In his recent visit to the Cameroons, Pope Benedict XVI declared that condom use will not help in Africa’s fight against HIV/AIDS. The Vatican has widely defended these comments. The only reasonable conclusion to make is that the Vatican has become an abettor to ethnic genocide. Thirty-three million people in the world have HIV/AIDS. Twenty-seven million of them live in Africa. AIDS kills upwards of 6000 people a day on the African continent.

Even in the United States, race poses a large risk factor to contracting the virus. African Americans make up 49% of new HIV/AIDS cases, despite the fact that African Americans constitute 13% of the American population. The incidence of HIV in the black Caribbean population of the United Kingdom is disturbingly disproportionate, relative to the size of the population, while the incidence of HIV/AIDS in the African population of the United Kingdom is worse still.

On the African continent, The Bush administration’s “Foreign Aid for Abstinence Programs” policies seriously contributed to the problem. For example, the Ugandan government’s pre-Bush willingness to promote abstinence as part of a multi-layered approach including discussion of condom use and discuss safe s-x led to a marked decrease in the new cases of HIV/AIDS, particularly amongst Ugandan youth. In late 1990s, while an HIV/AIDS epidemic gripped the rest of the African continent, Uganda managed to successfully contain and prevent the virus.

Far from acknowledging the success of such multi-faceted approaches, the Bush administration’s new abstinence based aid policy had serious implications for Uganda’s HIV/AIDS containment and prevention programs. A 2005 Human Rights Watch Report stated: “As the largest single donor to HIV-AIDS programs in Uganda, the United States is using its unparalleled influence to export abstinence-only programs that have proven to be an abject failure in its own country.” It is also no coincidence that Senegal, a country with a 92% Muslim population, and which has been one of the few African countries open to safe-s-x discussions as part of prevention programs, has one of the lowest HIV/AIDS infection rates in Africa.

Some kind of hope has arrived recently for the HIV/AIDS-ravaged black world population in the form of the Obama administration’s renewed commitment to fighting HIV/AIDS domestically and abroad, including the removal of Bush’s “Aid Funding for Abstinence Education” policy. Despite this, however, the word from God’s right hand representative, Pope Benedict XVI, to the African people is that “spiritual and human awakening” and “friendship for those who suffer” will conquer AIDS, not condoms. Condoms, apparently, will only exacerbate the problem. Pope Benedict’s assertion this week continues the long Vatican tradition of aiding ethnic genocide by denying the 90% HIV/AIDS prevention rate afforded by effective condom use.

Australia, with our successful record of containing HIV/AIDS and purported division of Church and State, has long been silent on the abstinence issue, but we now have an obligation to speak out. There is much to be said for a “Foreign Aid for Safe S-x Education” policy as the first port of call for containing HIV/AIDS globally, particularly across third world nations and on the African continent.

This would of course prove unpopular with religious and “family groups”, but it would force foreign governments to acknowledge the appalling legacy of the decades long “Aid for Abstinence Education” policy and help reverse the solid contribution this policy has made to the spread of the HIV/AIDS virus across the globe.

In condemning the use of contraceptive measures to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS, Pope Benedict XVI demonstrates that the Vatican is not only out of touch with reality, but has no respect for the sanctity of black lives and effectively endorses ethnic genocide by disease.