Bulgarian medics freed, return from Libya

The ordeal of Bulgarian medics convicted of infecting Libyan children with AIDS (my last post on the subject is at http://mayas-corner.blogspot.com/2007/03/hiv-trial-in-libya-part-6-last-why-most.html) is over. First, their death sentences were overturned and replaced with life imprisonment. This was linked to agreements with EU guaranteeing treatment for the infected children, compensations for their families and funding an AIDS hospital in Libya. Then, after visits by the French presidential couple, Libya allowed the five nurses and two doctors to be transferred to Bulgaria to serve their life sentences here, as an agreement for judicial help between Libya and Bulgaria allows. Then, as our law allows, the Bulgarian president Parvanov pardoned them. The act of pardoning was issued swiftly and read right at the airport.
I hope the medics will be able to recover from what they had to endure and go on with their lives, though of course nobody can give them back the lost years or compensate for their suffering.
The Palestinian doctor could benefit from the same track to freedom because he had been granted Bulgarian citizenship. So here the Bulgarian state, generally not a very admirable one, did the right thing and followed the principle of leaving nobody behind. Dr. Hajuj will likely later move to the Netherlands, where his family resides. But anyway, he has his own state now and this state is Bulgaria.
As a friend of mine said, "Thanks to God and to all who did what was necessary for the rescue of those people." I would add my special thanks to all Libyans who defended them or at least doubted the official version about their guilt.
Most people in Libya seem outraged by the release (though, as far as I know, there have been no riots). I think that those who still believe in the medics' guilt are unlikely to change their opinions ever in the future, no matter what evidence is presented to them. I know Bulgarians who still think that the victims of the People's Court in 1944-45 were guilty.
Many non-Libyan Arabs believe in our people's guilt, similarly to most Libyans but without the same excuses. Now, because the children's families have received money (see above), Libyans are accused for being child sellers! Let me quote AngloLibyan's post The Democratic Arab World!: "The majority attacked the Libyan people for accepting the money to release the medics, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when I see comments from Saudis, Egyptians and other Arabs saying that the victims families sold their own children, it makes you think that Egypt and Saudi Arabia are such democratic countries that the government can never force them to accept anything!!!".
I commented, "We Bulgarians often say that there are no devils around our pool of boiling water in Hell. I.e. devils keep guard by other nations' pools because occasionally some sinner manages to crawl out and a devil is needed to throw him back into the boiling pool; but this is not needed for the Bulgarians, because as soon as one of them tries to crawl out, the others pull him back themselves. You guess we have this saying because we, unfortunately, are inclined to put each other into trouble rather than helping each other. But I think this applies to the pan-Arab "nation", too. Every time when an Arab nation tries to make something good for itself, other Arab nations will surely try to pull it backwards. Misery is easier to endure if you have company."
I hadn't expected that the HIV trial would become, among other things, an illustration of the merits of pan-Arabism!

The HIV trial in Libya, part 6 (last): Why most Libyans believed the official story

This image, which I copied from AngloLibyan's blog, seems to be very popular in Libya. At http://lonehighlander.blogspot.com/2005/04/case-441999-story-of-bulgarian-medics.html, Highlander shows it being used by demonstrating HIV-infected Libyan children. The author and copyright status of the image are unknown to me. I'll be grateful to any reader who informs me about these details, so that I could give credit and ask for permission. UPDATE: The author is Mohammed Izwawa (thanks to Suliman who informed me, see his comment to this post; the name seems to be spelled also Ezwawi). I cannot find Mr. Izwawa's e-mail; if he is reading this and disagrees with his work being shown here, he can post a comment or e-mail me (mayamarkov at gmail dot com) and I'll remove it.

This amateur psychological "study" is the last part of my sequel about the trial in Libya; the previous parts are, respectively, at http://mayas-corner.blogspot.com/2006/09/hiv-trial-in-libya-part-1-infection.html, http://mayas-corner.blogspot.com/2006/09/hiv-trial-in-libya-part-2-victims.html, http://mayas-corner.blogspot.com/2007/03/hiv-trial-in-libya-part-3-tale-of-two.html, http://mayas-corner.blogspot.com/2007/03/hiv-trial-in-libya-part-4-how-infection.html and http://mayas-corner.blogspot.com/2007/04/hiv-trial-in-libya-part-5-discussing.html.
