AIDS-infected
recruits into the military and police are not allowed to be rejected for health
reasons – by law:
In South Africa, Matoane warned in her lecture at
the military academy in Saldanha, she had personally found in her hands-on work
in the field, that most of the AIDS-infected military men turn “increasingly
mean, mutinous, dangerous and self-destructive. “They start staying away from
their jobs, refuse to obey commands, and form a threat to all forms of
authority.”
The top-secret government
report warned that the chaotic conditions in the country’s military were
causing a ‘threat to state security’. However the government still refused to
publish all the details.Some were however read into the parliamentary record by
Democratic Alliance MP David Maynier – who accused Defence and military
Veterans Minister Lindiwe Sisulu of having ‘misled’ both parliament and the
country by witholding her reports. http://longwalksincefreedom.blogspot.com/2010/11/sandf-morale-be-security-threat.html
Maynier, who serves on
Parliament’s defence portfolio committee, said he would not allow the reports’
contents to remain hidden.
Many hundreds of
thousands of young, black South African men are falling victim to the lethal
combination of AIDS and the co-infection with drug-resistant Tuberculosis –
referred to in South Africa as Turbo-AIDS. A joint testing programme carried
out with the SA military and the US authorities called Operation Phidisa,
showed in 2007 that infection levels among young black male military men stood
at 40% in 2007 – 22,000 soldiers. Special manuals were even drawn up in the USA
and SA on the way to identify and deal with AIDS-infected military people. The
SA military then started refusing any recruits who tested HIV-positive because
of their medical conditions.
However in May 2008, the
SA Constitutional court ordered the SA military to no longer refuse any HIV+
recruits because it was ‘unconstitutional’. The defence force lawyers’
arguments that these ill soldiers were unable to carry out their duties and
were “dangerous around military hardware” fell on deaf ears at the country’s
highest law court.And exactly the same laws also apply to recruits in the South
African Police Force.
