17 Aug 2007: ISS Today: The Case of the Bulgarian Health Workers in Libya - Between Justice and Politics

17 August 2007: The Case of the Bulgarian Health Workers in Libya - Between Justice and Politics

 

After eight years in detention and two death sentences, the five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian medical doctor have at long last been released and allowed to travel to Bulgaria. They arrived in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, in the early hours of Tuesday, 24 July 2007 aboard a French government plane. They were accompanied by Cecilia Sarkozy, wife of the newly-elected French president Nicolas Sarkozy, and Ms Benita Ferrero-Waldner, the External Affairs Commissioner of the European Union. The Bulgarian authorities had granted Bulgarian citizenship to the Palestinian doctor a month earlier so that he could benefit from any transfer deal. There is a prisoners’ transfer agreement between Libya and Bulgaria that is legacy of the Communist era. The six were pardoned by a Bulgarian presidential decree as soon as they arrived.

 

The five Bulgarian nurses had all come to Libya in the early and late 1990s, except for one who had been working in the North African country since 1984.  The Palestinian doctor had been living in Libya since 1969 when he was just two years of age. At the time of their arrest, all but one the health professionals worked at the Al-Fateh Hospital in Benghazi, the second largest city in Libya. The other worked at a different hospital in the same city.

 

The six workers were first arrested in 1999, along with others who were soon released. The Libyan authorities charged them with deliberately infecting more than 400 Libyan children at the Al-Fateh hospital with HIV/AIDS virus. About 50 of the children have since died of the pandemic. The six consistently denied the charges and claimed that their confessions were extracted under duress.

 

After about five years in detention, they were first sentenced to death in May 2004, after being convicted by a Libyan court. These initial death sentences were overturned in December 2005 by the Supreme Court, which ordered the health professionals to be retried after noting “irregularities” in their arrest and interrogation. The retrial began on 11 May 2006 at a criminal court in Benghazi, concluding with yet another death sentence on 19 December. This verdict was upheld by Libya’s Supreme Court on 11 July 2007 despite intensive campaigning by not only the relatives and well wishers of the health workers, but by almost all of the countries of Europe and numerous international human rights organisations.

 

Five days later, however, the case was examined by the Supreme Council of Judicial Authorities (the highest legal body in Libya) which commuted the death sentences to life imprisonment. This ruling reportedly followed a financial settlement with the families of the infected children, each one receiving about $1m. According to Islamic law, which dominates the Libyan legal system, a death sentence may be overturned should the families of the victim agree to accept compensation.

 

Although Bulgaria and the EU have publicly refused to accept any idea of compensation, arguing that this might imply admission of guilt, the payout is reportedly coming from an international fund which the Libyan government, the EU, the Qaddafi Foundation run by the Libyan leader’s son, Saif Al-Islam, and other organisations are contributing to. A 17th July report on the English web site of Al-Jazeera claimed that 150 of the victims had already received cash transfers.

 

But while the release of the six workers made the headlines of almost all the Western media, it is striking to observe the cemetery-like silence of the Libyan media on the issue. The closest they came to covering the story was a short news bulletin in the 24th July editions of two papers (Azzahf Alakhder and Al-Fajr Al-Jadeed, both of Arabic langue and government-controlled) talking about a phone call President Qaddafi had had with French President Sarkozy the previous day. Nothing about the content of the phone call was revealed.

 

All this call the whole saga into question: Was it after all a matter of justice, or it was rather a staged political game to gain diplomatic scores? If it was the latter, who orchestrated the game in the first place and what was the expected benefit of doing so? In any case, what lessons can we learn from this affair now that the workers have been released?

 

The accused always insisted they were innocent. Several Western AIDS experts backed their claim, submitting that the children may well have been infected started before they arrived at the Benghazi hospital, or else the infections were due to poor hygiene conditions and the reuse of syringes in the hospital. Support of this kind was, however slow in coming. At first, only a few people cared about the fate of the Bulgarian nurses. Even the Bulgarian authorities only got involved after they were heavily criticised by the relatives and colleagues of the nurses. The real push in the Bulgarian government’s intervention came when the country was cleared to join the EU in 2005.

 

The European Commission soon took over the case and, in diplomatic terms, invested heavily in it. The bloc’s external affairs commissioner made numerous trips to Libya, meeting the prisoners and working to improve the conditions of the infected children. The EU also made the normalisation of relations with Libya conditional on a quick and satisfactory ending of this affair. Was all this spurred by pure humanitarian considerations, or was the EU following its policy of solidarity amongst its member states? Why did the Europeans, notwithstanding their public denials, agree to provide funding to help Libya look after the infected children?

 

As the saga drew to a close, the competition for political point-scoring became clear among the different European actors. Because of his personal involvement in the affair, including through sending his wife to meet Colonel Qaddafi in person, the French president, Sarkozy, was criticised for  only stepping in at the eleventh hour and yet attempting to “hijack” the fruit of the long years of hard labour of other people. In fact, on the day the six workers arrived in Bulgaria, the popular French daily, Le Monde, carried two front page stories about the issue. One of them claimed that “the release of the medics happened thanks to the efforts of the French government and the European Commission” (L’Elysée et Bruxelles ont fait libérer les infirmières bulgares!). 

 

On the other hand, the way the Libyans handled the issue raises a number of questions: What did Libya stand to gain from incriminating five nurses from a country that was not even a member of the EU and which has limited economic clout?  If it was a pure legal issue, why was the Qaddafi family so involved in almost every aspect of the case? The Libyans had charged that the medics deliberately contaminated the children on the order of either the CIA or Mossad. But why make such outlandish claims, especially given that the only doctor who was implicated was a Palestinian? Why was there no mention of these charges in the concluding chapters of the case? 

 

There is no denying that Libya has enormous interests in normalising relations with the European Union, and the same goes for the EU in having access to the lucrative Libyan oil industry and newly liberalised market. These considerations must have played a big role in securing the release of the medics. But what this case highlights for Libya and other African countries is the importance of good governance at home and respect for the rule of law. Had the political system in Libya been known for these qualities, there would have been less skepticism about the legal process that resulted in the conviction of the health workers. An efficient and trustworthy legal system would also have spared the medics the ordeal they have been subjected to over the past eight years. More importantly, relatives of the infected children would have had real answers to what really happened to their children. That more than 400 children came to be affected by the same disease at the same time in the same hospital is a fact that cries out for some explanation. But now a satisfactory answer to what happened may never come to light.

 

Issaka K Souaré, African Security Analysis Programme, ISS Tshwane (Pretoria)