This part was the most difficult for me to write. Remember Diogenes who took a lantern to search for The Human? Anyone who tries to explore the hidden spaces of human mind needs a lantern, for he is likely to find little light where he is going. Moreover, because I am not a Libyan and my people differs from the Libyans in many respects, the intended recipients of my message will most probably dismiss it as mere bigotry. I have even considered omitting this part and letting Libyans, one day after they set aside their more serious problems, to search their souls themselves. However, such a bright future seems unlikely to come, so I'll end my sequel as planned. I won't try to make this post concise - let it be as long as it gets.
Why do most Libyans agree with the official version that the AIDS epidemic in Benghazi was caused intentionally? I think some really believe it while others only claim to believe. So we have two groups to consider.
1) Libyans sincerely believing in intentional infection
The official story that the infection was deliberately spread, especially in its original CIA-Mossad version, seemed so absurd to me that I wondered how could any sane adult believe in it. Even a 12-yr old, I thought, would laugh and say this is a good idea for a video game. However, we must remember what Einstein said, "Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe." Recently, one of my relations said to me she believed cures for AIDS, plus all types of cancer, were discovered but drug companies were hiding them in order to sell their current expensive and inefficient products. At the same time, a popular TV host (Milen Tsvetkov, for Bulgarian readers) was launching a hysterical campaign against immunizations because of the rare but severe complications of some vaccines (I wish him to see the video at http://www.kevinleitch.co.uk/wp/?p=538). So stupidity is by no means a Libyan patent. However, in a normal society different views are freely expressed and so you have many different types of stupidity, instead of one dominating. The situation is different in a dictatorship, where you are brainwashed round the clock by the official propaganda and have very limited access to alternative information sources. Of course nobody knows better that the Libyans that the TV speaker's "Good evening" is the only part of the news likely to be true, but humans cannot live in informational vacuum, so most of them finally succumb to propaganda. In this context, it is noteworthy that Qaddafi's version isn't very popular among Libyan expatriates who live in normal informational environment. To cite some examples, Hannu, Suliman, 7mada and Smokey Spice reject it.
Let me give a small sample of official Libyan propaganda. As Suliman mentioned in a comment to my earlier post, Libyan sources, without giving the full text of Dr. Montagnier's in-court testimony, claim that it "was damning to the case of the accused" (http://mayas-corner.blogspot.com/2007/01/what-made-libya-at-end-of-2006-similar.html). (This reminds me of the joke about Napoleon who said in his afterlife, "Soviet propaganda is a great thing. If I had it, nobody would ever know I had lost the Waterloo battle.") An even more fruitful approach is using the infected children and their families. Remembering how useful was for the anti-Vietnam war propaganda the image of a single napalm-burned child, you can figure out what can be done with more than 400 young victims. An example can be found at http://anglolibyan.blogspot.com/2007/03/wisams-story.html. The mother of an infected boy claims that "Sanjaka the Bulgarian old nurse" (presumably Snezhana Dimitrova) has given him an unauthorized shot: "I saw with my own eyes Sanjaka injecting a syringe in to my son's drip, when the nurse noticed that I was looking she got scared and quickly hid the syringe, I asked her what was that medicine for and told her that he is not supposed to have any medications at this time... Yes I saw her inject my son with my own eyes." I'll duscuss later the families' claims and their reflection on other Libyans, let me now just mention that if the story is true, this woman should be telling it not in a newspaper but in the court. As should be expected if the defendants are picked randomly, the evidence linking them to the infected children is very thin. It is in fact so thin that a mother who could testify to have actually seen nurse Valya Chervenyashka inject her child was a key witness and it was a blow for the prosecution when she died of AIDS. (It is another question that only in the twisted reality of totalitarian Libya a nurse in a children's hospital can be charged with giving shots to children - what actually was she expected to do to earn her salary?)
