Rescuing The Children: Elián, AIDS, South Africa and Media
By Danny Schechter

I can just hear some Hollywood exec wondering if it has "series potential"
while watching the dramatic showdown in the latest episode of the Elián
González tug-of-war. On April 22 federal agents in a long overdue and
overdrawn response "rescued" the six-year-old from a politically driven soap
opera and family feud. He was reunited with his father, a reunion that
enjoyed support from the majority of people living outside the Castro-hating
hothouse of Miami's Little Havana.
The media was omnipresent, of course, live and in color, milking the drama
for all it was worth. On many networks "all Elián all the time" had months
ago become a programming staple -- coverage that mostly failed to take a
critical look at the vicious 30-year U.S. embargo of Cuba that created the
conditions leading to Elián's mother's "escape" in the first place. His
first rescue, at sea, had long since been overshadowed by a hostage
situation created by his relatives and their fanatical supporters among
right-wing exile groups. The best interests of the child were not
necessarily considered in their best interest. (One unreported aside: A
Cuba-expert friend of mine who was shuttling between Havana, Miami and
Washington to resolve this crisis told me of an earlier encounter with
Elián. He was asked if he wanted to go home. His response was a question
indicating the nature of this six-year-old's fears. "Will I have to go back
the way I came, on a raft?" he reportedly asked.

The major complaint in most TV newsrooms was undoubtedly with the timing of
the raid. Why couldn't Attorney General Reno have waited until primetime to
act, so that they could have enjoyed a bigger audience? Instead, the
marshals moved with militarized speed - and in inappropriate combat gear -
just in time to assure attention during Saturday morning children's TV
shows, thus traumatizing a whole nation of kids with images of heavily armed
men pointing scary weapons at unarmed civilians. I guess a Justice
Department that brought us the Waco debacle still doesn't know how to act in
a less heavy-handed manner. One AP photo of a gun pointed toward one kid
effectively undercut their moral standing. They have a way of blowing it
even when they try to do right.

As I thought about the child's rescue, in this month of Passover and Easter,
with biblical tales of a people's exodus to freedom and Christ's
resurrection, my mind drifted elsewhere. It took me back to another land and
to tens of millions of children without fathers or mothers, who have no
federal marshals to rescue them and far less media attention paid to their
plight.

Six years ago this month, I was on the assignment of a lifetime, documenting
Nelson Mandela's presidential campaign in South Africa's first democratic
elections. I was there at his invitation, as a result of the body of TV work
our company Globalvision [LINK to Globalvision.org] had produced on the
apartheid issue over the years. Our South Africa Now public television
series was still on the minds and in the memory of many South Africans
forced into exile during the long years of their fight for liberation. They
provided access to us, although our film, "Countdown to Freedom: Ten Days
That Changed South Africa," was independent in its approach.

In the euphoria of that moment, as a long-disenfranchised people lined up to
vote on April 27, 1994, sometimes standing for hours in queues snaking
through the townships, there was a sense that here at last the forces of
democracy were triumphing over the forces of racism and repression. Mandela
was seen as the rescuer of his people. The world's best-known political
prisoner went on to become president. For many South Africans, and for the
people who marched for them in many lands, it was like being in a dream
state. The world had turned upside down. White rule was finally over in
South Africa. And the transition was largely peaceful.

The world media was out in force to cover that spectacle, but focused on
personalities, not the struggle that they led. Their "liberation," as we can
see now, was only partial. And the "victory," only one part of a more
complicated truth. "The issues were black and white, the 'baddies' and
'goodies' easily distinguishable thanks to variations in melanin
deficiency," noted the veteran South Africa watcher, journalist David
Beresford in the Johannesburg Mail & Guardian. "When [Mandela] walked out of
the prison gates, the moment confirmed those certainties -- the anticipated
moral victory offering a fitting climax to what seemed like a morality tale
enjoyed by millions watching television. In retrospect it was something of a
fake orgasm in fairyland, because truth is not so easy."

Needless to say, there is never any one single truth, but certainly it is
true that journalists around then, including myself, were not as aware as we
might have been of the genocide about to be unleashed in Africa, in Rwanda.
Most of the media missed the buildup to that manmade calamity and the UN's
mishandling of it. That story went mostly unexplained until years later.
Also largely unreported was another holocaust in the making in South Africa
itself, the HIV-AIDS pandemic. While I was chronicling the country's hopeful
political transition, a tragedy of cataclysmic proportions was brewing out
of global-media view.

