[BRIEF NOTE] On Libya's HIV show trial
Dec. 19th, 2006 11:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldVia the New York Times, an article on the ongoing HIV trial in Libya:
I mentioned this case last December, predicting that the Libyan government would find some way to not execute the five Bulgarians and one Palestinian held on trumped-up charges. It still might, since the judicial murder of five citizens of Bulgaria, a country soon to join the European Union, would be an excellent way for Libya to scuttle its tentative rapprochement with Europe and the wider world.
Make no mistake: In all probability, these six people are innocent of the charges made against them. Scientists working at Oxford University have demonstrated that the pattern of HIV infections, and of co-infections with different hepatitis viruses, strongly suggest a breakdown of basic sanitary conventions in the Benghazi children's hospital. The Libyan state has resisted calls for independent review, instead producing a shoddy report to try to buttress the state's case. It certainly isn't as if Libya is free of HIV infections to begin with, not with patterns of IV drug use that has led to an "almost tenfold increase in infections in young men in the early 2000s" and the presence of a large immigrant population from high HIV-seroprevalence sub-Saharan Africa.
Luc Montagnier, discoverer of HIV and author of a previous report that also clears the accused, said it best when he said that the existence of the HIV infections was "embarassing politically for Gaddafi, but there is the pressure of the parents, who absolutely need to find a scapegoat. Of course this can't be the Libyans, so it falls on the medics." Blaming the foreigners always works.
It shouldn't here, not at the expense of six innocent lives. I'd normally refer people to the website of the Libyan embassy in Canada, but the site seems to be down. How about you try to pull up the contact information there, and on the sites of its kindred elsewhere in the world, too?
A Libyan court on Tuesday again sentenced five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor to be shot by a firing squad for deliberately infecting more than 400 children with H.I.V., more than 50 of whom have died. The decision complicates Libya’s efforts to improve relations with the West.
[. . .]
The episode began in February 1998 when the nurses arrived to take up jobs at Al Fateh Children’s Hospital in Benghazi, the country’s second largest city. By August that year, children at the hospital began testing positive for H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. Health authorities soon realized they had a major problem.
An investigation concluded that the infections came from the wards where the Bulgarian nurses had been assigned. Dozens of Bulgarian medical workers were arrested, and vials of H.I.V.-tainted blood were found in a videotaped search of one nurse’s apartment.
According to a Libyan intelligence report submitted to the court, that nurse, Kristiyana Vulcheva, later confessed that the vials had been given to her by a British friend who was working in Libya. She said she and her colleagues had used the vials to infect the children.
Colonel Qaddafi subsequently charged that the health care workers had acted on the orders of the Central Intelligence Agency and Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad.
I mentioned this case last December, predicting that the Libyan government would find some way to not execute the five Bulgarians and one Palestinian held on trumped-up charges. It still might, since the judicial murder of five citizens of Bulgaria, a country soon to join the European Union, would be an excellent way for Libya to scuttle its tentative rapprochement with Europe and the wider world.
Make no mistake: In all probability, these six people are innocent of the charges made against them. Scientists working at Oxford University have demonstrated that the pattern of HIV infections, and of co-infections with different hepatitis viruses, strongly suggest a breakdown of basic sanitary conventions in the Benghazi children's hospital. The Libyan state has resisted calls for independent review, instead producing a shoddy report to try to buttress the state's case. It certainly isn't as if Libya is free of HIV infections to begin with, not with patterns of IV drug use that has led to an "almost tenfold increase in infections in young men in the early 2000s" and the presence of a large immigrant population from high HIV-seroprevalence sub-Saharan Africa.
Luc Montagnier, discoverer of HIV and author of a previous report that also clears the accused, said it best when he said that the existence of the HIV infections was "embarassing politically for Gaddafi, but there is the pressure of the parents, who absolutely need to find a scapegoat. Of course this can't be the Libyans, so it falls on the medics." Blaming the foreigners always works.
It shouldn't here, not at the expense of six innocent lives. I'd normally refer people to the website of the Libyan embassy in Canada, but the site seems to be down. How about you try to pull up the contact information there, and on the sites of its kindred elsewhere in the world, too?
