On Monday 7 January 2008 I placed an article about about the Sydney Park AIDS Memorial Groves on Wikipedia - the so-called open-source encyclopedia, and guess what??

On Tuesday 8 January 2008 the article was deleted. I had already made a link from the web site to the Wikipedia article, but will now remove it and make the link to my blog instead.

I find this sort of editing or censorship quite pathetic! Instead of contacting me and asking for various bits of information relating to the Groves in question, they just decide that the article does not have verification from other sources so can't be corroborated, whereas they had the web site of the Sydney Park AIDS Memorial Groves - SPAIDS -  and the Council under whose auspices the project was developed.

Here is the article:

SYDNEY PARK AIDS MEMORIAL GROVES – SPAIDS

Background history and development                                                          7 January 2008

The Brickworks at the bottom of  King Street Newtown in Sydney’s inner west ceased being a brickworks somewhere around the middle of the 1980s.

The site then became a garbage dump and became rather polluted with all the waste deposited there.

Ownership of the site had changed from private to public and by 1990 the area was under the control of South Sydney City Council. Council started cleaning up the site and ridding it of pollution and soon afterwards started grading and laying out the site for a large park to be called Sydney Park.

In the initial stages Council, which had its own nursery established on the site, planted trees to demarcate different parts of the Park. By 1992 Council was inviting community groups to plant trees in the Park to help it to become established.

At around this period, when many young people were dying from the AIDS epidemic, some members of the gay community, who had become carers for people with AIDS, approached South Sydney City Council with the request that they be considered as a community group in order to plant trees to commemorate people who had died of AIDS.

Similar groups had established memorial groves overseas and in Australia, and it was hoped that Council would be sympathetic to the request.

After about 18 months of negotiation, Council agreed to this community group being permitted to plant trees for commemoration purposes, and it was supposed that this would end up being a one-off event. The first planting by the AIDS Memorial Groves group took place on 15 May 1994. Council decided, in order to help establish the Park, to have three plantings a year and was inviting  assistance from community groups.

By 1996 the AIDS Memorial Groves group had planted on 8 occasions and found a name for the Groves – SPAIDS – Sydney Park AIDS Memorial Groves. Plantings continued to take place three times a year under the auspices of South Sydney City Council until that council was merged with Sydney City Council who continued with the establishment of the Park and community plantings.

SPAIDS has continued to be part of the Park and in 2001, while still under the auspices of South Sydney City Council, a Reflection Area with a permanent stone sculpture and circular surround was built by Council as part of the development of the Park.

The Park was beginning to show signs of being fully laid out with trees grown to full height by about 2002, and soon afterwards it was decided to have only one community planting a year and that to take place on National Tree Day which is usually the last Sunday in July.

By the end of 2007 about 8,000 trees had been planted, and 1,200 names recorded of those who have died of AIDS. This figure represents about 20 per cent of AIDS recorded deaths in Australia.

For web site, contact details and further information, see http://www.zipworld.com.au/~josken

Submitted for SPAIDS by Mannie De Saxe, Sydney Park AIDS Memorial Groves Founder and Co-coordinator.

The following report came from BNews 181, 20 December 2007:

(Victorian) "Police Minister Bob Cameron's office confirmed the government might abandon its eight-year ban on condoms in prisons, after studies showed more than half of Victorian male prisoners have Hepatitis C. Prison officers said they had no objections provided prisoners had to buy the condoms."

Lesbian and Gay Solidarity (Melbourne) has been campaigning for years in New South Wales and Victoria for condoms to be provided in prisons. Most states in Australia lifted the bans some years ago, but the recalcitrant Victorian government seems to have had to wait until evidence shows an alarming increase in diseases which are often sexually transmitted, before taking any action on this community health problem.

HIV/AIDS is also on the increase around Australia, but more so in Victoria than in the other states. This radically right-wing conservative Australian Labor Party government has certainly got blood on its hands from this issue and many other health issues, while showing a healthy increase in its budget surplus for the current financial year.

