【By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.／陳世欽譯】

SOWETO, South Africa — Shortly after Michel Sidibe became executive director of the United Nations’ AIDS prevention agency, a court in Senegal sentenced nine gay men, all AIDS educators, to eight years in prison for “unnatural acts.” 

In one of his first moves as the new chief of U.N.AIDS, Mr. Sidibe, 59, flew to Senegal to ask its president, Abdoulaye Wade, to pardon the men. Mr. Sidibe, the son of a Muslim politician from Mali and a white French Catholic, asked the president — who is married to a white Frenchwoman — if he had ever suffered discrimination.  

“Oh, Sidibe, you have no idea,” came the reply. “And for not marrying a Muslim.” “Then, Uncle,” Mr. Sidibe said, using the African way to politely address an older man, “why do you accept that men here are put in jail for eight years just for being gay?” Shortly afterward, the charges were dropped.  

Mr. Sidibe has persuasively delivered difficult messages to African presidents in his three years in office: Persuade your men to get circumcised. Tell your teenage girls not to sleep with men for money. Shelve your squeamishness and talk about condoms. Help prostitutes instead of jailing them. Ask your preachers to stop railing against homosexuals and order your police forces to stop beating them. 

Mr. Sidibe calls anyone younger than him “my brother” or “my sister.” He seems to remember, and hug, everyone he has met before, from drivers to senators to journalists. And he regales guests at parties with long parables.  

“You can’t say ‘no’ to Michel,” said his predecessor, Dr. Peter Piot, a Belgian who hired Mr. Sidibe away from Unicef. “I was at a conference in Ethiopia in December, and for the first time, I felt I was hearing ‘ownership’ of AIDS by African countries. They weren’t talking so much about the donors, but about it as their own problem. I think he had a lot to do with that.” 

Thanks, in part, to Mr. Sidibe’s lobbying, South Africa and China are revising their approaches to the epidemic, and he hopes Russia and India soon will too. And the notoriously conservative African Union has created a committee to help populations it previously ignored: homosexuals, prostitutes and drug abusers.  

Dr. Aaron Motsoaledi, South Africa’s health minister, said Mr. Sidibe pursued him relentlessly at a United Nations conference in New York until they met. They joined in an effort to get Jacob Zuma, the country’s new president, to budget more money for AIDS drugs . “I was new to my office, and this man was just chasing me,” Dr. Motsoaledi said. “He insisted South Africa must take leadership on AIDS for Africa. I said: ‘What about Botswana?’ But he insisted.”  

Mr. Sidibe said he appealed to Mr. Zuma’s sense of social justice, telling him the lives saved would be his noblest legacy. In 2010, Mr. Zuma increased the national AIDS budget by 30 percent and, along with Mr. Sidibe, publicly took an AIDS test. Thirteen million South Africans have done so, and nearly 500,000 people are getting treatment.  

Mr. Sidibe also met with King Goodwill Zwelithini of the Zulus, one of South Africa’s largest tribes, to give him evidence that circumcision — banned in the 1820s — protected men against AIDS. In 2010, the king ordered all Zulu men — perhaps five million — to have the operation. 

While the global battle against AIDS is still being lost, it is being lost less badly. Four years ago, 250 people were newly infected for every 100 people getting treatment; that number is now down to 200. 

Mr. Sidibe has fought hard against harsh anti-gay laws in Africa, against hate crimes like the “corrective rapes” of lesbians by South African gangs — and against the widespread belief that homosexuality is a Western import. He pressed China to admit that H.I.V. was spreading rapidly among gay men and drug users and that the 500,000 Chinese working in Africa and 40 million migrant laborers, many of whom visit prostitutes, were potential risk pools. China, which Mr. Sidibe described as “immune to pressure, but very pragmatic,” soon reversed several policies. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao spoke at the United Nations in 2010 about holding the hands of AIDS patients, and zero-tolerance drug policies were dropped in favor of methadone and syringe-exchange. 

Mr. Sidibe focuses his lobbying on the BRICS countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. If each takes the lead in its region, he says, it will drag others along. “In my village they said: If you want to kill the snake, you must hit the head,” Mr. Sidibe said. “In Africa, South Africa is the epidemic’s head.”