Another reason for Libyans to believe in intentional infection is that they regard the Benghazi epidemic as a world precedent. It seems that the intra-hospital infections in other countries and the importance of unsafe transfusions and injections for spreading the disease are still unknown to most Libyans. Indeed it is in human nature, when something awful happens to us, to think we are the first and only ones in the world hit by it (and realizing that thousands or millions other people have suffered the same is an important part of recovery). But in this case, the propaganda also helps. See e.g. http://anglolibyan.blogspot.com/2007/02/unite-for-children-unite-against-aids.html. At the top of a continent devastated by AIDS for decades, Libyans are being told that theirs is "a real tragedy that the world never experienced before", "no crime ever committed was as horrible as this crime that was committed against our children", "there is no crime worse than this crime". And once you believe that the Libyan epidemic is unique, you will require a unique explanation. Only if you are outside Libya, the question "how bad is this case in comparison to the AIDS disaster in Africa as a whole" may come to your head (Suliman's comment to the same post).
I think that, despite my conviction that unwanted behaviour mustn't be excused in order not to be encouraged, I have almost excused the Libyans for believing the unbelievable. However, a seemingly small but very important detail remains: the personalities of the accused. One day, when the Q-man's rule will be just a painful past, the Libyans will have to deal with the question, "Why did our dictator choose exactly this story to sell to us? He implicated CIA because he knew we hated America; logically, the Americans had bombed us. He implicated Mossad because he knew we were anti-Semites; well, almost everybody was at that time. But why did he choose as scapegoats foreigners, mostly white, mostly women? Did he think we were sexists, racists and xenophobes? And was he right, after we believed him so easily?"
I think it isn't a coincidence that of the seven accused medics, five are women and the only one acquitted is one of the two men (Dr. Zdravko Georgiev). Witchhunts in Europe also targeted mainly women. It seems that cultures repressing sexuality tend to see something satanic in women. This applies not only to young attractive women but also to others who aren't much of a temptation, so this phenomenon is puzzling to me. Possibly someone else could try to clarify it.
The impact of racism and xenophobia is easier to explain. They had been inherent to human even before he evolved into human proper and although restrained today, they are still here and raise their ugly heads every time when something bad happens. Earlier this year, Atanas Predov, a Bulgarian guest worker in Spain, died of methanol intoxication. His relations didn't believe this to be the cause and requested an autopsy which revealed that both kidneys were missing. It was concluded they had been taken for illegal transplantation and this had caused the man's death (source e.g. http://www.sofiadnes.com/modules.php?m=news&nid=24783 in Bulgarian, http://p083.ezboard.com/Bulgarian-Victim-of-Criminal-Organ-Removal-in-Spain/fbalkansfrm11.showMessage?topicID=1325.topic in English). Significantly, no one of the Bulgarian comments I've seen questions the idea that Spanish doctors kidnap Bulgarians from the street and kill them by removing their kidneys for transplantation. In the early 1990s, many Bulgarians objected foreign adoptions out of fear that the children would be used as organ donors. A Bulgarian journalist, mentioning that such fears are popular in many countries despite the absence of proven cases, described this is a modern technological version of an immortal myth - that our children are kidnapped or killed by foreigners. Indeed, the parents of at least two missing Bulgarian children believe, without any serious reason, that the children have been kidnapped and taken abroad (you can read about one of the victims at http://savestin.exactpages.com/).
Taking the above into account, imagine how bad could the situation be in Libya, where the Others are all the time demonized by the official religion. Indeed, one of the reasons why I hate Islam is that it uses, and enhances in order to use, every single built-in defect of human nature. To help the demonization, Libyan prosecutors have accused the Bulgarians also in illicit sexual relationships, distilling alcohol, drinking alcohol in public and illegally transacting in foreign currency. To the Western mind, it seems absurd that additional minor charges are allowed to obscure such a grave case. However, within the if-it-moves-forbid-it Koranic philosophy these charges are not minor. As an anonymous commentor explained at http://mayas-corner.blogspot.com/2006/11/alfa-roma.html, a woman wishing to have sex with a man other than her husband is not a human sinner but a monster able to do a first-degree child murder or any other outrage without even hesitating. The currency transaction seems to imply a violation of the Koranic ban on interest and prove that the accused are extremely greedy people able to do everything for money.
The belief of so many Libyans that the accused medics deliberately infected their patients does more than moving the anger away from Qaddafi's health care establishment. It affects the collective Libyan psyche. Without this belief, the siblings and classmates of the infected children would vow to become AIDS researchers and find a cure; instead, now parents are vowing to join al-Qaeda and seek revenge. Such pledges reveal what is going on in people's heads and for that reason, although very unlikely to be fulfilled, may help us predict the future.
