Mission Impossible

Stephen Lewis wears his trade union politics over his heart. Dressed in a crisp blue denim shirt with CUPE monogrammed on the pocket, he sits across the dining room table of his comfortable Forest Hill house on a rainy Saturday. The room is a hybrid: solid Canadian furnishings and eye-grabbing paintings, pottery and sculptures in bold, undulating shapes and colours, from Africa. More than alert, Lewis seems coiled like a Slinky that has boinged into Toronto and is about to boing out again to another speech, another rally, another fundraiser. Last night he slept in his own bed for the first time in weeks—“not bad,” he says, reciting an itinerary that swept through Namibia, New York and Ottawa. He’ll be off again tomorrow. It’s all part of a schedule that has him delivering 200 speeches and travelling some 300,000 kilometres a year—and that’s in addition to the 10 overseas trips he makes annually as the United Nations’ special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa.

Lewis speaks with the wallop of a stump preacher and the passion of an old-style unionist. A virtuoso of superheated adjectives, he’s always talked as though there were an editor buried in his larynx, tidying his syntax and thumbing through a thesaurus. Ironies are “acrid,” observations are “heretical” and forces are “malevolent.” What’s different about Lewis the UN envoy, versus Lewis the politician or Lewis the labour arbitrator, is his focus. Battling AIDS in Africa has been his most visceral campaign. It has burnished his messianic fire.

His noisy diplomacy has made him a fundraising and advocacy juggernaut. He’s not the only UN special envoy for HIV/AIDS. But the other three—George Alleyne for the Caribbean, Nafis Sadik for Asia and Lars Kallings for eastern Europe—are so low profile that most people don’t realize they even exist. Lewis is the only one who makes headlines, not just in Africa but around the world. That’s because he knows how to court the media, he’s willing to work 20 hours a day, and he’s determined to spread uncomfortable facts about AIDS even if it means antagonizing his own employer.

Here’s what he said in a media briefing at the UN in March: “We came out of the Holocaust asking ourselves how we could ever live with the recognition that much of the world knew what was in those trains rumbling down the tracks to Auschwitz. We came out of Rwanda asking ourselves how it was possible that the world was inert in the face of a hideous genocide that everyone knew was taking place. It is my contention that years from now, historians will ask how it was possible that the world allowed AIDS to throttle and eviscerate a continent, overwhelmingly the women of that continent, and watch the tragedy unfold, in real time, while we toyed with the game of [UN] reform.”

Nevertheless, Lewis’s grassroots fact-finding, backroom negotiating and public lamenting is about to change. He’s saying goodbye to all that official diplomacy and quitting the unrelenting “part-time” job he’s held since May 2001. There was no set term, but five years seems long enough to have made a mark—for Lewis and the UN. First, though, he’ll address an estimated 20,000 delegates at the 16th AIDS Conference in Toronto this month. The conference theme, “Time to Deliver,” is meant to challenge governments and the UN itself to live up to their prevention and treatment commitments. It is actually a reprise of the chorus Lewis has been singing ever since he embarked on his odyssey as Kofi Annan’s representative.

As he makes the shift from public advocate to private citizen, he likes to joke that everything about him is “former,” making light of his previous careers as a political organizer (including for Tommy Douglas in 1956), politician (provincial leader of the New Democratic Party when Bill Davis was premier), labour arbitrator, media commentator and diplomat. But there’s nothing former about his commitment to social justice. He learned that from his father, David Lewis, federal leader of the NDP, and his mother, Sophie Lewis, and it’s been a theme coursing through his personal and professional life ever since. He’ll take up a number of new assignments, including becoming a scholar-in-residence at McMaster University (where he’ll research and lecture on globalization) and taking an advisory position at the Harvard School of Public Health. Most significantly, he’s going to spend more energy on the Stephen Lewis Foundation, a charitable organization for AIDS relief in Africa that he founded in 2003 and which is run by Ilana Landsberg-Lewis, the eldest of his three children.

Forget public policy, forget multilateral diplomacy, forget consensus; by setting up the foundation, which provides practical and swift relief to people suffering from HIV/AIDS—from buying coffins in which to bury victims to supplying school fees for orphans—Lewis has created a huge private demonstration project that bypasses lugubrious and slowpoke bureaucracies. At age 68, after a lifetime of collective action and five years of exhaustive pleading, he may well have found his most effective role: working directly with those most affected by the AIDS pandemic. In that sense, stepping down as envoy is a beginning rather than an ending.

The difference between people living with AIDS on this side of the world and those dying from the virus in Africa is money. Few financial resources exist on that continent to test patients, buy drugs, train local people to distribute them effectively and supply support systems for the millions of grandmothers who have been left to mourn their daughters and raise their motherless grandchildren. No wonder Lewis wanders the globe like a portable Wailing Wall. “We have all the will and money in the world to fight the war against terrorism,” he says. “What happened to the will and the money to fight the war against AIDS?”