With at least 3.5 million South Africans infected by HIV, that epidemic can
no longer be ignored. Part of the beloved country is no longer crying; it is
dying, and in droves. When I started covering South Africa in 1967 a state
of emergency was in effect. Now, with the death toll from AIDS rising, it
has returned -- although not formally -- as a state of urgency. At its core
are ten million young children like Elián, only these have been orphaned by
AIDS and for the most part are still off the media radar screen. While
Newsweek and CNN do deserve credit for reporting the AIDS orphans story, far
more is needed.

These children are relegated to the back pages because "big" journalism has
an affinity for Big Medicine and its top-down way of seeing AIDS in Africa
only in medical terms, as a disease to be fought with prevention, high-tech
medicines and research oriented toward finding "the cure" a.k.a. "a magic
bullet." Yet in countries that lack an adequate healthcare infrastructure,
legitimate questions can be raised about whether treatments developed in the
West are equally suitable in Africa. The one African leader who is doing
some of that questioning has become a target for editorial denunciations of
his motives and judgment.

It is South Africa's president, Thabo Mbeki, Nelson Mandela's chosen
successor, who is at the center of that controversy. Mbeki has been
questioning the link between HIV and AIDS, and consulting with dissident
scientists who have been virtually run out of the medical world for
questioning orthodox understandings. Last week, a letter he wrote to
President Clinton and other world leaders explaining his stance was leaked
to the Washington Post [LINK to letter?]. A day letter the newspaper
denounced him editorially for questioning mainstream AIDS thinking, calling
it "a ludicrous waste of precious time and a cruel hoax on his suffering
people." The subtext is that African leaders are to blame for the spread of
AIDS by not doing enough - a perspective as popular in some liberal media
circles as the notion among racists that oversexed Africans have brought the
problem on themselves. It is always easier to blame the victim than look
more deeply into how an epidemic spread. It is significant that it was the
Village Voice, an independent news weekly, that won the Pulitzer Prize for
its reporting on AIDS, not the Post or the New York Times (which also took
an editoral swipe at Mbeki).

One challenge here is for both the media and medical worlds to recognize how
complicated this fight is. Many African societies are still in denial about
AIDS, uncomfortable with even talking about sex within their families,
trapped in deeply ingrained cultural taboos. Some governments even contend
that these cultural traditions must be "respected" by outsiders and AIDS
workers. To this, South African AIDS activists like David R. Patient say:
"You may very well be right in your argument, but you will end up being DEAD
right." In an article in the Citizen newspaper out of Pretoria, he insists:
"We either dramatically change our cultures or we will end up burying them."
Adding to the problem is the failure on the part of many media observers to
recognize that the rapid spread of AIDS in the world needs to be reframed as
a global public-health emergency, then anchored in a health and human rights
framework. As Joyce Pekane, a vice president of the Congress of South
African Trade Unions (COSATU), put it in a recent speech at a conference of
South Africans living with AIDS: "The rapid spread of the disease is related
to poverty and the lack of access to socioeconomic rights such as housing,
clean water and health care." This structural problem, in a country where
37.5 percent of the population is unemployed, and where rape and social
breakdown is widespread, is a major factor that makes it hard for people to
change behaviors that puts them at risk The pandemic spreads in other
countries for similar reasons, along with wars and refugee crises.

Inextricably connected to all this is the enormous spread of the number of
children orphaned by AIDS worldwide. These kids, unlike Elián, do not have
families to fight over them. But they desperately need rescuers too, as well
as major media to tell their stories. The scale and implications of this
problem are huge and frightening, as I learned by working with MediaChannel
advisor Albina du Boisouvray, whose FXB Association [LINK: www.fxb.org] is
focusing on the plight of these orphans. The organization funds research at
Harvard's FXB Health and Human Rights Center [LINK: ], mounts field projects
in 13 countries and does policy advocacy among governments and international
agencies. Du Boisouvray's own work began after she lost her only son,
François, a helicopter rescue pilot, in an air crash in Africa. Now she is
trying to mobilize interest from a media that for months seems to have time
for only one child - the "raft boy."
We have had too much attention paid to one child for the wrong reasons, and
too little paid to millions of others for the right ones.

Danny Schechter produced 10 documentaries with GlobalVision, where he serves
as vice president and executive producer. He is the executive editor of
MediaChannel and author of "News Dissector," a collection of his columns and
writings from Electronpress.com [LINK: www.electronpress.com/dschecter.asp].