in South Africa against President Thabo Mbeki's policy on combating AIDS. The President is accused of aligning himself with a very small group of dissident scientists.
The Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) has, unlawfully, imported a generic drug, Biozole, from Thailand to treat HIV/Aids related diseases and distributed it to a network of doctors and pharmacists. TAC chairperson Zackie Achmat said it was part of its defiance campaign against "patient abuse and Aids profiteering by the multinational pharmaceutical companies"
Sitting in front of a poster of a bloody hand print that was headlined - "Drug companies have blood on their hands - one Aids death every ten minutes -affordable drugs now", Achmat said: "The choice is clear - the right to life and access to health care are non-negotiable. Profiteering at the expense of life, even when protected by law, is not a right.".
Biozole is a generic equivalent to US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer's Fluconazole. Pfizer sold the drug for 80.24 Rand per 200 milligram to the private sector and R28.57 per capsule to the private sector. The Thai equivalent cost R1.78.
The import violated Pfizer's South African patent rights.
TAC will stop defying the unjust trade laws, once Pfizer has reduced the price to R4 per tablet. The National Land Committee (NLC) has warned of an impending race war inless south Africa's six million farm dwellers were protected from abuse at the hands of white farmers. Present farm laws have left farm workers and tenants at the mercy of white landowners.
White farmers are scared out of their wits by the threat of a repeat of the Zimbabwean scene. But, according to Andile Mngxitama, NLC land rights co-ordinator, here is already a war under way in the South African countryside. "At he moment it's a one-sided war waged by the landed against the landless. The sad truth is that the only significant land reform happening in South Africa is that black people are losing more land."
According to, Professor Shadrack Gutto, spokesperson for the Centre of Applied Legal Studies (CALS), a lot has been said inal acts and gross violation of human rights are on the increase on farms."
The NLC and the CALS are to call on the government to expropriate land from absentee farmers as a short-term measure, to alleviate landlessness and implement a comprehensive land reform programme. There has been a marked increase in racist incidents in South Africa.
In Johannesburg police are investigating assault charges against three white men who allegedly beat a black teenager and forced him to eat his own excrement. The three men, army reservists, also forced the 17-year old youth to daub himself in his own exerement. They accosted him at night while he was hitchhiking near a black township.
The police say that they don't know yet if the incident was racially motivated. The victim just happens to be black, and the perpetrators white.
In another incident, a white construction boss dragged a black employee to his death behind a truck; and a black girl, accused of stealing from a whiteowned shop was stripped and painted white from the waist up:
The fact that such cowardly acts of fascist barbarism have become commonplace in some parts of the Northern Province, demands that the government closely monitor race relations in those areas to avert a racial explosion.
President Mbeki has labelled racism as an evil experienced by blacks and committed by whites. The 89 employees of Cathy Ann Fashions in Woodstock, near Cape Town, have found themselves jobless because their employer said he was closing the business "on God's orders".
Last week, factory boss, Kevin Atkins, walked into the factory with a bible under his arm and said: "God has told me to close the factory". God had told him to choose between religion and his factory. *T helped him (God) build this After reading them a verse from the New Testament, Atkins told the workers the factory was closed. God really does work in mysterious ways!
Racism on the increase
closed by divine decree.