Global History of HIV/AIDS Activism

Interview of Nikolaos Papadogiannis with Georg Bröring, 9 June 2025. Georg Bröring reflects on his leading role in the Aids & Mobility project in Europe, the project’s engagement with people of migrant origin from various parts of the world, and the limitations in its interactions with organisations from the Global South. #Europe

 

Nikolaos Papadogiannis: Thank you very much once again, Georg, for our discussion today. Could we start by you introducing yourself, please?

Georg Bröring: Yes. Thank you for inviting me to discuss with you. My name is Georg. I studied social work in Germany from 1980 to 1984. I worked for one year in youth care, and then I moved to the Netherlands, where I studied social and cultural anthropology, and I graduated in 1989 or 1990 from the University of Amsterdam. Then, already in 1987, during my studies, I was invited by the German Aids Foundation to support them with a project on safer sex activities. That was in 1987 that I went back to the Netherlands and finished my studies, and in 1992 I started to work in the HIV field in the Netherlands for the National Committee on Aids Control. This was a commission installed by the government to provide HIV policy advice to the government, because at that time, AIDS was still quite new, so new policies had to be developed. Then, in that organisation, there was a colleague who thought about specific activities for migrant populations. That was based on a study by the WHO, which was called ‘Aids and Mobility, Migrants and Travellers’. I think that the WHO published it in 1989 and then again in 1991. Then, the project ‘AIDS & Mobility’ in Europe started. Initially, I was a project officer, and later I was also the project manager in AIDS & Mobility Europe. I coordinated that project until 2007. And at that time, the project was transferred to Germany, to a migrant organisation. I started freelancing after 2007. So that is, in short, my professional background.

So, as I mentioned, the starting point was this study by the World Health Organisation. And then there were a few dedicated colleagues, and they came from a few European countries. I think the founding members of AIDS & Mobility were in the Netherlands, in Belgium, in France, in Spain and in the UK, because these were also the countries that, also due to their colonial history, had a high number of migrants living there. And the project was, at the beginning, mainly focused on providing information in different languages, and that was mainly in Arabic or in Turkish, the main languages of the migrant populations in these countries. It also offered information in other languages, like Papiamento. At that point, there was no treatment yet. So, the project was very much focused on prevention.

At that stage, I think it was in 1991, and project members applied for European money. The European Commission also supported the project financially. It was first on an annual basis. And later we also had multi-annual funding.

So, in short, in the first years we collected a lot of information. What was there already? We had a little documentation centre in which we collected information from the different countries so that they could learn from each other. How do you address certain populations so that we do not have to reinvent the wheel? At the beginning, there were a few HIV organisations working with migrants: In the UK, it was the NAZ project. In Belgium, it was SIREAS. In the Netherlands, the National Aids Committee on AIDS Control. The Deutsche Aids-Hilfe in Germany was also involved from an early stage in AIDS & Mobility. And France, I think it was AIDES that was involved. And Spain, I don’t remember which organisation it was. I think they were based in Barcelona. So, the first things were indeed mainly collecting information and documentation, and also developing materials for different migrant populations.

I should clarify that we made a distinction between migrants and travellers. And for travellers, we meant mobile people like tourists, but also business travellers. And migrants were those people who settled in another country for a longer period. This was the main distinction. I think it was also the distinction that the WHO used in their publication that I mentioned earlier.

So that was the beginning. And then I think after a few years, the European Commission said, ‘It’s nice that you do this work, but we want you to be a really European network’. Thus, we extended our work to the other European countries, and that was before the extension of the EU to the Eastern European countries. And there were also some discussions because other migrant organisations in Europe were not so happy that AIDS & Mobility was the organisation that received the main funding on that issue. So, whenever these migrant organisations applied for money, they said, no, you have to go and work together with AIDS & Mobility. There were some tensions, but altogether we worked fine, and it was also a request from the European Commission to have national focal points in every country. We selected an organisation as a national focal point. It was also sometimes a bit tricky, because we were not always able to decide who would be our national focal point. Sometimes a country would also say, no, this is we appoint this person to be the national focal point. So, there were these national focal points. I think it was around 1996 or 1997. That was a big change.