Hopefully the minor parties with progressive social issue policies will begin to achieve greater representation at all levels of government and so improve the status of those disadvantaged by the two party system.

Thabo Mbeki became president of South Africa after Nelson Mandela retired in 1999. Mbeki was thought at the time he became president to be a worthy successor to Mandela because he had been part of the liberation struggle against the apartheid regime while he was in exile. His father, Govan Mbeki had been a close associate of Mandela’s and great hope was placed in his son who was considered a serious-minded intellectual who would lead the country into greater security and prosperity, which Mandela had started to secure from the international community.

Now, at the end of 2007, Mbeki’s government – and the ANC – is plagued by corruption, nepotism, incompetence, and certainly criminal activities, relating to the HIV/AIDS crisis and the continued employment of Manto Tshabalala-Msimang as the Health Minister. The disgraceful scaking of her deputy was an international cause celebre, and did nothing to allay the suspicion that the sacking was engineered by Manto.

Mbeki now wants to exercise greater censorship and hopes to get hold of the Sunday Times newspaper which has continued to expose the corruptions in the government and the ANC. The Sunday Times expose of the Health Minister’s criminal behaviour and her alcoholism should have been enough for Mbeki to investigate her ability and her justification for maintaining her portfolio. Instead he has defended her and wants to bring criminal charges against the newspaper which has exposed the scandals.

The following articles were in The Age newspaper on 10 November 2007, from the Guardian newspaper of the UK, and are of such importance that they are here reproduced in full.

Just as there was international pressure against the apartheid regime, and now the Mugabe regime, so there needs to be international pressure to get Mbeki to resign before he takes over the mantle as the Mugabe of South Africa.

Time too for South Africa’s political groupings to reassess their affiliations and provide a strong parliamentary opposition to Mbeki and the ANC government. It is too easy for Mbeki and his supporters to use the smear of racism in their counter-attacks against their opponents, but they clearly need to be made accountable for their corrupt practices. Manto must be made to go sooner rather than later to remove some of the taints which besmirch the government.

IT'S THE kind of thing that might give a banana republic a bad name: the editor of one of South Africa's biggest newspapers threatened with arrest for exposing a minister as a drunk and a thief while the country's top prosecutor is suspended for investigating corruption allegations against the chief of police.

Thirteen years after President Nelson Mandela inspired the world by overseeing a peaceful transition from apartheid to democracy, the shine has rubbed off his successor Thabo Mbeki. The soft-spoken but aloof academic the West regarded as a safe pair of hands has, according to his critics, become increasingly autocratic and paranoid. He has sacked officials and ministers who fail to show "slavish deference" and is accused of leading an assault on press freedom the like of which South Africa has not seen since the dark days of apartheid. For their part, the President's supporters insist the allegations are baseless and part of a political campaign to influence December's crucial African National Congress conference where Mr Mbeki will bid for a third term as party leader against rivals Jacob Zuma, the former deputy president, and businessman Tokyo Sexwale.

The latest target in what one British newspaper called Mr Mbeki's "paranoid war" is the Sunday Times, the country's biggest broadsheet paper whose exposes have regularly embarrassed the Government.

Alarm bells rang last week when the newspaper reported that its owner, Johnnic Communications, had received a bid by a consortium made up of prominent allies of the President, including his political adviser Titus Mafolo, Foreign Ministry spokesman Ronnie Mamoepa and the former chief of state protocol, Billy Modise.

Despite the insistence by the President's spokesman, Mukoni Ratshitanga, that the President knew nothing about it, the opposition was quick to claim that this was a back-door attempt by the state to gain control of one of its most persistent critics. What on its own might seem a relatively innocuous business deal similar to others involving members of the powerful ANC elite, has taken on a sinister edge because of its timing.

Just weeks earlier, the paper's young black editor, Mondli Makhanya, was allegedly threatened with arrest after publishing a series of embarrassing stories about the country's controversial Minister of Health, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, based in part on a leaked copy of her medical records.

