the next two years to fight AIDS and funds a new World Bank AIDS trust. The bill was awaiting Clinton’s signature. Dellums also led a “town hall” on AIDS for delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

Dellums hails from a family whose name is synonymous with politics. His uncle, C.L. Dellums, was a Bay Area leader of the Pullman Porters union, an officer in the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People and chairman of the California Fair Employment Practices Commission for 25 years.

From 1967 to 1971, at the height of the Vietnam War, Dellums was a member of the Berkeley City Council. In 1970, he was elected to Congress, the first African American to represent the white-majority 9th District. Peace activists called him a “moral beacon,” while one congressional colleague derided him as a “bomb thrower.” President Richard M. Nixon put Dellums in the top 10 on his infamous enemies list. But by the time he retired from Congress in 1998, Dellums enjoyed a reputation for fairness and courtesy even among House conservatives.

Dellums says his “greatest legislative and personal achievement” was leading Congress in its override of President Ronald Reagan’s veto of sanctions against apartheid South Africa in 1986, after a nearly 15-year campaign. As chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, he helped defeat the MX mobile-missile system, curtailed production of the B-2 bomber and conducted his own hearings into the Reagan-era military buildup.

In addition to chairing the AIDS advisory council, Dellums is president of Healthcare International Management Company, which provides AIDS services to Africa, and board chairman of Constituency for Africa. He lives in Washington with his wife, Cynthia. Dellums was interviewed at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in downtown Los Angeles.

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Question: How did you get involved in the AIDS issue?

Answer: I was invited to become a member of the national board of AIDS Action. At the first meeting, I was introduced and asked to say a few words. I said, “I would like to apologize to everyone in this room. I spent 27 years in the Congress of the United States, 31 years in political office, and I’d like to think that with that level of experience, I understood the gravity of the problems with AIDS. But it wasn’t until I left the continental limits of the United States and set foot in countries in Africa that I really came face to face with the magnitude of the disease. . . .

I really retired to walk away and do something else with my life. But I ran into this problem and said, “Hey, I have to try to do something about it.” I felt that what was needed was a loudmouth activist to try to help make this country and the world uncomfortable with what’s happening in Africa. I can’t blame anybody else unless I’m willing to step out there and do my very, very best. And I’m hoping that the plate gets so crowded that I can quietly exit into my retirement, and I’ve done my job.

Q: How bad is it in Africa?

A: Between 11 million and 12 million Africans have died since the first case of AIDS was determined. Africans are dying at a rate of between 6,000 and 7,000 a day. It’s estimated that over the next year, minimally, 2.3 million Africans are going to die. In the first 10 years of this new century, we are going to be looking at more than 23 million people dying, unless we do something very significant. Life expectancy all over Africa has dropped about 20 years. In Sierra Leone, life expectancy is 35 and falling. In Zimbabwe, it has dropped into the high 30s and falling. All over southern Africa, life expectancy has dropped into the 40s and falling.

When I retired from Congress, there were 7.8 million children who were orphaned as a direct result of AIDS. Now there are 10 million. Some people anticipate that by the end of this year, that number could run anywhere from 12 million to 14 million. The World Health Organization and the United Nations say that by the year 2010, we are going to be looking at roughly 40 million children who are orphaned, and that’s just on the continent of Africa.

Q: How do you see your mission?

A: To get across my view that AIDS is clearly a global pandemic, that at this particular moment, it is only manifesting itself most profoundly and most dramatically and most painfully in sub-Saharan Africa. But Africa is only phase one. India may well end up with horrifying numbers. Brazil is also a time bomb ticking. In Russia, and down through the Balkans, my prediction would be that, in the next few years, you’re going to be looking at an infection rate between 5% and 10%. In the United States, the face of AIDS has significantly changed: 42% of the people dying of AIDS are African American, 28% are Latino. Every hour, two teenagers are infected with AIDS. So many people have lulled themselves into a sense of complacency, that [people think] we’ve gotten our hands around this issue. But nothing can be farther from the truth.

Q: Are African countries capable of dealing with the crisis?

A: Some have resources, but they lack the capacity to fully grapple with this problem. It’s a mistake to see AIDS as just a health issue. It’s a development issue. It’s an infrastructure issue. It has the capacity to topple governments, to bring down economies, to bring a level of destabilization that’s extraordinary. That the U.N. and the United States are beginning to view AIDS as a security issue is no overstatement. The global community has a responsibility to come together to develop a total global strategy, with heavy significant emphasis on Africa.

