A rude awakening

An Indonesian visitor to Paris once noted how she was struck by the many more elderly faces filling the famous city's trams and streets, compared to the youthful scene in crowded Jakarta. This, she noted was in stark contrast to Indonesia, where the young population, typical of most developing nations, were more likely to be seen commuting and shopping in the cities and towns.

But imagine a large part of these young people dropping out of the national census -- dying -- to the extent that the dominant face of Indonesia shifts to the very young -- meaning much fewer healthy mothers and fathers to take care of them.

This is what is happening in much of Africa, where governments face teeming numbers of orphans and dying parents, after losing so many people in their productive years to HIV/AIDS.

In southern Africa, the report released by the World Health Organization and the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS says that a quarter of the population in the 15-49 age group have contracted Human Immunodeficiency Virus.

In this country, it is not uncommon to hear people remark that African nations are largely poor and are so far away from here, so they do not affect Indonesia. Current figures show that "only" 1.1 million people in Asia became infected with HIV last year; but this was more than any previous year.

The latest report on HIV/AIDS ominously warns that Indonesia, China and India -- a population of some 2.5 billion -- could be the next countries with an HIV/AIDS explosion. Reports on the world's scourges tend to be forever dismal, as if life and death threats are the only things that can wake us up to heed the concerns they raise. Unfortunately, that is probably true.

One result, however, is that there have been some education campaigns dealing with HIV and the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome in recent years, and so we have commemorated each AIDS Day on Dec. 1 without fail. The obvious danger is to fool ourselves into complacency. After all, we no longer hear as many fierce debates on whether promoting condoms is tantamount to encouraging sin. Promotion of safe sex continues, though with caution, partly because of the apparent consensus reached by campaigners and worried elders the world over, that abstinence should be the first and foremost method of prevention.

But how effective have these campaigns been? Indonesia's country coordinator for UNAIDS, Jane Wilson, has been quoted as saying that despite of a number of the government's good policies, "the implementation of these policies is limited to less than 10 percent (of those people) with high risk behavior."

The "high risk" group referred to a latest estimate of 160,000 intravenous drug users, currently identified as the fastest growing group of people contracting HIV/AIDS in Indonesia, of whom 25 percent are known to already have HIV/AIDS.

If less than 10 percent of the targeted groups benefit from the education/prevention campaigns, which are geared to combating both HIV/AIDS and drug abuse, then clearly more concerted efforts are needed from the government and the public to check the spread of the virus. The sheer population size of well over 200 million makes it impossible for any government to take sole responsibility of changing individual's behavior, let alone treating all the millions that may contract HIV/AIDS.

Clearer strategies, and a more clear position on the part of the government in, say, the hazards of unsafe sex, would help to check potential complacency on the issue. Every AIDS Day is an opportunity to renew our commitment to fight HIV/AIDS -- and renew awareness that identification of high risk groups does not mean everyone else is blissfully safe and hence justified to stigmatize the "high risk" folks. Indeed there is virtually no room to remain smug about this issue.

High risk groups have long been considered those who are "morally loose." Now women are told to be careful if their husbands travel around for work or other things, possibly exercising their perceived right to sexual recreation; and girls are taught that saying no to sex does not necessarily mean never seeing their boyfriends again. It means a responsibility for everyone -- at the very least to educate themselves and the people in their immediate surroundings -- and hopefully avoid that specter of a country dominated by children, with no one there to take care of them.