The newspaper claimed the minister had disgraced herself during a hospital stay in 2005, throwing tantrums and refusing to eat the food. But it was the allegation that alcohol was smuggled into her room and that she was drunk in the hospital on several occasions that struck a chord, appearing to confirm a long-rumoured drinking problem.

A week later the paper alleged there had been a cover-up over a liver transplant that Dr Tshabalala-Msimang had undergone in March after her own liver was said to have been damaged by "auto-immune hepatitis".

In fact, the paper claimed, the minister was suffering from alcoholic liver cirrhosis and she had continued drinking even after the transplant. It also revealed that she had been convicted of theft after stealing watches, jewellery and even shoes from patients at a hospital in Botswana where she had worked as a medical superintendent in the mid-1970s.

The Health Ministry went to court to demand that the medical records be returned. The Cape Town Medi-Clinic, where the minister stayed in 2005, laid a charge of theft against the paper after discovering her medical records were missing.

Last month the newspaper splashed with the news that police investigating the theft had told its editor and his deputy managing editor, Jocelyn Maker, that they would be arrested on suspicion of receiving stolen property. They are also facing charges under the National Health Act, which makes it an offence to publish someone's medical records without their permission.

In the wake of a call by Essop Pahad, Minister in the Presidency, for government advertising to be withdrawn from the paper, many in the media saw it as an attempt to teach the paper a lesson. It was claimed that Mr Mbeki himself was behind the arrests and that a police officer had spent a week in New Zealand to interview the person suspected of leaking the minister's medical records. It was suggested that Ms Maker's phone had been tapped and police had been told to "dig up dirt" on Mr Makhanya and other journalists involved in stories about the Health Minister.

Writing in a British newspaper recently, writer R. W. Johnson compared Mr Mbeki's behaviour to that of Robert Mugabe, President of neighbouring Zimbabwe. Mr Ratshitanga, the presidential spokesman, responded in kind, labelling Johnson a "full blooded racist". There is a strong suspicion that the matter is being pursued with a vigour that is in stark contrast to the resources put into solving many of the 19,000 murders committed last year. Mr Makhanya says he can't discuss the arrest but he is convinced press freedom is under threat.

Also worrying government critics is the ruling ANC's proposal for a media "tribunal" to explore, in the words of ANC information head Smuts Ngonyama "certain biases" within the industry. Karima Brown, veteran political editor of Business Day newspaper (50 per cent owned by Johnnic), points to the recent attempt by the ANC to push a list of approved candidates for the board of the country's largest broadcaster, South African Broadcasting Corporation, as a "clear indication that the state is keen to get its hand on large media institutions".

While the focus has been on the media, there has been a deafening silence from the minister and President on much of the substance of the allegations in the Sunday Times.

On the potentially serious question of whether the minister in charge of the nation's health is an alcoholic, the Government has said nothing.

Chris McGreal, Johannesburg
November 10, 2007

THE bitter power struggle between President Thabo Mbeki and his former deputy, Jacob Zuma, for control of the ruling African National Congress intensified as a South African court opened the way for Mr Zuma to be charged over a multibillion-dollar weapons deal.

The court of appeal's ruling on Thursday that the police seizure of allegedly incriminating documents from Mr Zuma's home and office was legal was expected to undermine his campaign as the favoured candidate to unseat Mr Mbeki as party leader at an ANC congress next month and so become the country's president in 2009.

The court also said investigators could have access to papers about a meeting between Mr Zuma and a French arms company, Thint, at which the payment of a substantial bribe was allegedly discussed.

After Thursday's rulings Mr Zuma said he would seek leave to appeal to the supreme court. The ruling comes six weeks before the ANC leadership election in which Mr Zuma appears to be the only candidate capable of defeating Mr Mbeki.

Mr Mbeki is constitutionally barred from running again for president of the country in 18 months' time, but there is no legal obstacle to him remaining as the ANC's leader. If he were to win next month's vote, he would probably be able to anoint his successor as president and would have considerable influence in parliament, because the party's MPs would answer to him.

