LECTURER in the Department of History at the University of the West Indies Cecil Gutzmore is claiming that some known homosexual scientists are shifting the blame for AIDS from the gay community to Africa.

A year ago he had accused the United States of inventing the deadly HIV virus. Gutzmore said any claim that the HIV/AIDS epidemic originated in Africa was "a great deal of western propaganda."

"The claim that it (the HIV virus) came from Africa was always a lie... a great deal of western propaganda in the 80s and 90s went into that business of saying it's you Africans who have pushed this thing around worldwide.

This is not true. Some scientists known to be gays are shifting the blame about HIV/AIDS from the gay community towards Africa," Gutzmore insisted.

He went on to encourage the use of condoms and one-partner relationships, to help prevent the spread of the killer virus.
The UWI lecturer was the main discussant at a rap session on the topic "AIDS and Germ Warfare", put on by the African Liberation Day Committee in Kingston, recently.

Speaking around this same time last year at a panel discussion on "The Impact of HIV/AIDS on the Global Black Community", Gutzmore had made a call for compensation for African victims of the deadly disease. "This is another debt that they owe to Africans along the lines of the one that they owe us for the oppression of slavery," he said then.

At the most recent forum Gutzmore reiterated his controversial argument, that the US was responsible for the "creation" of the HIV virus. "I'm making the claim again. Even if we don't know exactly which laboratory, it doesn't mean it wasn't invented there and that they didn't do it. That is where it came from."

He said the disease migrated from the US, and was devastating populations in places such as Haiti, East Africa, South Africa, and the Caribbean. Gutzmore said tourism and gay sex were the methods by which the disease had spread.

"Check the facts that as you look at the spread of this thing into Haiti or into Jamaica or into Kenya or into Central Africa or into South Africa, that it did not come down from the countryside into the town; it goes up from the town into the countryside," he said. "Routes that have sexual relationships with visiting male homosexuals, and visiting white tourists. That's where the thing spread from."

waltersb@jamaicaobserver.com

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