Q: Ninety-five percent of all AIDS-prevention money is spent in industrialized countries, but 95% of people with AIDS live in poor countries. How do you strike a balance between prevention and treatment and need?

A: I’ve called for an AIDS Marshall Plan, with an initial focus on Africa. [It would be] a global public-private partnership in which the United States assumes a leadership role in making a major governmental commitment [of money], then assumes a responsibility to help galvanize other countries in the Group of 8, in Europe and Asia [to give money]. The second strategy [entails] going out into the private sector, in the United States and around the world, to match those public funds with private dollars.

Q: You have talked about debt forgiveness playing a role in helping African countries combat AIDS.

A: Sub-Saharan African countries pay debt service to the tune of $31 billion annually. Suppose these countries were freed from that debt. They could take that $31 billion and begin to build education and health-care infrastructures, allowing them to better address the problem of AIDS. For example, how do you get from one village to another village to teach prevention and treat AIDS if there aren’t good roads? How do you engage in a significant care and treatment effort when you have no health-care delivery system? The same with having no hospitals, no clinics. How do you educate children, who cannot read, about AIDS? . . .

Debt forgiveness [would] allow these countries to get credit for taking money they would normally have used in debt service to improve the quality of life of the people in their society, and also to better come at the issue of AIDS. In the best of all worlds, [the recently announced U.S. Export-Import Bank] loan-guarantee program would be a straight-out grant of a billion dollars. It’s really not an extraordinary amount of money. When we’re talking about life and death at this level, I think this is a small price to pay for the preservation of humanity. This is a time when we ought to be talking about debt forgiveness, not inflicting new loan burdens on developing countries.

Q: How do you see the private sector getting involved in your strategy?

A: You’ve got places in Africa where employers are hiring three and four people for the same job because they know the first two or three are going to die in the next few months. What does that do for the cost of doing business? What does that do in bringing down production capability? When it’s the young women in Africa pulled out of school, in order to care for people who are dying, what happens? They drop out of school, so the poverty rate begins to spiral out of control. When you and I both agree that our self-interest is mutually engaged, the likelihood of you and I staying together to get the job done is very powerful, because we see our mutual self-interest. It’s like Martin Luther King’s comment that generosity is more than throwing a few crumbs to a beggar.

Q: Until recently, African American leaders have been reluctant to speak up on AIDS in their communities. How do you explain their slow response?

A: Because in the first instance, many took a moral view of the AIDS crisis. The U.S., with all its perceived sophistication, is almost infantile, at worst, and adolescent, at best, when it comes to talk about sexual matters. Then you have the issue of [intravenous use of] drugs and bad needles. When you put sex and drugs together, you suddenly have people back-pedaling.

But AIDS is not a moral issue. It’s a health issue [and it] even goes way beyond health. We have to get beyond the moralizing phase and begin to see it as an epidemic in this country and a pandemic around the world, then we’ll start to deal with this problem differently. We’ve got to get out of this conspiracy of silence, this denial, and begin to talk about the issue loud enough and in tones that fit the reality of the problem. And this requires some screaming and a sense of urgency. . . . With the U.S. presidential election taking place, we need to step up and say, “All right, we want to see both parties make a commitment to deal with this issue.” I come from a generation that came of age in the ‘60s, out of a period of activism. We didn’t make the world perfect, but we changed the world with our activism. I’m saying, people have got to become active because AIDS is a major problem in this country, in Africa and around the world.

Q: In light of all the calls for party unity, was the Congressional Black Caucus right to challenge vice-presidential nominee Sen. Joseph Lieberman on affirmative action?

A: I think it was both appropriate and necessary. In the black community, issues of affirmative action and support for public education are very important. The fact that we are a significant constituency [means that] people have a responsibility to make sure these issues get clarified.

Q: Why do you think the AIDS issue received so little attention at the Democratic convention?

A: President Clinton did address the issue of AIDS and other infectious diseases. The vice president spoke to this issue at the United Nations and in other venues leading up to the convention. [The administration] has stepped up its efforts over the last several years, both at the domestic level and international levels.

Should the issue have greater visibility? The answer is clearly yes. The human family is threatened, and we have a responsibility to draw a line in the sand, and that line has to start with Africa. I just hope that the point gets made that we have to care about life in West L.A. and South-Central L.A. and East L.A. with the same fervor that we care about life in Eastern Europe and Africa. We have a long way to go.

I think the AIDS pandemic makes that point; we are living in one world that is becoming much smaller, interrelated, interdependent, and we’re all vulnerable. *