He was not an innocent about the UN and its Byzantine ways when he was appointed envoy. He’s been involved with the organization since 1984, when Brian Mulroney made him Canada’s ambassador to the UN (an appointment that still surprises Lewis, because of their opposing political views). He stayed on as a UN special adviser on Africa and then as deputy executive director of UNICEF from 1995 to 1999. He knew from frustrating experience how sluggishly the UN approached change or direct intervention. But like a battle-scarred general, or a recovering politician, he couldn’t resist one last campaign.

“All I could bring was advocacy,” he says about the envoy position, pointing out that he had no money from the UN to dispense. His job was to make the issue of AIDS in Africa “come alive” and to help people in western democracies find a way to connect with the devastation. Surprisingly, his diplomatic experience was of very little use. Instead, Lewis drew on his background as a politician.

“Everything I learned in the Ontario legis­lature I have applied in this job,” he says. “How to frame an issue, how to document it, how to push it forward.” Lewis’s privileged position as a senior UN representative gave him unfettered access to political leaders and high-levelbureaucrats, as well as remote villagers. What he took to those meetings, however, was a hard-won political lesson: “The impact that you make depends on the quality of your material. Research is fundamental.”

He came back from Lesotho and Swaziland in February, for example, and reported that “the virus has the countries by their throats and they are gasping for survival.” Then he produced the statistics he had gathered. Quoting from a Demographic Health Survey, he revealed that the infection rate was 25 per cent in Lesotho and 42.6 per cent in Swaziland. That is horrifying enough, but the rate jumps to 56.3 per cent in pregnant women between the ages of 25 and 29. “That’s the highest prevalence I have seen registered in any age group anywhere,” Lewis said. “The mind fractures at the thought of it.”

After each trip to Africa—and he’s made almost 50 in the past five years—he has held a press briefing at the UN and handed out a written text to reporters. “Every time it got some coverage.” More important than the coverage was the boom­erang effect. People in the region got the sense that the UN finally had somebody who was on their side.

There’s a downside to all that coverage, all that lamenting and expostulating. At the 2004 AIDS Conference in Bangkok, he demanded to know why the same people who successfully fought apartheid were allowing their fellow citizens to die of AIDS. As a result, Lewis is not welcome in Thabo Mbeki’s South Africa, one of the most AIDS-plagued countries in the world. (Mbeki continues to deny the virus’s virulence, and the minister of health has suggested a course of vitamins as an antidote.) This makes it impossible for Lewis to meet with officials and AIDS workers there. The price of re-entry is a public apology to President Mbeki and his government for “insulting” them.

Lewis’s failure to budge Mbeki’s intransigent attitude is one of the reasons he thinks his replacement as envoy should be an African. “For some time I have been arguing that it is very strange for a white Canadian to be representing Africa. And it must be a woman,” he says. That belief has nothing to do with gender equity. It is entirely pragmatic. As the majority of infected adults are women, it is essentially a women’s issue. “They must have a woman’s voice to speak for them,” Lewis says.

The other problem with rhetoric is that fatigue can set in—physical and emotional on his part, and intellectual in the media. Oh, there goes Stephen Lewis again. But that ennui is not true of students and regular people, and professionals working in the field. Lewis has built solid bridges with AIDS activists and experts. He’s considered a close and valuable colleague by Dr. Jim Yong Kim of the World Health Organization and Dr. James Orbinski, the former chief of mission in Rwanda and Zaire for Médecins Sans Frontières. “He broke all the diplomatic rules and made the devastation of AIDS in Africa a human reality, not simply an epidemic in some far-off land,” says Orbinski. “Anything I can do to help him, I will.”

Lewis recently made an appearance at the Bloor Street Cinema for a screening of Tsˇepong: A Clinic Called Hope, a Canadian documentary about a small medical outpost in Leribe, Lesotho, that tests and treats AIDS patients. The movie theatre erupted with applause when he was introduced. Afterward, he was swarmed by people seeking advice and wanting to know where they could volunteer or send money. There is a great deal of goodwill and energy on the ground in Canada. Lewis’s challenge has been to connect it, in a positive way, to the other side of the world, where women are writhing in agony in huts as their children watch them die.

Lewis had an epiphany about a year and a half into the job. He was being ground down by what he was witnessing in Africa. Two things happened around the same time. In December 2002, the extended Lewis fam­ily—his wife, journalist Michele Landsberg; daughter Ilana and her baby Zev; his son Avi, a documentary filmmaker; his daughter-in-law, author Naomi Klein; and his younger daughter, Jenny, a casting director—went on a two-week vacation to Costa Rica. “We wanted to take my dad very far away, so there would be no telephones,” remembers Ilana. Lewis is an indefatigable worker, but he’s always been able to connect with his family when he’s home. This time was different.

According to Ilana, her father was “haunted,” unable to pull himself away from the horrors he had seen. Not even his 10-month-old grandchild, Zev, could distract him for long. “He was ravaged. There was something raw and disturbing about how preoccupied and sad he was.”