Another big change of course was after 1994-95, the new treatment. It was no longer only about primary prevention but putting treatment on the agenda, so as to make it affordable and accessible to migrant populations in the different countries. So, the work plan was mainly focused on a few things. Every year, we made a country report. Our national focal points contributed in terms of country reports, what was happening in their respective countries, or the national focal points also received a small amount to organise national meetings. We also organised every one or every two years a migrants’ meeting. And that was in particular for migrant populations from the different European countries, and that was really a very important moment, also to have access to information. What is really the concern in communities, how they experience HIV, what are their attitudes, but also their responses to HIV. There was very rich information that came through these migrants’ meetings, as we called them.

And then we entered 2000. Were there any major changes? Yes, at some point, the funding mechanism also changed, but that is a little bit later. I think in 2006, European funding became very, very complicated. So we had to provide information about who is going where in the different countries. We said, ‘come on’. I mean, that is just too much to ask. And that meant at the end 2007, our application was approved, but we refused to accept it. We said, ‘no, under these conditions, we cannot work’. It was quite a shock for the European Commission, but we were happy to shock them because this mechanism didn’t work for a 1 million project, where you don’t have the people to take care of all these administrative requirements. So, we thought, ‘no, thank you, keep your money’.

At that time, we transferred AIDS & Mobility to the Ethno-Medical Centre in Hannover in Germany and handed over all the documents. We also thought it’s a good idea to give it more into the hands of migrant organisations. We were also sometimes a little bit criticised for not being really community-based. But on the other hand, the funding mechanism was so complicated that the smaller organisations were not even able to take over this administrative load.

So that’s in a nutshell what happened over all the years. Questions from you at this stage.

Nikos: Yes. Thank you. Georg, one question I would like to ask is about the migrant meetings. I would be very much keen on learning about, if you remember, any particular things that you began to think differently after participating in those migrant meetings. What do you feel that you learned from the migrants?

Georg: First of all, the organisation was really in the hands of our colleagues in the different European countries. There was always a working group from different European countries. I think what was very interesting was also the testimonies that were done, and a lot of mutual learning. And what we learned was also the stories of communities, especially the African communities at that time. In many African countries, HIV was still very much neglected at that point. There were also myths around preventing HIV transmission. For instance, if you sleep with a virgin, that can prevent you from catching HIV. I mean, that was very early years of the epidemic. And that was also very good to address within the communities, so they can discuss it and find the best way to address it.

And of course, there are also service providers that we’re also learning from, from those present at the migrants meeting. And it was also a moment of solidarity between groups. Of course, it was not only a learning thing, but also related to empowering people to re-energise. And these were also very important elements, but also the training about how to address HIV in different settings? What is a good way to do a presentation of new materials, a presentation of videos? So more and more was coming up. It was before the digital era, also. I mean, today you find everything online. At that time, that was not the case. In that sense, it has also changed and changed a lot.

Nikos: Georg, do you remember any ideas from migrants, especially from the Global South, that you incorporated in the activities of Aids & Mobility? For instance, any symbols you used in prevention campaigns, or stories from migrants?

Georg: Yes. For instance, while the North was much more informal than the South, very often it was better to put someone with a white jacket, to play the doctor and to have the doctor’s advice. We would look more into community advice, where they would look much more into official doctors’ advice. So that is a small example.

What else can I think of? Now it was also mainly later when we talked about access to treatment. And it was very important to learn also what the different rules and regulations are in each country. So, how do migrants experience what the legal regulations are? I remember that even in Italy, at that time, if I remember correctly, the doctors helped provide medication. But at the same time, they also had to report to the police if the migrants were not registered. So, every resident, legal or illegal, would have access to a medical card with which they could have doctor’s appointments and medication. So the system was there, but the migrants wouldn’t know about it. And even there, if they went to the doctor, they could find a completely different attitude. This was not always restricted to migrants, but could also apply to the non-foreign-born population. And how doctors would address people with HIV was and still is sometimes not very sensitive in some regions. I have a friend in Naples who said that his experiences with doctors are quite, quite shocking. Sometimes I think how lucky we are in the North, where doctors are also trained on sensitive issues and being culturally sensitive. This cultural sensitivity was, of course, also one thing in the migrants’ meeting. If health professionals attended, they would exchange ideas with people from the global South. This was also a learning experience.

Nikos: Georg, speaking of those legal challenges and the different attitudes in different countries towards migrants, if I may ask, how did you try to establish contact and relationships of trust with migrant communities?