But Mr Mbeki faces strong opposition from the trade union confederation and the Communist Party, members of the ruling tripartite alliance with the ANC, because they are unhappy with the Government's market-oriented economic policies. They have thrown their weight behind Mr Zuma, despite corruption allegations that have dogged him for years.

GUARDIAN

Chris McGreal, Johannesburg
November 6, 2007

SOUTH African President Thabo Mbeki's top political adviser and a senior government official have made a bid to buy a leading South African newspaper group embroiled in a battle with the presidency over its exposure of high-level abuse of power and corruption. The attempt to buy Johncom for 7 billion rand ($A1.16 billion) has raised concerns that it is an attempt to silence one of the country's best-selling newspapers, the Sunday Times.

The paper recently alleged that Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang is a convicted thief and an alcoholic who misused her office to obtain a liver transplant while still drinking. The paper has been critical of Mr Mbeki's hostility to the conventional treatment of AIDS, hostility doctors say has cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

It has also accused Mr Mbeki of abusing his powers and using underhand tactics to silence and punish opponents as he struggles to retain the leadership of the ruling African National Congress.

The consortium seeking to buy Johncom includes Mr Mbeki's political adviser, Titus Mafolo, who made headlines five years ago when he was accused of faking his own car-hijacking. He was charged with fraud, perjury and defeating the ends of justice. The charges were later dropped.

Other members of the consortium include Foreign Ministry spokesman Ronnie Mamoepa and a former chief of state protocol, Billy Modise. All are close to Mr Mbeki.

Johncom also owns the Sowetan and has a big stake in the country's leading financial daily, Business Day.One prominent ANC MP, Kader Asmal, said there was a danger of independent newspapers falling under political control. He told the Sunday Times that it is "astonishing that civil servants are able to develop time and energy for what is really a takeover bid".

Mr Mamoepa said the bid was a purely commercial venture, while Mr Mbeki's office said the President did not know about it.

Suspicions that it is politically motivated have been strengthened by the increasingly hostile confrontation between the Sunday Times and Mr Mbeki's office.

Last month, police began a criminal investigation of the paper's editor, Mondli Makhanya, for allegedly obtaining the Health Minister's medical records illegally.

Critics said the assigning of a top detective and considerable resources to the case reflected the political nature of the investigation in a country where there were barely enough resources to deal with the horrific murder rate.

GUARDIAN

Every year, around World AIDS Day, a few AIDS organisations in Sydney organise the "Walk for AIDS" day as a fundraiser for the AIDS organisations who organise the "Walk for AIDS" day as a fundraiser for -----------------!!! You get the picture!

And every year the "Walk for AIDS" is held in Sydney's Royal Botanic Gardens, this year on Sunday 25 November 2007.

Some years ago SPAIDS wrote to the Sydney Star Observer (SSO) that there was a park which held the AIDS Memorial Groves and a Reflection Area as a permanent memorial for people who had died from AIDS.

SPAIDS suggested that the SSO advise the organisers of the "Walk for AIDS" accordingly.

SPAIDS was ignored and the "Walk for AIDS continues to be held in the Royal Botanic Gardens.

SPAIDS organisers have been responsible for the planting of 8000 trees in Sydney Park since 1994 after 33 plantings, and have recorded 1200 names of people who have died of AIDS. People have come from all around Australia as well as visitors from overseas to record the names of partners, family, friends, others they want to remember, by planting a tree in a park that was newly developing in 1994. By 2007 the AIDS Groves are truly Groves, and to date SPAIDS represents the only national AIDS Memorial in Australia.

But the "Walk for AIDS" organisers continue to ignore the existence of SPAIDS!

One wonders what their problems are.

Visit the SPAIDS Groves at: Sydney Park AIDS Memorial Groves - SPAIDS

The following article appeared in the Good Weekend magazine dated 22 September 2007. After at least 25 years of AIDS in South Africa, Mbeki and his health minister are still in denial and are therefore personally responsible for the deaths of thousands of South Africans every year.