2) Libyans trying/pretending to believe
While many Libyans sincerely believe the official story about the Benghazi epidemic, many others just try to convince others, and usually also themselves, that they believe it. Of course, trying to accept something you don't really think means personality split. I've mentioned that not only patients with schizophrenia but also most of the so-called normal people are a combination of two or more incompatible personalities. You don't agree? Haven't you asked yourself why you so often cannot predict how a well-known person will behave in a certain situation? This is because, even if you have been around him for 20 years, you have no way to know which of his personalities you'll be dealing with. But let's return to the question why Libyans claim and try to believe in intentional infection.
Compassion is a burden for the soul. Therefore, if a person is suffering and we cannot (easily) help him, we tend to brush compassion off by convincing ourselves that he brought it upon himself. In other words, we are inclined to blame the victim. E.g. when some years ago in my city a 16-yr old girl was shot dead by a policeman as she was leaving a bar with her boyfriend, a surprising number of people reacted by saying that good girls don't go to bars. In the Libyan HIV case, I am sure that if the infected patients were adults, much more time would pass before linking them to the hospital. Everybody would think they had contracted the disease by illegal sex or drug use. But because children are infected, and infected not by HIV-positive promiscuous mothers but by medical procedures, the Libyan society has to feel compassion for the children and their families. This is already a burden. It would be too much of a burden to pity, apart from the children, also a bunch of tortured and gravely accused foreigners. So people feel better to think that the defendants are guilty. And logically, the more abuse and undue imprisonment the medics are forced to endure, the stronger will be the psychological need of ordinary Libyans to consider them guilty.
In fact, subjects of a dictatorship tend to blame every victim of the regime. When the Communist rule in Bulgaria was dismantled in 1989 and we first enjoyed freedom of speech, I was surprised to see how many Bulgarians believed in the guilt of political prisoners. (In fact, there had never been a strong anti-Communist opposition in Bulgaria and most "political prisoners" were jailed for offences such as wearing a wrong kind of clothes, speaking Western languages, listening to the BBC, telling quite innocent jokes about the regime and the dictator, or for nothing at all.) My friend explained this widespread opinion. She said, "People just feel compelled, after not entreating for the prisoners, to believe in their guilt." I replied, "But who would dare to entreat? We had justified fears for our own safety!" My friend said, "Few can think like you, because people hate regarding themselves as cowards." I call this phenomenon "survivor syndrome". It surely helps people to live under a dictator without feeling depressed all the time, but slows recovery after the dictator is toppled. The survivor syndrome means that the more atrocities a dictator does, the stronger will be the motivation for his (surviving) people to whitewash him and blame his victims. We are observing this very clearly in Iraq.
There is also another, more noble reason for Libyans to convince themselves in the medics' guilt. This is the sense of solidarity with the parents of the infected children and the wish to believe everything they say. Let me discuss this important issue in more detail. The initial article in the La magazine cited a number of parents who accused the hospital staff in rudeness and incompetence but expressed no suspicion of malicious intent, neither pointed to medics of a particular nationality. Of course the parents, most of whom had accompanied their children at the hospital, shouldn't believe very easily in the official version. E.g. some of them are likely to know that their children haven't been treated by any of the accused medics (the defense team revealed that such infected children exist by simply comparing the dates when the patients were treated at the hospital and the dates when the defendants were on duty). However, at a later stage the parents very actively supported the version of intentional infection and called for death penalty and huge compensations. Of course some of them, desperately needing somebody(anybody) to blame for their tragedy, found relief in seeking revenge against the accused, while others, even if not quite believing, would want the Bulgarians sentenced in order to receive compensations from Bulgaria (or its Western allies). These parents have every reason to think that Qaddafi will not agree to give money for their children and they have more chance to get the sums needed for treatment from a foreign source. They cannot think too much of justice and abstract truth and so on, the need of their infected child comes first.