Georg: The relationship of trust was not that complicated, because most of the colleagues, also the national focal points, were partly from migrant organisations. The Eastern European countries did not have so many community-based organisations established. Such organisations were much more common in the in Spain, in France, in Belgium, the UK, Germany and the Netherlands. The southeastern countries had much less NGO experience. That was also reflected in our national focal points in southern Europe. The Eastern European ones, as well, could be governmental organisations, while the West and the North would be much more migrant organisations. But I remember that in Bulgaria we had very dedicated colleagues. In Romania and Poland, the same.

In the Central Eastern European countries there were no postcolonial migrants. It would be much more the Roma population that would be addressed. Moreover, Poland would have in the field of sex work much more influx from the Eastern European countries, from Russia, from Ukraine.  In any case, establishing trust was not, I think, such a huge problem.

Nikos: Speaking of your international collaborations, Georg. Did you collaborate with organisations based in the Global South, like Naz India or Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa?

Georg: Far too little. That was also partly due to the funding mechanism. I mean, we had European funding. We were not even allowed to bring people from outside Europe. We were not allowed to organise meetings there. So we wouldn’t have any funds to do that. Our partner organisations may have had contacts with organisations in the Global South; the French certainly had. But we, as a European project, did not have direct links. I remember we also had a discussion on how we can expand a little bit more in that direction. But it was not possible, not feasible.

And it was not a huge funding. We were a small team. In our team, we had a project officer, me as a coordinator, a communication officer and a secretary. So that was our team here in the Netherlands, those were the staff costs we had then. We had money for publications and for coordinating meetings. And the rest was going to the partner organisations. I think we had a budget of 1 million for three years. So that is 300,000 per year. It’s not big money. That was all. We had a steering committee at that time, also with representatives from other European countries. And they also sometimes said, ‘Oh, you have to think bigger if you look at migration worldwide’. But even in Europe, it’s such a huge thing. And we were this tiny little project.

On the other hand, I think we were quite well-known. For instance, at the International AIDS Conferences, we were quite visible, always present. We also cooperated with other European networks like the sex worker networks, the drug users networks, because there’s always also a connection between drug use and mobility, and with sex work and mobility. In that sense, I think we did achieve something. But compared to the overall issue of migration in Europe, it was, of course, a rather small thing.

Nikos: I have actually found some material from Panagiotis Damaskos about the network on men selling sex, and also found your collaboration with Hydra in Berlin, the sex workers’ rights organisation.

Georg: Yes, that was in the very beginning. That was actually also the first two projects that I was involved. The male sex work project was one that we developed small education materials for Polish and Romanian sex workers who were quite present in Berlin and Amsterdam. Also, it was a collaboration, and the sex workers were also very much linked to organisations in Poland, because it was in the 1990s when the borders opened between the East and the West. I forgot to mention this opening of borders had a big impact on mobility and migration in Europe, very often linked to sex work. So we worked a lot with Hydra, but also the European project on sex work, which was called Tampep. There were many cases, when they also came to our meetings, and we went to theirs. And that was also a nice learning experience, because if you had the over-bridging issues of migration and sex work, they learned from our experiences and we learned from theirs.

Nikos: Very interesting. Regarding the migrant meetings and your collaboration with migrant communities, I was thinking about the debates in HIV organisations in the 1990s about whether to use the term ‘gay’ when talking with people from the global South, or migrants from the global South, about men having sex with men. Was this a debate you had in Aids & Mobility as well?

Georg: Not so much about MSM [men who have sex with men]. We probably slowly switched from gay to MSM. But we adopted the term MSM very early, I think. And if I recall correctly, I think it was not a big issue in Aids & Mobility. What was more of an issue was the definition of migrants and travellers, because it carries different connotations across countries. And also it changed over the years. And at some point, it was black and ethnic minorities in the UK where the Germans just moved from foreigners to migrants. Now the Germans move from migrants to people with a migrant background. So language is always in movement.

I always tried not to be too strict with myself. I said, ‘Okay, we need to have the debate, but it should not split us because we are on the same page here. Please don’t feel, um, insulted if someone uses the incorrect word. The more important thing is that we work on the same issues’.

So in that sense, as you also can see, the first documents always of Aids & Mobility had ‘migrants’ in the in our publication. Then, later, we switched to ‘ethnic minorities’. Of course, MSM did play a role. But for many African communities, that was not the main issue because there’s also much more heterosexual transmission [of HIV].

Nikos: Was the term ‘race’ also a contentious point within Aids & Mobility?