Mbeki and Manto are the laughing stock of the world's AIDS commmunities , but it is no laughing matter for the HIV communities existing in South Africa. Mbeki sacked his deputy Health Minister who knew what she was talking about and who also tried to do something about the terrible crisis existing there, but Mbeki and Manto are still doing the "cure" with garlic and beetroot, while the drugs desperately needed and which South Africa can well afford are not made available to the general population. As for educating the population about HIV and AIDS - well, that is just beyond the understanding of the ANC and its government.

There were such high hopes in South Africa when the ANC gained government in 1994, and since 1999 Mbeki has helped squander the goodwill and support of many people around the world. It is time for Mbeki and his criminal health minister to go. It is a crime for both of them still to be there at the end of 2007! 

SUMMARY: Desmond Tutu says those killed in the anti-apartheid struggle would be shocked by "Dr. Beetroot" and "the vast deterioration in health standards of our land."

South Africa's president called critics of his embattled health minister "wild animals" in a remarkable display of support for a woman decried by AIDS activists for advocating beets and garlic as remedies for the disease.

His defense of Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang came as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel laureate often regarded as the moral conscience of the nation, said in a speech Friday that the Health Ministry has presided over the vast deterioration in health standards of our land."

Tshabalala-Msimang has been condemned at home and abroad for her unorthodox views on the AIDS virus, which has infected an estimated 5.4 million South Africans -- the highest number for any country in the world.

At news conferences, she has made plain her mistrust of antiretroviral medicines, repeatedly espousing a diet heavy on garlic, beetroot, lemon and olive oil as more effective in treating HIV/AIDS. The comments have earned her ridicule and the nicknames "Dr. Beetroot" and "Dr. Garlic."

South Africa's stand at the international AIDS conference in Canada last year included garlic and other foodstuffs, prompting international scientists to write an unprecedented joint letter of protest to President Thabo Mbeki.

For years, Mbeki has been accused of downplaying the extent of the AIDS crisis and has steadfastly stood by his health minister.

But his weekly ANC Today online newsletter, published Friday, took his support to new heights. Mbeki said history would honor the minister as "one of the pioneer architects of a South African public health system constructed to ensure that we achieve the objective of health for all our people, and especially the poor."

"In our tradition as the ANC, we do not normally celebrate our heroes and heroines publicly, such as Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, until they have died," he wrote, referring to the ruling African National Congress. "Violating this tradition, I have now written about Manto Tshabalala-Msimang as I have because some . . . have chosen to sit as judges."

Mbeki slammed The Sunday Times newspaper for intruding in Tshabalala-Msimang's private life by reporting that she had jumped a waiting list when she underwent liver transplant surgery in March. The paper reported that she needed the transplant because of years of alcohol abuse.

Tshabalala-Msimang denied the allegations and successfully sued to recover medical records that served as the source for some of the newspaper's allegations.

"It is obvious that those who deliberately manufactured and peddled these lies did so to argue that Manto Tshabalala-Msimang should not have been treated and should have been allowed to suffer and die," Mbeki wrote.

"Some in our society, and elsewhere in the world, seem determined to applaud this truly frightening behavior, which, in reality, belongs to wild animals," he said.

Mbeki and Tshabalala-Msimang have known each other for 45 years and went into exile from the apartheid government together in 1962. The minister's husband is the treasurer of the African National Congress.

In his speech Friday night, Tutu lamented that "too many died unnecessarily because of bizarre theories held on high," in a thinly veiled reference to the president and his health minister.

Tutu said the heroes and heroines killed in the anti-apartheid struggle -- if they were alive today -- would be shocked by the devastation of HIV/AIDS. The disease kills 900 South Africans -- the equivalent of three jumbo jet crashes -- every day.

"They would be distressed by the latest episodes in the saga of a health department that has been less than efficient and has presided over the vast deterioration in health standards of our land," he said.