After a court session last August when none of the defense witnesses appeared (I've blogged about this at http://mayas-corner.blogspot.com/2006/09/nothing-new-in-libya.html), Idris Laga, father of an infected child and chairman of an association of parents of the infected children, was delighted about the witnesses' absence and said it proved the prosecution thesis was correct. A more sophisticated person would express regret that the witnesses hadn't appeared to say their phony testimony and have it disproved, but we must be glad that Mr. Laga said what he said, because his words show us something important: the parents of the infected children aren't interested in fair trial and disclosing the truth, on the contrary, they will make every effort to obscure it. After de Oliveira et al. published their article in Nature claiming that the epidemic started before the defendants arrived to the hospital, Mr. Laga stated that the scientists "were not authorized by the kids' legal guardians to obtain samples" (Suliman's comment at http://mayas-corner.blogspot.com/2007/01/what-made-libya-at-end-of-2006-similar.html). With other words, we won't allow blood samples to be taken from our children because their analysis could prove somebody not guilty and so make his execution more difficult!
The cynic would also mention that the guardians (most likely the parents) seem too well informed about their rights for people fresh out of a dictatorship, so hasn't anybody instructed them? Indeed, in the above lines, I portrayed the parents as free people acting on their own free will, which is hardly justified. Remember the mother who allegedly saw nurse "Sanjaka" inject her boy (http://anglolibyan.blogspot.com/2007/03/wisams-story.html)? Let me cite the comment of Libyan-American Hannu, mother of four: "I am very skeptical of the story and the extent of truth in it. First, the fact that it was published in a Libyan newspaper takes away from its credibility. I got to the part "... when I saw with my own eyes Sanjaka injecting a syringe in to my son's drip..." and that's where I realized the Libyan propaganda behind the story... It is a fact that some of those families are being coaxed by the Libyan authorities to lie and distort things in exchange of false never-fulfilled promises. Who's to blame them!" Mickey Grant, who made a video about the case, has first-hand information that the families are indeed coaxed: "No journalist I know of has ever been allowed to do real interviews with the families of the children. I went to Rome where many of the children were being treated for that purpose and I found that the only way the families could participate in an interview was if a Libyan Agent was present and they were too scared to do that." (http://anglolibyan.blogspot.com/2007/05/what-is-real-number-of-libyas-aids.html; there you can see the video, too).
Some Libyans may think that while it is unfortunate that innocent people have been abused by the Libyan state the way they were, it is a good thing to force the West to pay for the children's treatment (especially after the Libyan government seems reluctant to pay). Indeed, demanding ransom after taking hostages is a much more reliable way to obtain money than appealing to people's humane feelings. However, what might benefit the families (because, while much of the money will surely go astray, some will serve its purpose) is a long-term PR disaster for Libya. I don't think that in our globalizing world somebody can afford not to care what others think of him. "How many Arabs does it take to change a light bulb? None. Arabs just sit in the dark and blame it on the Jews. Same thing with the HIV infection, but this time they blame foreign medics." This is the best of several samples of the "war declared on Libyans on the Internet", cited by AngloLibyan (http://anglolibyan.blogspot.com/2007/02/who-is-michael-sheilds.html). What should be more worrying for Libyans than these Web insults (apparently work of Bulgarian teenagers) is what adults are thinking, typically without saying it in public. The whole affair reinforced one of the worst steretypes about Arab Muslims - that they contact Westerners mainly in order to extort money from them at any cost. I advise Libyans always to stick to the claim that the demand to Bulgaria/West to pay for the children's treatment is solely Q-man's policy never approved by the majority of Libyans. Without true opinion polls, nobody can ever prove the opposite. Those who make voluntary fund-raising campaigns for the children should never imply that the West has any responsibility for the children's plight, either by conspiracy to infect them or by sanctions. Instead, a point should be made that these children are innocent victims of Qaddafi's health care system which, after allowing them to be infected in the first place, now refuses them adequate treatment, although Libya has enough money to afford it (esp. after lifting the sanctions).
And last, after discussing the most noble reason for Libyans to claim to believe Qaddafi's story, let me mention the least noble one: Islamism, i.e. taking to heart the Koran's demand to force Islam down the throats of non-Muslims. While Islam makes a person prone to sincerely believing bad things about the Others, Islamism includes deliberate lying in an effort to denigrate the enemies and so obscure their evident moral superiority. After the Islamists blame the West for their own crimes (Sept. 11) and for natural disasters (the tsunami), how could they resist to blame it for a man-made AIDS epidemic? Among the Libyan diaspora, I've observed almost 100% correlation between expressing firm belief in the medics' guilt and being Islamist (I prefer not to give links, because the aim of this post is not to attack my opponents personally). Within Libya, Islamism doesn't seem very popular... with one important exception: the city of Benghazi.
