Magic expected during Johnson's matches in RI

By Bruce Emond

JAKARTA (JP): Times have indeed changed for the better since 1994, when Earvin "Magic" Johnson was denied a visa to enter Indonesia for an exhibition tour amid a media torrent focusing on the basketball star's HIV status. The blitz, marked by lurid speculation on Johnson's "risk" to others, was notable for a singular lack of clarity in defining how the virus is actually contracted.

Johnson should be applauded for coming to Indonesia, particularly considering the frenzied reception which greeted his previous proposed visit. He has been remarkably candid about how he believes he contracted the disease (through promiscuous heterosexual sex) and expressed his remorse about the danger he put his wife in before they were married.

Despite lingering moral questions, Johnson puts a human face on this disease for many Indonesians. (More than one analyst has cited the irony of the public's almost reverential acceptance of Johnson's admissions while any woman would have been branded a whore for the same behavior).

Although ostensibly a basketball tour, Johnson's upcoming visit to Indonesia may be championed by some as a positive sign that sensitivity to the rights of people with HIV and AIDS is growing in Indonesia. There is no doubt that awareness of the disease has increased enormously in recent years following increased activities conducted by both government and private agencies. Witness the various forums from panel discussions to art shows, held in conjunction with World AIDS Day on Dec. 1.

Awareness, however, does not necessarily translate into tolerance or acceptance. Johnson's visit does not change the fact that misconceptions prevail about this disease, particularly that it cannot touch ordinary Indonesians.

Granted, Indonesia has come a long way from the AIDS "Dark Ages" of the 1980s and early 1990s, when mention of the disease was dismissed with a perfunctory "only gays get it" or an overwhelming paranoia founded on ignorance about the disease.

A visit to an AIDS information center, tucked away in a deserted corridor in one of Jakarta's oldest hospitals, would yield little but a kaleidoscope of stomach-churning photos of people with advanced stages of HIV infections. Inquiries about the services on offer were for naught as the woman on duty referred all questions to the head of the center.

Ignorance among all sectors of the public was astounding. A gay man in his mid-40s, who worked as a guess relations manager at a hotel, said he was not worried about AIDS. "I think it is easier for European people to get this virus," he said earnestly. "Indonesian people have hotter blood because we live in the tropics and that will kill the virus."

Others would state confidently that the appearance of an individual revealed his or her HIV status, or, barring the sight inspection test, that a motley cocktail of orange juice, vitamins, antibiotics and traditional medicine would ward off the virus.

Some of the stories were heart-rending, such as that of the lover of an expatriate man who had died of AIDS. The Indonesian had moved back to his hometown, exiled by the loss of his friend and the inhumanity of the treatment. Several years after the incident his pain was still raw as he recounted seeing his deathly ill friend for the last time as he was sent home to die, how various authorities descended on the home they shared together to destroy "unclean" items, and his own feelings of having nobody to turn to in his grief.

Or there is the story of the expatriate teacher who contracted pneumocytis carinni pneumonia. When his illness became known to the authorities in his Central Java town, he was deported, literally on his deathbed, and his family was forced to buy up a row of seats on the airplane to allow him to rest on the long journey back to the U.S.

For all the progress that is made in educating the public and disseminating information about AIDS, several cases reveal that much remains to be done in ending myths, even within the medical community. Last August, a doctor was sanctioned at a major Jakarta hospital for treating a person with AIDS.

These are the reasons why Magic Johnson's visit to Indonesia should be feted.

Attractive, likable and articulate, Johnson destroys the stereotypes of the weak, craven, individual or monster images which have been a part of some of the more sensational AIDS "misinformation" efforts in Indonesia.

Let us hope that the public sits up and listens to what Johnson has to say about AIDS before the face of the disease comes even closer to home.

The writer conducted informal research on AIDS information programs in Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand as a Thomas Watson Fellow from 1991 to 1992.