Fiji sure made a splash at the ICAAP. Some are saying that it is the security for the President of Fiji that makes the FTA protest so difficult to stage and contributed to the violence. Does the President of Fiji have anything to say about peaceful protest and security?

Hotel internet charges in Busan were said to run between fifteen and twenty dollars a day. Why were more free access sites not provided by the local organising committee?

[him] moderator

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A TINY ISLAND-NATION MAKES A HUGE IMPACT AT THE 10TH ICAAP
AIDS Task Force of Fiji launches landmark report, country’s President
wins plaudits for activism

August 27, 2011

Busan, South Korea – Less than a day after his speech won rave reviews
at the opening ceremony of the 10th ICAAP, the president of Fiji,
Ratu Epeli Nailatikau, joined United Nations officials and
representatives of a key NGO from the Pacific island-nation at the
launch of a landmark report on men who have sex with men, transgender
people and HIV.

“Secret Lives, Other Voices”, subtitled “A community-based study
exploring male-to-male sex, gender identity and HIV transmission risk
in Fiji,” is the first such research to be conducted with MSM and
transgender people in that country since 1998.

“We fully involved the communities in every stage of the process,”
explained Niraj Singh, Project Manager of the AIDS Task Force of Fiji
and its Amithi project, whose study was funded by a competitive grant
from the HIV and AIDS Thematic fund of the United Nations Development
Programme (UNDP). “This included initiating the research, the planning
and study design, data collection, analyzing the data and reporting
it.  Instead of being treated merely as subjects, the communities in
this instance were key players in the research.”

The study, encompassing more than 200 MSM and transgender persons,
revealed some important and disturbing findings.  Despite higher
levels of knowledge than before regarding HIV and AIDS, many
individuals from these marginalized communities are not motivated to
use condoms.  Fiji recently lifted discriminatory laws that were a
relic of the colonial era, but stigma and discrimination towards MSM
and transgender persons remains high, proving a significant barrier to
HIV testing, and leading to what the study calls a “fatalistic
attitude” caused by homophobia and transphobia.

“There is a huge lack of trust in clinics, concern over privacy and
confidentiality, the feeling that one is constantly being judged by
health care providers and society as a whole,” said Ben Bavinton,
community researcher with ATFF and associated with the AIDS Council of
New South Wales (ACON), Australia, which provided key technical
expertise for the study.  “Moreover, almost a third of the respondents
had experienced physical violence, often really brutal violence, in
the six months prior to the study being conducted.”

“The data and findings clearly show that specific strategic and
targeted approaches to prevention and sexual health services for MSM
and transgender persons are urgently needed,” said Clifton Cortez,
UNDP Regional Practice Leader, HIV/AIDS Health and Development. “Peer
prevention programmes need to be designed and implemented, clinical
and sexual health services should be scaled up, and health care
providers and workers need to be sensitized.  In all of this,
community-based organizations should be involved in helping design and
shape these interventions to ensure the end results are what the
communities want and need.”

President Nailatikau concurred with these recommendations,
complementing the remarks he made the previous evening at the opening
plenary of the 10th International Congress on AIDS in Asia and the
Pacific. There, before the president spoke, the Executive Director of
UNAIDS, Michel Sidibe, had praised Fiji and its leadership for having
just days ago revised the country’s HIV Decree, lifting HIV-related
travel restrictions and removing the section criminalizing 'willful'
HIV transmission and exposure.  In his speech, the president said it
was important for Fiji to be “internationally compliant” in this
regard.

The president also expanded on his own personal commitment to a
rights-based approach in addressing HIV, as articulated in the United
Nations resolution stemming from the High Level Meeting of June this
year.

“The declaration meant a whole lot to me personally, as well as to the
rest of us closely involved in the response to HIV/AIDS because the
declaration speaks for the voiceless, the very people we should put at
the centre of all that we will be doing during the course of this
Conference. The voiceless include men who have sex with men, people
who inject drugs and the sex workers.  It includes women and girls are
who often are denied control over their bodies, who are denied a voice
in decision making and who are denied protection from violence.  It
also includes innocent children who are born with HIV and the 15
million people who need life saving treatment by 2015.

We, as representatives from the global community – the Family – as
Leaders in our own right need to respond to these voices irrespective
of the faith we confess, the morals we uphold, the social classes we
belong to and the political affiliations that we hold dear.”

 Enlightened political leadership in facing the HIV challenge,
important research and steps forward in empowering MSM and transgender
persons in a long conservative nation – and an example for other
nations in the Pacific and elsewhere to follow.

Roy Wadia for writing for APCOM, live from 10th ICAAP

MSM-Asia Newgroup <msm-asia@googlegroups.com>