Richard Holbrooke made peace in Bosnia and used his term as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations to get the Security Council to address the AIDS epidemic. Now he has taken on another daunting assignment: enlisting multinational companies that do business in Africa and other AIDS-wracked regions to deal with the disease among their employees.

AIDS, which killed an estimated three million people last year alone, has no cure. The drugs that keep it at bay cost a lot, must be taken for life and carry side effects. Finally, the politics are treacherous: Scruffy but savvy street activists have forced huge drug companies to relinquish patent rights and slash prices in poor countries. No wonder executives cringe.

But Mr. Holbrooke, who worked for 15 years as an investment banker with Lehman Brothers and Credit Suisse First Boston, wants to convince big business that doing nothing will make their shareholders cringe more. "The disease is decimating their workers -- often the more highly skilled cadres -- and it's killing the economies of many counties, which affects all companies" doing business there, he says.

In developed nations, where industry often requires highly trained employees, the value of keeping employees healthy is clear. But Africa still has large agricultural, mineral and petroleum sectors that often employ low-skill workers. With masses of unemployed Africans desperate for any job, the economics of health care can be a hard sell.

To win over reluctant chief executives, Mr. Holbrooke says he will use "a combination of pressure and praise, persuasion and outrage." Thomas Schick, an executive vice president at American Express, describes the approach as "extraordinary perseverance and creativity." Mr. Holbrooke also hammers away at the facts -- not only the jaw-dropping statistics about AIDS, but also case studies of how some businesses have responded.

His soapbox is the Global Business Council on HIV/AIDS, which he took over in August at the request of United Nations Secretary General Kofi Anan. Though the organization has been around for four years, it had fewer than 20 members and, according to many AIDS workers, had accomplished virtually nothing. Mr. Holbrooke tapped Ben Plumley, a former pharmaceutical-company executive who worked at UNAIDS, to run operations day to day. Seed money came from the Big Three of corporate philanthropy: Bill Gates, who gave $500,000, George Soros, $250,000, and Ted Turner, $200,000.

Mr. Holbrooke and his team have doubled Council membership, bringing in heavyweights such as DaimlerChrysler AG, Unilever PLC, AOL Time Warner Inc., American Express Co. and the National Basketball Association.

Mr. Holbrooke hopes to swell the membership to 200 companies by the end of next year. Besides annual dues of $25,000, Mr. Holbrooke says he wants member companies to set an example by adhering to a loose standard of "best" practices: a nondiscrimination policy to protect workers and reduce the AIDS stigma, frank prevention and treatment education, condom distribution in the workplace, counseling and testing, and treatment.

But for a man known for blunt talk, Mr. Holbrooke is vague about what "treatment" means. He says, "We would hope that large companies would extend this to antiretrovirals," the only drugs that target the AIDS virus itself. That isn't a requirement of membership, though. "I do not want a situation where we scare away members," he says.

That has brought criticism. Membership without providing drugs "gives a stamp of approval these corporations don't deserve," says Sharonann Lynch of the Health Gap Coalition, an activist group that plans its own campaign demanding treatment for HIV-positive employees.

But for now, Mr. Holbrooke is focusing on success stories. "In the case of Coca-Cola," he says, "there was a substantial internal argument about whether it would be good or bad to associate the largest soft-drink company in the world with a fatal disease. What happened is that the CEO, Douglas Daft, listened to the debate for a while and then decided."

Five months ago, Coca-Cola Co. announced a partnership with UNAIDS to provide marketing and distribution help. This month, a Coke executive from Kenya started developing ad campaigns, and Coke trucks have begun delivering educational materials in Zambia and Nigeria. In the workplace, Coca-Cola offers antiretrovirals to its 1,500 employees in Africa, though not to the far larger group of workers at bottlers.

Mr. Holbrooke says that top Coke executives expressed surprise at the favorable publicity their effort has received. "They discovered that good practice on AIDS turned out to be a good business practice," he says.

Mr. Holbrooke does hint that he will be putting companies on notice. Anglo American PLC, the mining giant and a new member of Mr. Holbrooke's Global Business Council on HIV/AIDS, has announced it will run a feasibility study to decide whether to provide antiretroviral drugs to its vast work force. Currently, an Anglo insurance plan pays at least some of the cost of those drugs, but it covers only about 12,000 of its approximately 85,000 workers in southern Africa. Mr. Holbrooke says his staff "will be looking very closely" at whether Anglo equalizes AIDS care.

These days, he also has to figure out how to advocate for AIDS in the wake of the terrorist attacks. Since Sept. 11, he says, "the attention focused on AIDS has understandably diminished." But, he says, "comparing the war on terrorism and war on AIDS is like `Sophie's Choice' -- which of the children do you want to sacrifice?"