(Intervention of Luigi Cerina at the International Conference on Aids - Florence, June 16-21 1991)

Mr. President of the Republic, Mr. President of the Conference, Mr. Minister of Health, delegates to the congress and dear friends,

in welcoming you to Italy and to Florence as President of the Italian National Co-ordinating Committee of Sero-Positive Persons, I want to thank you and to express a double wish.

The thanks are for your interest and for the dedication that many of you have shown in the fight against the scourge of AIDS, a scourge that is not only due to the lethal nature of the virus itself but to social and historical forces that multiply, exponentially, its terrible efficacy.

We wish you all success for yourselves and for us.

Thanks your commitment, we, as well as the sero-posivitive persons and those ill from AIDS, can begin to look forward to life and not dumbly back to death.

We also thank the journalists for their presence here. Without the mass media, we cannot eliminate one of the contributing causes to this plague, ignorance, which makes the healthy susceptible and makes those that are ill, hopeless.

Our wish then is for information which helps us all not disinformation which harms us all.

Now, having express gratitude where gratitude is due, we must express our alarm at these quasi-religious and quasi-liberal ideologies that are, in essence and in effect, terroristic. These ultra-state attitudes are grounded in classism and sexism, they permeate your work, the work of the entire United Nations, and that of many states, not to mention our very consciences.

Those who will die, often murdered, by the state or by superstition, can already be calculated in the tens of millions before the end of a decade that is also the end of a millennium. Because of an irrational hatred of much of the spectrum of human sexuality not to mention overt or covert racism, the fight against AIDS in Africa and parts of the Far East has been fought half-heartedly without the necessary urgency and energy when it comes to furnishing information on sex and hygiene to the afflicted populations as well as, pratically, furnishing them with urgently needed contraceptives.

Much of this malign negligence is conducted in the name of the salvation of the soul, where the ideal of chastity or of indiscriminate procreation take precedence over the survival of the human species.

The large majority of us Italians, sero-positive or ill with AIDS, are Catholic. This makes it doubly painful for us, even scandalous when the Roman Catholic Church is the great engine that drives so many states to uphold the policies of death.

Equally, we accuse the prohibitionist ideology everywhere - religious or secular - as being equally deadly to us all. Unfortunately, it has been adopted by the United Nations and by too many of its members.

But when this fierce ideology is replaced by sanity and good will, as in Amsterdam, less than 8% of drug addicts contract the virus.

Wherever prohibition has been enforced, particularly in Italy, up to 70% of drug addicts are sero-positive or already ill with AIDS. Nine tenths, 90% of our dead have, in effect, been murdered. So, we will die, gentlemen. We are dying, gentlemen. And not only because of a fearsome virus but because of an ideology, a pseudo-morality, a jumble of criminal, totalitarian and blind attitudes. Ignorance and malice are the exponential multiplier of death from AIDS.

We accuse those pseudo-liberal governors who practice what is in effect genocide of the poor in the ghettos of the North American metropolises, in the favelas and the Bidonvilles of Latin America and the Third World, in much the same casual way that we waste public funds and neglect Public Services in countries like our own Italy.

We accuse homophobic sexism in many parts of our so-called democratic first world, so like that of those totalitarian states which have systematically denounced homosexual acts as being perverse or ill.

By condemning to clandestinity and infamy a sexual life outside marriage and the business of procreation, and by condemning drug addiction while condoning cheerfully poverty, one confers on the virus its non-congenital, epidemic, demonic power...

Thus, our "j'accuse". A "j'accuse" in the name of simple common sennse, not to mention, of reason of morality and order, of the right to life and a life under law (as the Radical Party's motto states, my party, trans-national and trans-party), in the name of love, of respect for others, of the inseparable principles of liberty and responsibility, of the necessary knowledge to enable one to choose and act well for the good of one self and others.

We want to live, ladies and gentlemen, dear friends.

We must, meanwhile, live celebrating life, not merely surviving, and not existing in fear and resignation of a terrible death that need not be inevitable if there be knowledge and good will.

We want the people who are sero-positive or afflicted with AIDS to be guaranteed the right to participate in decisions that directly concern them - otherwise even medical progress will be slow, and ineffectual.

In the course of this conference we will discuss our proposals and our specific needs. But now, as we begin this conference, from us already stricken to you the healthy, the healthy for now, we must never lose sight of the fact that we are no special group but an integral part of the human community which must be made whole and healthy through the good faith of us all.

I wish you well in your work. We have a tremendous need of it.

Thank you.

Luigi Cerina