The
tumultuous struggle for power following last Sunday's disputed
election is not the only mass campaign being waged in Ukraine.
Far from the snowy streets of the capital Kiev, in the Black
Sea port of Sevastopol, HIV rates are among the highest in Europe,
and young Red Cross volunteers have taken to the streets to
warn their peers of the dangers of risky sex and drugs.
Sevastopol was closed to the outside world for 70 years under
the Soviets, but the gloomy images that fact may generate in
a visitor's mind are soon dispelled by a brighter reality.
Long the secretive home of the Soviet (now Russian) Black Sea
fleet, the city is now open for business. Located on the west
of the achingly beautiful Crimean peninsula, this jewel of a
town's glistening architecture is only a fraction of its attraction.
There are the Greek ruins at Chernsonesus, which seem to crawl
out of the azure sea. There's the robust and tasty local wine.
There are the café-lined boulevards, the balmy climate.
And of course, the chance for those of us reared on James Bond
movies, the chance to snap pictures of Soviet submarines.
"Sevastopol, Sevastopol, beloved of Russian sailors",
goes the old song, and there are plenty here, even though this
is modern-day Ukraine. As a port town, it's not just sailors
that visit - sex and drugs have taken up residence, and in Ukraine
that means HIV infections are rising.
Andriy Klepikpov of the International AIDS Alliance recently
noted that Ukraine is facing its biggest threat since World
War Two - by the end of the decade, 1.5 million of them could
be HIV positive. The rate of new infection is the highest in
the world.
It's a good analogy; one designed by a Ukrainian to make his
compatriots sit up and listen. A call to arms. And Sevastopol
has always been good at that.
The city was laid waste in 1854 during the Crimean war, and
even before Florence Nightingale took up her lamp a bunch of
sisters led by the great Dr Nikolai Pirogov helped the wounded.
Before the Red Cross was founded, humanitarians were defending
Sevastopol's wounded while its fighting force, including a certain
Leo Tolstoy, held off the British, French, Turks and Sardinians
for almost a year.
In the Second World War, always called "the Great Patriotic
War" in the former-USSR, Sevastopol was again levelled,
and its massively outnumbered defenders held out against the
German and Romanian attackers for eight months.
This effort is commemorated wherever you go. Every school has
a museum or a diaporama dedicated to those awful days, right
down to replica tanks with "For Stalin" scrawled on
them, and helmets punctured by bullets.
Sevastopol's defenders are celebrated in song and story. And
now a new breed of young defenders is emerging, defending their
town from the spread of HIV. Their weapons are words and brochures;
they prefer condoms to Kalashnikovs. Sevastopol's youth Red
Cross see their mission as in some way continuing the legacy
of their forebears.
Now on the edge of the expanded European Union, today's young
Ukrainians realise the virus recognises neither borders nor
ethnicities. A good example is 14-year-old Eldar Emiruseimov,
whose Tatar forebears were kicked out of their Crimean homeland
by Stalin in the 1940s.
Fifty years on, the Crimean Tatars are back in their ancestral
homeland, and Eldar has found a niche as a Red Cross peer-to-peer
instructor, helping dispel the stigma that condemns many HIV-positive
people to a life in the shadows.
He looks slightly gawky in a T-shirt several sizes too big,
but when he talks, people listen. Tensions are high between
Tatars and the Ukrainians and Russians they have come to live
amongst, but Eldar says "we're all in this together. My
friends are Russian and Ukrainians, and I just want to warn
people about this disease. It threatens all of us."
The official rate for HIV infection in Ukraine is between one
and 1.5 per cent of the population, but local Red Cross workers
say in Sevastopol it could be double that.
Among the young, "recreational" drug use doesn't mean
puffing on a joint of cannabis. The first drug young Ukrainians
are confronted with is something called "shirka",
slang for "shot", an opiate milked directly from poppies
and sometimes mixed with anti-depressants.
It cheap, it's quick, and if you share a needle, it's a potential
killer.
Ukraine is fast discovering a whole new host of realities that
have to be confronted. As the AIDS epidemic spreads, people
are learning that it's not just "dirty people" - sex
workers, drug users, men who have sex with men - that get AIDS.
The population at large is having to ask if it makes sense to
supply needles to injecting drug users when elderly diabetics
have to pay for theirs. And aid agencies are struggling to find
non-pejorative ways of saying "AIDS victim" or "contaminated",
and seeing how more neutral terms sound in Ukrainian.
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Eldar
Emiruseimov, is an ethnic Tartar and a Red Cross peer-to-peer
instructor. “My friends are Russian and Ukrainians.
We're all in this together,” he says (p12220)
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Home
of the Russian Black Sea fleet, it's not just sailors
that visit Sevastopol - sex and drugs and HIV have taken
up residence (p12223)
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Eldare
with his fellow Ukrainian Red Cross peer educators (p12221)
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The
Ukrainian Red Cross has found that peer-to-peer education
is an effective way of dispel the stigma that condemns
many HIV-positive people to a life in the shadows (p12222)
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