Kenyan assistant environment minister Wangari Maathai poses Friday as she addresses the media in Nyeri, Kenya, after being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Ms. Maathai, the country's assistant minister for the environment since 2003, founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977. The largest tree planting project in Africa, it is aimed at promoting biodiversity and at the same time creating jobs and giving women a stronger identity in society.

By Wangui Kanina in Nairobi
October 11, 2004

The Kenyan ecologist Wangari Maathai made a typically combative start to her first day as a Nobel laureate by defending a recent suggestion that the HIV virus was made in a laboratory as a plot against Africans.

She became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for helping the poor with a campaign to plant trees and slow deforestation.

Ms Maathai, pictured, rarely reluctant to confront the powerful, said her comments in August were aimed at promoting an inquiring attitude to AIDS among Africans and fight the fatalistic notion that it was a curse from God.

"Would you solve the problem if it you believed it was a curse from God?" she told a news conference at the weekend. There was a theory that AIDS was created by a scientist in a laboratory as an agent of war, she said. "I was encouraging people to ask questions, which is what I always do."

Ms Maathai caused a furore in Kenya when she was quoted in the East African Standard as saying AIDS was a biological weapon devised to destroy black people.

"Do not be naive. AIDS is not a curse from God to Africans or the black people. It is a tool to control them designed by some evil-minded scientists, but we may not know who particularly did [it]," the August 31 article quoted her as telling a seminar in her home town of Nyeri.

The idea that AIDS began as a plot by Western scientists to control Africa's population is commonly heard across Africa.

At her lobby group's office, Ms Maathai said she never suggested any particular region was responsible for creating AIDS but she was suspicious about the secrecy surrounding the origin of the virus.

"Some people say it came from the monkeys, and I doubt it ... others say that it is a curse from God. But I say it cannot be that only black people are cursed, because we are dying more then any other people on this planet, and that's a fact."

Reuters, Agence France-Presse
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/10/10/1097406423992.html