From Entebbe, Uganda – “A man shocked parents on Sunday when he confessed to recruiting school children into homosexuality to promote the practice in Ugandan schools.”

Hence started the opening paragraph of a front page feature of the Ugandan daily The New Vision under a 5-cm letter header: “HOMOSEXUAL ADMITS RECRUITING STUDENTS”

New Vision’s Paul Kiwuuwa writes that George Oundo has received funding and training from “abroad” and targeted children, mostly “needy” ones, because children are “easy to initiate and they like easy things”. “Conversion” was achieved through books and compact disc showing homosexuality to young boys.

So what happened that Oundo stopped converting needy children with the support of an alleged foreign Gay and Lesbian Coalition and “confessed”?

Oundo became a Born-again Christian and “got saved at Pastor Martin Sempas’ Church, the Inter-Faith Rainbow Coalition against Homosexuality, based at Makere University Kampala”. Yes, the Ugandan Pastor who burns condom on the university campus.

The story does not stop here. George had experience a “transgender transition” in the past and wanted to be a woman and was known as Georgina, all because of international human rights organisations that “spread homosexuality”. Later, eigt more men “confessed involvement in homosexuality and gay activities, which they said they had abandoned. Speaking to journalists at the Grand Imperial Hotel in Kampala, the youthful men described homosexuality as abnormal and anti-Christian, and declared war against it.”

When reading such caricature of reporting and nonsense one can only be left short of words. Such coverage does nothing but contributes to the spread of the epidemic by exonerating of their responsibility those who are really at the centre of the epidemic and its spreading: men and women who are having unprotected sex.

But there is worse. The daily reports that the Uganda Education Minister Manirembe Bitamazire announced last year an investigation into homosexuality in schools where the activity is “rampant”, and the Uganda AIDS Commission chief Kihumuro Apuuli, also observed* that “schools had become a breeding ground for the vice”, the solution being that “parents had a big responsibility to inculcate African Values into their children.”

Conflating homosexuality and HIV in Uganda (or anywhere else for that matter) does not make sense but confirm that it is much easier to find a scapegoat than to face the truth. The denunciation of homosexuality as foreign to “African values” also reveals of a long tradition of denial and cultural relativism, not specific to Africa, which has obstructed and still obstruct the prevention efforts by stigmatising further people who are amongst those most vulnerable if not most affected yet and ignores the real cause of the epidemic. That such beliefs are supported by the head of the Uganda AIDS commission 25 years after the start of the epidemic is extremely worrying.

Evangelical and Pentecostal churches, in conjunction with pontifical nonsense.» are doing a great witch-hunting job, diverting resources and destroying successful HIV prevention. Such irresponsible and dangerous views are wiping out years, past and future, of HIV prevention.

Crime against humanity should apply to those who spread such nonsense.

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[Note added July 2010: Having done some background research, I find the comment attributed to David Apuuli dubious. See this and this. This would need further research]

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