INTERVIEW-Detained China AIDS activist's stifled cry for justice
Source: Reuters
By Chris Buckley NINGLING, China, March 14 (Reuters) - Li Xige's home in this flat, brown patch of central China is her prison and her defiant memorial to her daughter who died of AIDS. A corner of her main room shows photos of the daughter, Sun Yingchen, who died at the age of 9 from AIDS spread through infected blood given to her mother. Another wall shows letters from students supporting Li's efforts for justice. But the police at the door keeping Li under house arrest in rural Ningling County, Henan province, underscored the government's efforts to muzzle citizens demanding a reckoning with officials who let AIDS spread through tainted blood. "They want me to shut up but I won't," Li told Reuters. "The responsible officials have never been punished. They watched people die, saw AIDS spreading, and did nothing," she said. "Why? I want to know." For several years, China has worked to stem a wildfire of AIDS deaths that struck rural Henan in the 1990s, fuelled by reckless blood selling. Li and many other residents there now receive state-funded medicines to keep HIV at bay. "AIDS patients and their families have received good care. Their thinking has undergone a big change, and they're grateful to the government," the Communist Party chief of Henan, Xu Guangchun, said last November, according to the Henan Daily. But Li said medicine was not enough. She and other campaigners want something much more elusive in this tough province of an authoritarian state -- accountability for officials who let HIV seep from unhygienic commercial blood stations to hospitals. HUMAN RIGHTS Li, a 38-year old postal worker, said she was infected through a transfusion given during her older daughter's caesarean birth. She found out about her own illness when the child died in 2004, apparently infected through breast feeding. "I'm glad we have medicine now, but I also want our human rights," she said, grappling with her mischievous surviving daughter, Sun Weili, 5, who was infected during pregnancy. Such demands have been nettlesome for Henan, where the government encouraged commercial blood selling in the 1990s, helping spread an HIV epidemic. Over 30 other Ningling mothers who gave birth at the local maternity hospital were also infected with HIV, as well as about 12 of their children. Altogether about 80 locals have caught the disease through transfusions, Li said. In July 2006, after organising some of the women into a self-help group and leading protests to Beijing, Li was detained for "organising a crowd to attack a government office". She has been under house detention on-and-off since then, let out for accompanied forays. Her police guards -- observing new rules letting foreign reporters interview willing subjects -- let Reuters visit. Li, an energetic, wren-like woman, spoke in a staccato. But asked about her younger daughter, her voice fell away. "The kids around here won't play with her because they're afraid of AIDS," she said hoarsely, falling into a long silence. "She knows how her big sister died." In other parts of China, citizens infected through transfusions have won compensation of hundreds of thousands of yuan. Li said she wanted 900,000 yuan ($113,000). No officials have been prosecuted for the spread of AIDS through Henan's blood, said a Beijing doctor familiar with the province. Courts there have refused to consider the cases. One of the men guarding Li said he sympathised but wanted her to be realistic. "In China, cases like this take time to settle," he told her. "You should be patient and let things run their course. This is China."
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