Manslaughter: The unlawful killing of a human being without malice aforethought (Oxford English Dictionary).
Some commentators think Thabo Mbeki’s decision not to provide antiretroviral drugs to South Africans suffering from AIDS (even while neighbouring Botswana and Namibia were using them to save thousands of lives) was genocidal. The policy, according to a new study by researchers at Harvard, caused over 365,000 premature deaths among adults and infants – about half the number who died in the Rwandan genocide, and many more than died in Bosnia.
Genocide is the “deliberate extermination of a national, racial, political or cultural group.” Mbeki’s stubbornness mostly killed black South Africans (a racial group), but proving he deliberately exterminated them would be tough. Proving mass manslaughter, on the other hand, should be a slam dunk.
The Treatment Action Campaign dropped a 2003 manslaughter case that charged the health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang with “unlawfully and negligently [causing] the deaths of men and women and children.” Despite the fresh evidence of the death toll caused by Mbeki and his henchwoman, however, the new spirit of co-operation between activists and the government means old wounds are unlikely to be reopened. I asked one of those activists what the families of those who died unnecessarily would think about letting Mbeki and his health minister off the hook: “Most of those relatives,” she replied, “don’t think someone else is responsible. Because of stigma and discrimination, they mostly blame the person who died.”