Lewis talks about it in slightly different terms. “Everywhere I went as envoy, women were dying, orphans were not in school, people living with AIDS had no capacity to feed themselves.” He could see that “putting $10,000 into the grassroots of a project” could transform the lives of local people, but there was a cavernous bureaucratic gap between need and supply. The UN’s broad multilateral policy initiatives seemed to swallow resources rather than distribute them.

As was his custom, at the end of his next visit to Africa, on his way back to Canada, Lewis stopped in Nairobi to visit a close friend, UNICEF regional adviser Paula Donovan. She listened to his eloquent but despairing exhortations and finally told him to “stop whining,” and go home and raise the money and put it to work where he could see it was needed.

How exactly to go about it was a dilemma he confronted in long conversations with Ilana. At that time she was 36, living in New York and working at UNIFEM, a UN advocacy organization for women. A trained lawyer and a new mother, she was coming to the end of her maternity leave and worrying about how she was going to cope as a single parent with a job that demanded a huge amount of travel. Dark haired and with a feminized version of her father’s facial features and enormous blue eyes, she shares more than a physical resemblance with him. Ilana stumped the political hustings with Lewis during three provincial election campaigns when she was in grade school, and transferred from U of T to Hunter College when he first went to New York as ambassador to the UN, partly because he was so lonely without his family.

They had always talked about social justice issues, but this was one time when working for the good of others could serve their personal needs as well. Ilana moved back to Toronto with Zev in late 2002 and started researching charitable foundations. The Stephen Lewis Foundation began in her kitchen in early 2003, with Lewis as chair, and three directors, all extremely knowledgeable about development work.

They were determined that administrative expenses would not exceed 10 per cent (government regulations allow twice that) of the money they raised. They already knew they wanted to fund small projects that would make an immediate and practical difference to the lives of people affected by the pandemic.

Lewis’s old friends in the trade union movement came in with generous amounts of seed money. Then Stephanie Nolen, African correspondent for The Globe and Mail, wrote an article that mentioned the foundation. Suddenly money started pouring in from individuals. Ilana remembers a letter carrier coming to her door one winter day, hauling a bag of mail. “Does Stephen Lewis live here?” he asked. “No,” she replied, “but I am his daughter.” A look of understanding came over his face. “Is he running again? I’d like to volunteer for his campaign.”

The money was coming in so fast that she had to ask another organization to bank their donations until they could get their charitable status. “What was shocking about it,” she explains, sitting in her Chinatown office as her younger son, toddler Yoav, offers us bites of his doughnut, “is that we thought we could raise a couple of hundred thousand dollars and do some good works. Instead, we had $700,000 in our first year.”

Three years later, they have raised a staggering $11 million in Canada, mainly from individuals, and funded more than 100 initiatives in 14 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, including paying school fees, providing training for home care, and starting the Grandmothers’ Project, which links women in Africa who are raising children orphaned by AIDS with some 40 grandmothers’ groups in this country.

The SLF has been given delegate status at the Toronto AIDS Conference. Ilana is taking full advantage of both the audience and the international attention this will attract; for instance, the foundation is bringing 70 grandmothers and 30 facilitators to Toronto from its projects in Africa to meet with 200 Canadian grandmothers for a pre-conference brainstorming session.

Meanwhile, her father intends to end his stint as envoy with a rhetorical bang that will reverberate around the world. At the closing session of the AIDS conference, he intends to speak “briefly, but toughly” about the need to develop a country-by-country plan to eliminate the pandemic. “How many conferences can you hold to say the same thing? Conferences from which emerge the same objectives?” he asks, his voice swelling as though he is speaking to a crowded room.

Lewis’s publisher, House of Anansi Press, is marking the conference by issuing a revised edition of his Race Against Time, last year’s Massey Lectures that so blistered the United Nations for inactivity that Lewis was afraid he would lose his job. He didn’t seek the UN’sa pproval of his manuscript, but he sent them the book just before publication and waited nervously for a reaction. “As far as I could judge, nobody read it for a very long time,” he chuckles. It took an article in The New York Times to attract the UN’s notice. Several discussions in due and judicious time led to the mutual agreement that Lewis should step down as envoy at the end of this year. The afterword in the new edition will be “quite provocative,” he promises. The message Lewis wants to convey is simple: you can defeat the virus.

And what of Lewis’s own performance? Has he been a success or a failure as envoy? How do you even measure success in a field as intangible as diplomacy, especially when so many people are still dying?

There are 40 million people infected with the virus around the world, 28 million of them in sub-Saharan Africa, of which nearly two-thirds are women. It is predicted that more than one in five children in Swaziland, Zambia, Lesotho and Botswana will be orphans by 2010. Transfer those statistics to Canada and we would have 1.2 million orphaned children in our midst: a social services nightmare, even for a rich and well-serviced country. That is the reality that haunts Stephen Lewis. It’s what keeps him fighting; all that’s changed is his platform.