As I mentioned before in Part 2, strong feelings against the Qaddafi's regime existed in Benghazi even before the epidemic and were reinforced by it. However, the Q-man handled the crisis in a way I reluctantly admire. Knowing well the Islamists' minds, he knew that they were hating him but were hating much more the white infidels, especially the women (similarly to the Iraqi Islamists who, while disliking Saddam, love to hate America and its supporters). All he needed to do was to divert the anger and hate to appropriate objects. After that, interviewed ordinary Benghazeeans praised the Leader for helping the infected children receive justice and not caving in under Western pressure. Of course they couldn't say in front of the camera that they hate Qaddafi, but I had the feeling that the praise was at least 70% sincere.
This is why I am angry at the Benghazi residents. Unwilling or unable to use properly their brains because of heavy Islamist prejudice, they wasted their courage in vain and achieved less than nothing. Instead of being real danger or at least a thorn in the ass for Qaddafi, they became useful pawns in his game. When criticized by Westerners, he can always point at them and say, "You may dislike me but do you see the alternative? People ready to torch buildings because of a cartoon, people whose most cherished dream is to resurrect the 7th century." In the case of the AIDS outbreak, Qaddafi is responsible (though indirectly) but he manipulated the Benghazeeans so successfully that now he is more popular among them than before! Like an Iraqi who admires Saddam despite having a brother killed by the regime (linked and discussed by Sandmonkey at http://www.sandmonkey.org/2007/02/02/lmao/), Benghazi residents now admire the true murderer of their children. Indeed, Qaddafi gained so much from the whole affair that some Libyan expatriates, following the "Who benefits from this?" logic useful in disclosing many crimes, suspect that he caused the Benghazi epidemic intentionally, with or without the accused medics' participation!
I wouldn't want to end this post with such a bleak picture, but so be it, for even the worst truth is better than false hopes. In conclusion, I'd advise Libyans, when going to a hospital for intravenous injections, to ask what syringes and needles they'll need and buy them beforehand. And of course also to use condoms when making unauthorized love.

The HIV trial in Libya, part 5: Discussing unintentional infection

This is continued from part 4 (http://mayas-corner.blogspot.com/2007/03/hiv-trial-in-libya-part-4-how-infection.html). The end of the sequel will be devoted to the Libyans' attitudes towards the HIV case.
Although it is impossible to perform a real opinion poll in Libya, it is clear that most Libyans believe the accused in the HIV trial are guilty. This is reported by all foreign journalists and by the Libyans themselves. However, I think this seemingly homogenous public opinion is in fact divided into at least three distinct groups. Let me first address those Libyans who believe only in unintentional infection. (I don't understand why they are so confident that the police, even if wrong about the intentional infection, have found the right people; after all, inquisitional type justice systems like the one in Libya are known to routinely indict the wrong people even in very simple criminal cases. But let's not dig into this issue.)
The Libyan prosecutors, showing what Butler called stubborn idiocy, keep considering intentional spreading of HIV as the only hypothesis able to explain the epidemic in Benghazi. However, some ordinary Libyans, while believing that the police caught the right people, have come to the conclusion that the crime has most likely been of negligence. Two years ago, Highlander wrote, "I don’t want to believe that the Bulgarians could have deliberately given AIDS to Libyan kids" (http://lonehighlander.blogspot.com/2005/04/case-441999-story-of-bulgarian-medics.html). I'll try now to present the opinion of these Libyans.
"Let them acquit he lady who has never worked at the El-Fateh hospital, but I want the others punished. And, while I don't believe they acted intentionally, I don't mind them being sentenced as if they did, because the punishments for negligence are a joke, compared to what happened to the children. Even if you are right that they were picked randomly among scores of nurses and doctors doing absolutely the same things, they were caught and I want them sentenced. The Romanians may be happy to have a legion of infected babies and nobody punished - I am not. You described yourself how careless and good-for-nothing health workers spread HIV to every corner of Africa! I am sure this happened because nobody was ever held responsible. If several people are punished, hopefully the others will be more careful next time. Like Mark Twain, I think it is better to have one or a few innocent persons suffering than five hundred."