AIDS activists say Tshabalala-Msimang's promotion of untested remedies and her public pronouncements have led to confusion and undermined confidence in scientific medicine.

Nathan Geffen, policy coordinator of the Treatment Action Campaign, said Saturday that the AIDS activist movement would continue to press for the health minister's dismissal. The movement has demanded Mbeki respond by Sept. 7 to its detailed reasons why she must be dismissed.

Geffen listed the minister's failings: the slow provision of drugs to prevent HIV positive mothers passing on the virus to children; delays in giving treatment to people with AIDS; and her department's failure to provide proper staffing and expertise.

"The failure to manage the HIV crisis has had a knock-on effect on the management of the entire health system," Geffen told The Associated Press, citing the spread of drug-resistant tuberculosis -- closely associated with AIDS -- as an example.

Tshabalala-Msimang was sidelined for months with ill health this year. During that time, Deputy Health Minister Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge joined forces with private groups and AIDS activists to draw up an ambitious five-year plan to halve the number of new infections and provide care and treatment to 80 percent of those in need by 2011.

But Mbeki fired Madlala-Routledge last month, ostensibly because she went on an unauthorized trip to an AIDS conference in Spain and did not work as part of a team. AIDS activists said Madlala-Routledge was victim of a political vendetta orchestrated by her boss, the minister. (Clare Nullis, AP)

 HIV revisionism has a long history in the USA, South Africa, Australia and other countries around the world. In South Africa the main proponent of HIV revisionism is the president himself, Thabo Mbeki. So bad has the situation been in a country where the epidemic has long been out of control and treatments denied by the South African government because of the president’s and health minister’s views – she says “let them eat garlic” – that the government has been taken to the courts in order for treatment drugs to be made available as generic drugs so that access is widely available.

 The South African context is relevant in the Adelaide case mentioned above because the convicted man, Andre Chad Parenzee hails from South Africa. He was convicted on three counts of endangering life last January (2007) after one of the women, a mother of two, became infected with HIV.

 Defence lawyers, no doubt responding to their client’s country of origin, launched an appeal, calling two Perth so-called medical researchers – Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos and Dr Valendar Turner – who testified in the South Australian Court of Appeal the virus did not exist and could not be sexually transmitted.

 The judge fortunately was an enlightened man and was not to be intimidated by HIV revisionists who may have been had to be called as part of the appeal by the defence. Justice John Sulan dismissed the witnesses’ testimony and rejected the application for a retrial.

 It is an interesting sideline to this trial that it took place in Adelaide where one of Australia’s leading Holocaust deniers lives. He, too, has become an HIV denier, stating that AIDS does not come from HIV. His name is Frederick Toben and he runs an organization called the Adelaide Institute – a reactionary right-wing “think tank”!!!

I have just made another interesting discovery, courtesy of an email about HIV/AIDS which has just been sent to me (Friday 3 March 2006) by someone who is part of the denier group which argues that  AIDS does not come from HIV.

This is of course the president of South Africa Thabo Mbeki's line and also that of his health minister Manto Msimang.

Now I suppose being a denier of one major issue of the 20th century - that Auschwitz didn't happen and millions of Jews were NOT murdered by the Nazis - espoused by David Irving and his friend Frederick Tobin of Adelaide, who is currently on his way to Iran to support the Iranian president's take on the issue - means that one can of course be a denier of other major issues of the 20th century.

The email about HIV and AIDS was sent by someone whose name I cannot find on any listing of the AIDS deniers, so I am not sure who he is or where he comes from, but in referring to one of the main deniers I found the name of Frederick Tobin as an AIDS denier.

Now things fall into place! If you can be blinded to one set of events, why not to others, and HIV and AIDS is a fertile breeding ground for deniers. Mbeki has been doing it for at least the last 7 years, and cites such people as Dr Peter Deusberg to support his hypotheses, so why not Frederick Tobin, who falls into the category of "There are none so blind as those who will not see!".

I have learnt a lot tonight!