Laura Bush irked by criticism of Aids plan

ACCRA - US first lady Laura Bush opened a four-day trip to West Africa on Sunday full of praise for the continent's first elected woman president but irritated by criticism of promoting abstinence to help combat AIDS.


"She serves as a very important role model for little girls on the continent as well around the world," Bush said of Liberia's Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, whose inauguration she will attend on Monday. "A shining example for all of us."


Johnson-Sirleaf defeated soccer millionaire George Weah in a November 8 presidential runoff and has pledged to heal the wounds of a bloody 14-year civil war that ended in 2003 but left Liberia in ruins and killed 250,000 people.


Bush urged Liberia's president-elect to reach out to young people who did not support her.


"One problem in Liberia is there's so many unemployed young people and the young people were overwhelmingly for George Weah, the soccer player ... even though Mrs Johnson-Sirleaf won by 59 per cent of the vote," she told reporters en route to Accra.


Bush said she brought "the commitment of the United States government to stand with Liberia and the people of Liberia as they rebuild their country".


A senior US official said Washington had committed US$1 billion to Monrovia between 2004 and 2006, most of it for peacekeeping.


The rest of Bush's trip, to Ghana and Nigeria, will focus on education and the HIV/AIDS pandemic which the United Nations estimates infects more than 30 million people in Africa. The disease has killed at least 20 million worldwide.


President George W. Bush has proposed a US$15 billion emergency plan to help stem its spread in Africa and the Caribbean, but critics have complained the program leans too heavily on the promotion of abstinence and fails to place enough emphasis on condoms.


"I think it's a very fair divide," Laura Bush said. "The whole plan all along has been Uganda's plan which is the ABC - abstinence, be faithful and the correct and consistent use of condoms."


Uganda has brought its AIDS infection rate down from 30 per cent in the 1990s to about 6 per cent now.


In a part of the world where one in three people had a sexually transmitted deadly disease and in countries "where girls feel obligated to comply with the wishes of men," women needed to know that abstinence was a choice, Bush said.


"But when girls are not empowered, when girls are vulnerable, their chances of being able to negotiate their sexual life with their partners and to encourage or make their partners use a condom are very low."


Opponents contend that money under the Bush program is often siphoned off to faith-based groups that preach abstinence, but supporters say in Africa promoting the use of condoms has failed to halt the disease.


"I'm always a little bit irritated when I hear the criticism of abstinence, because abstinence is absolutely 100 per cent effective in eradicating a sexually transmitted disease," Bush said.


- REUTERS