October 9, 2004 - 3:00 PM

Africa laureate dismisses AIDS "bioweapon" flap

By Wangui Kanina

NAIROBI (Reuters) - Wangari Maathai has made a typically combative start to
her first full day as a Nobel laureate, defending a recent suggestion that the
HIV virus might have been made in a laboratory as a plot against Africans.

The outspoken Kenyan environmentalist became the first African woman to win
the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for aiding the poor with a campaign to plant
trees and slow deforestation.

Maathai, rarely reluctant to challenge the status quo or confront the
powerful, said her comments in August were intended to promote an inquiring
attitude to AIDS among Africans and combat the fatalistic notion that it was a
curse from God.

"Would you solve the problem if it you believed it was a curse from God?" she
told a news conference, adding that one theory was that AIDS was created by a
scientist in a laboratory as an agent of war. "I was encouraging people to ask
questions, which is what I always do."

Maathai caused a furore in Kenya when she was quoted in Kenya's East African
Standard daily as calling AIDS a biological weapon devised to destroy black
people.

"Do not be naive. AIDS is not a curse from God to Africans or the black
people. It is a tool to control them designed by some evil-minded scientists, but
we may not know who particularly did (it)," the August 31 article quoted her as
saying at a seminar in her home town of Nyeri.

A U.S. State Department spokesman on Friday congratulated Maathai on the
Peace Prize but said without elaborating that Washington did not agree with her
on every issue.

A senior U.S. State Department official, who spoke to reporters on condition
that he not be identified, said:

"She has made some statements about the source of HIV/AIDS that we have very
much disagreed with. She said it was invented as a bioweapon in some laboratory
in the West. We don't agree with that," a senior U.S. official told reporters.

WELL-WORN THEORY

The idea that AIDS began as a plot by Western scientists to control Africa's
population is commonly heard across Africa.

Maathai, speaking at the office of her environmental lobby group, said she
never suggested any particular region was responsible for creating AIDS but she
was suspicious about what she called the secrecy surrounding the origin of the
virus.

"Some people say it came from the monkeys and I doubt it...others say that it
is a curse from God. But I say it cannot be that only black people are cursed,
because we are dying more then any other people on this planet and that's a
fact".

Maathai has campaigned for years to educate Kenyans that felling swathes of
woodland wreaks irreparable damage on Kenya's ecosystem, destroying vital water
catchment are that sustain the backbone farming and hydro electric sector.