Condemned to Death

In addition to the obligatory red ribbons, the logo for the XV International AIDS Conference features three Asian elephants raising their trunks as if in welcome. The world's most important gathering of AIDS specialists will be held this July in Bangkok, a location chosen not only because Asia is thought to be the site of the next big wave of HIV infections but because Thailand is one of only a few developing countries that have thus far seemed able to control them.

International experts have hailed Thailand's 100 percent condom program, which in the 1990s distributed some 60 million condoms free to sex establishments, engaged brothel owners and government officials alike to make sure they were used and helped bring down rates of HIV and sexually transmitted infections as much as fourfold. Thailand is also the first developing country to create a functional program to stop mother-to-child HIV transmission, providing free prenatal care and preventive medication to more than three-quarters of pregnant women testing positive for HIV. Last June Kofi Annan's praise of Thailand was one of the few bright spots in an otherwise grim report to the UN General Assembly on lack of global progress against AIDS.

Yet the elephant--icon of long memory--is an ironic symbol for the AIDS conference in one respect. Conference organizers and UN officials alike seem to want to forget that, to the group at highest risk for HIV across Asia--injection drug users--what Thailand offers looks less like innovative AIDS prevention than old-fashioned, barrel-of-the-gun repression. In February 2003 the governing Thai Rak Thai (Thais Love Thais) party launched an all-out war on drugs that has included forced urine testing at nightclubs and bars, arrest quotas and mass roundups of alleged dealers and addicts.

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