Georg: It’s a very good question. Not really, because we did not use it. It is very interesting that the word ‘race’ itself is used very, very differently in European countries. And they also have their different historical backgrounds. In France, for instance, it was not allowed to report on different communities. They were not even mentioned in the epidemiology. They were not allowed to make distinctions. In terms of developing materials, this is really stupid because if you want to address specific communities, you need to make a distinction [between different cultural communities.

Nikos: Let me keep asking about debates. Another one has been, even up to the present day, within HIV work, whether to collaborate with, and how, faith leaders from migrant communities and the Global South. Was this something that you discussed and did?

Georg: Yes, we also had a meeting on that, but these things also happen much more on the local level, where people collaborated. But I recall that we had a meeting or a publication on that. But I must say that I’m not 100% aware. I remember also that our British colleagues said, ‘Oh, forget about the religious leaders, we need to work with religious communities. We don’t have to change bishops and imams, etc., we need to make changes in the different religious communities. We never had, let’s say, a major meeting in which we invited Catholic, Protestant, and Muslim representatives.

Nikos: What about artists from migrant communities? Did you collaborate with them?

Georg: Artists? Only as little sidekicks. They were invited to visualise, uh, information materials at the meeting. Of course, we also had artists perform, whether it was music or other things. Then we would have communities involved. But here again, I mean, it’s also a little bit of a shortcoming that we did not have the intensive collaboration with the countries in the South themselves. So we may have had an artist with an African background who lived in Belgium, and a Moroccan background who lived in France, and they would take part and contribute one way or the other, but this was no major part of our activities.

Nikos: In the migrant communities with which you collaborated, did you encounter any difficulties in interacting with people of various genders? Was this an issue that came up in the discussions?

Georg: Yes. It was mainly in the 90s, 92, 93, 94. We had expert meetings on east-west mobility and drug use, and on sex work. And then we also invited people from Eastern [European] countries. There were also, of course, people from the sex worker community, but the people that were sent from governments to those meetings were really these officials, and you could see that they were not interested at all. HIV was an issue that they didn’t want to talk about, but they had to go there because the ministry sent them. That was not very effective. And sometimes I had the impression they stayed for the 2 or 3 days and then said, ‘okay, we are leaving’ [without having achieved much]. There were also dedicated people, but some people were just representing their country because they had to. And there was still a lot of stigma in many countries. So, yes, many participants were not the most open-minded people in terms of sexual orientation. I also recall one colleague who was homophobic.

For us, it was also learning moments that there’s also an attitude outside of our own bubble. Maybe you recall that Ireland was the only EU country where you still had the right of birth. So if the baby were born in Ireland, they would automatically have Irish nationality. And according to this colleague, it was on all these African women coming to Ireland to give birth in Ireland to make sure that they have the Irish passport. I have no idea about the number of people who did that, and it may have happened. I can imagine that it happened, but whether it was a massive influx, I cannot believe that. But in his country report, that was the main issue that he addressed.

Moving to the present day, there are still some initiatives in terms of migration. The EU has also funded another project recently, the four C project [Crossing Countries, Crossing Communities], which was coordinated by the Dutch Aids Fonds. So I mean, migration is still quite an issue also in Europe. And HIV is not so much an issue anymore in that sense. It went down as a priority.

Also, when we started, migrants had different priorities. And that was also one of the lessons when we had the migrants meeting, they said, ‘okay, we have so many other issues, whether it’s just pure survival or other work, housing, etc., and then HIV is not on top’.

Nikos: I would now like to ask you about your activity after 2007: Did you engage in any initiatives on AIDS and migration after that point?

Georg: No. After I handed over, there was one more request from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. I did some work for them, but I lost touch with the Ethno-medical Centre, and I moved on afterwards. I was not so much more involved in the content, but much more into the process, into more project management. And I saw that the new generation coming up, so I let them do their work. I’m happy to support with project management, process support, etc. After my involvement in Aids & Mobility ended, I did a lot of freelance work and reviewed funding applications for the European Commission. So for me, it was also the chapter that closed. I did it for 17 years.

Nikos: Thank you very much indeed, Georg, for our discussion in general. Let me ask, is there anything that you would like to add, perhaps?

Georg: No, not really.

Nikos: Thank you so much once again, Georg.

Georg: Thank you so much. Good luck with your work! It was a pleasure to discuss with you.