Glenn was known as a sociable guy, always in for a party, organising barbecues and inviting everyone round. However, for his next birthday his twin sister, Tracy, would be the one making plans. They would be turning fifty and were set on celebrating the event together. The party was planned for September and was intended to be the highlight of what had turned into a sad year after the death of their father just a few months before.
Glenn wasn’t medically trained; he had graduated with a degree in economics from Bangor University in 1987. His first job was in television, working as a journalist and producer for the BBC. Glenn’s life as a gay man had made him especially aware of the dangers of AIDS and the need to prevent or to cure the disease. Frustrated by the world’s slow response to tuberculosis and Ebola and the consequent proliferation of drug-resistant strains, the former BBC journalist had become involved in educating people on the subject of AIDS. He was also a communication officer for WHO’s tuberculosis and Ebola campaigns. Tuberculosis, considered one of the ‘big three’ diseases—the others being AIDS and malaria—had an especially terrible impact on people with HIV, with one in four dying of tuberculosis rather than AIDS. Glenn had become acquainted with Joep Lange in Geneva where Lange had worked for WHO at the beginning of the nineties. Joep was already an important researcher back then and his clinical research into preventing and treating tuberculosis and other diseases contracted by AIDS patients efficiently and cheaply was being taken very seriously even in those early days.
Martine de Schutter had played a significant role in AIDS Action Europe from its establishment in 2004. Under her leadership the organisation grew into a network of over four hundred non-government organisations from Europe and central Asia, becoming a major force in the European HIV policy field. Martine’s work took her across the world and, like her other colleagues on the plane, she was looking forward to the Melbourne conference.
Like Joep, Martine was very involved in the struggle against inequality where health was concerned. It was difficult for her to accept that the level and the quality of medical treatment a person received depended on the country where they were born. The unfairness of it disgusted her. After working for WHO in South America, Martine returned to the Netherlands to work in the international fight against sexually transmitted diseases in Europe and central Asia. She worked passionately at keeping AIDS prominently on the European health agenda. She also worked hard at getting it onto Eastern European agendas, but that was a much more difficult proposition.
Martine was a single mother; raising her child alone had been a conscious choice. People around her told her she had a big heart, but Martine knew that although she loved people, the most prominent space she had in her heart belonged to her son. A proud mother, she frequently talked and boasted about her sixteen-year-old; although she was almost constantly on the road to somewhere, she never left her boy alone—he was always in safe hands with her younger sister, who was also his guardian.
This year Martine had stepped up another ladder and become the managing director of Bridging the Gaps, which aimed to provide vital drugs to those marginalised groups most vulnerable to HIV/AIDS across Africa, Asia and Latin America. She loved the work and she was good at it. She had a natural ability to connect people and she was making significant progress in identifying ways to break down the barriers for these groups to access crucial health services. Now the job she loved was taking her to Melbourne.
Pim de Kuijer worked as an HIV lobbyist, trying to convince the Dutch government to allocate more money to finance AIDS programs in regions where it would make the biggest difference. A political activist and parliamentary lobbyist for Stop AIDS Now!, he worked relentlessly to expand and build upon the quality of the AIDS effort from the Netherlands to developing countries. His experience in politics—he had previously interned for two former Dutch members of the European parliament and was a member of the liberal political party D66—and his incredibly detailed knowledge of the Dutch parliament were crucial in understanding who to approach in seeking support for his work for the Stop AIDS Now! group.
It was his aim to head back to his beloved Kuala Lumpur after the Melbourne conference, to meet up with old friends and colleagues. The 33-year-old Dutchman had always been a cosmopolitan who loved city life but some years ago, after working for the European Commission in Kuala Lumpur, he had returned to the Netherlands by train, journeying through the heart of China and Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railway. He’d loved the adventure of it, meeting and talking to people from all walks of life while travelling.
The AIDS movement had previously gone through a rough patch when, in 1998, Jonathan Mann, the former director of WHO’s international AIDS program, had died when a Swissair flight from Geneva to New York came down over Nova Scotia. It had been a big blow for a movement that had become accustomed to losing its leaders, mostly struck down by the illness they worked so hard to combat. But new scientists and lobbyists had stepped up and taken hold of the baton. People like Joep Lange, Pim and the others on their way to the AIDS conference had the combined expertise to possibly one day find a cure to the disease that was mercilessly killing millions and then to promote that cure throughout the world.
Because he longed and hoped for a just world, where all people could live without being subjected to discrimination and could enjoy freedom, Pim was regarded by his colleagues as an idealist. Believing politics could change the course of history, he had arranged training workshops for politicians in Sarajevo and gone on several election missions. Pim had been in Ukraine working as an international observer during the elections in 2006 and 2007. He believed in democracy and had supported Yushchenko and Tymoshenko; he felt honoured that he had been able to contribute to a better future for all Ukrainians.
On his way to Australia for Stop AIDS Now!, he would be flying over the country he had tried to help find its way along the difficult path towards democracy. He was sadly aware that Ukraine had a long way to go and that to this day it was still subject to controversy, corruption and ethnic clashes. Ukraine was in turmoil and the country hadn’t found democracy; instead it had tumbled into a war.
Chapter 8
Crimea, February–March 2014
The remarkably quick and mostly bloodless coup in Crimea may go down in history as one of the smoothest invasions in modern times. Days before, maybe weeks before, President Vladimir Putin had asked his parliament to approve his request to use force in Ukraine if it was needed to protect Russian interests there. By that time the Russian chess pieces were already in place. For much of February thousands of Russian soldiers had quietly taken up positions on Russian bases in the south.
Russia, like the US, had military bases on foreign soil, and existing agreements with Ukraine made it possible for their biggest base to be situated at the Crimean peninsula on the Black Sea. During the weeks of protest in Kiev, Russian forces had already begun moving around Ukraine, apparently legitimately and according to the terms of their military agreement. Crimea, with its many ethnic Russians, was suddenly full of Russian armoured trucks and aircraft.
This was an infiltration, not an invasion, and it was welcomed by a large portion of the local population. As tension in Ukraine mounted towards the end of February, with Russians and the EU accusing each other of interfering in the internal affairs of another country, the rest of the world looked on, expecting Russian ships and armed forces to arrive and capture Crimea when in fact this had already happened by stealth.