This viewpoint deserves respect, especially if free of the revengeful "I want somebody punished" attitude which too easily degrades into "I want anybody punished". The preventive, deterring role of the punishment, while somewhat unfair to the defendant in question, is a cornerstone of any justice system. However, will the guilty verdicts have preventive role? Will they send the right message to medics working in Libya?
No, they won't. First, if you don't prosecute people for violating safety rules, you cannot expect the sentence to force others to observe these rules. Second, prosecuting only foreigners will not encourage Libyan health workers to improve their work standards. Moreover, it will not have this effect even on foreign medics, because they know that if the Q-man needs them as scapegoats, he will get them, no matter how precisely they are working. Third, most important, all of the accused except Dr. Hajuj are nurses. As I commented once on Highlander's blog, "if there is something wrong in a hospital, it is the doctors' responsibility, not the nurses'. Doctors are better educated, paid and empowered than the nurses and have to supervise them." (https://www2.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=5760993&postID=114306313998064632).
Let's imagine that back in 1997-98, a nurse had told her patients' parents, "Your child will need intravenous injections, so please leave him here and find and bring at least 5 sealed needles, because the ones we have are non-sterile and unsafe." Would the parents be grateful? Some would, but most would react by going around the hospital asking questions and complaining and the nurse would quickly go into trouble. Or imagine that during a break some nurses and doctors are making coffee, a nurse comes and removes the coffee from the heating plate in order to boil needles and syringes. "I want to be sure that these are sterile and won't contaminate our patients." Would her superiors praise her and her colleagues be inspired to follow her example? No, their reaction would be, "Who do you think you are?". And most normal people have very strong herd mentality and sense of hierarchy. They'll prefer to risk infecting others and themselves with a deadly disease rather than confronting the who-do-you-think-you-are attitude. Then, who could hope that the risk to be arrested and sentenced will scare them enough to overcome this mentality?
Let me also quote from the remarkable essay Silence kills by J. Grenny (http://www.duncanworldwide.com/cc/SilenceKills.html): "The recent deaths of Jessica Santillan... and Jeanella Aranda..., resulting from carelessly mismatched blood types during organ transplants, illustrate the tragic results of silence... People who should have been aware of the blood-type mismatches simply said nothing rather than challenge doctors to follow the standard double-checking procedures... Why nurses and fellow doctors did not hold each other accountable for existing policies that already required cross-checks to ensure the accuracy of blood types? The answer, unfortunately, is that most health care workers operate in a culture in which silence is the preferred response when physicians violate protocols... The tragedy, of course, extends far beyond Jessica Santillan and Jeanella Aranda. A culture in which health care workers fail to hold each other accountable contributes to some two million hospital-induced infections each year and results in tens of thousands of unnecessary patient deaths. For instance, a federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study found that health care professionals wash their hands about half the number of times that policies require – a key factor in the spread of hospital-borne infections. The study probed whether redesigning the care environment through... more sinks available would help doctors and nurses to wash their hands when they should. The answer? It didn’t. What mattered most was whether or not the senior doctor washed his or her hands. Period. When the lead person set a bad example, not only did nurses, residents, and others not speak up, they fell in line – and failed to wash their hands as well."
Let's repeat: the key person was "the senior doctor". What happened to the senior doctors at the El-Fateh hospital who let the hygiene deteriorate to medieval standards? They were acquitted and cleared and can roam freely in their luxury cars, while five nurses and an ordinary doctor are hanging on death row. What message will this send to senior doctors of other Libyan hospitals?
To conclude: I think that even if Dr. Hajuj and four of the Bulgarian nurses have unintentionally contributed to the AIDS epidemic, their role has been quite a minor one, while those truly responsible got away with it. Punishing the "Tripoli six" will not give justice to the infected children. Neither will it help to prevent similar tragedies in the future or bring any good to the Libyan health care. We know from history that too many communities, when facing the onslaught of a deadly infectious disease, have reacted by losing their humaneness and doing irrational acts that could only worsen the situation. It is up to the Libyans whether to do the same or to show the reason and compassion that we hoped would characterize our age.

The HIV trial in Libya, part 4: How the infection must have occurred

This is continued from part 3 - the previous post (http://mayas-corner.blogspot.com/2007/03/hiv-trial-in-libya-part-3-tale-of-two.html). Here, I'll try to keep my writing as short as possible and to use instead citations from people who know better. Two important terms, used below, are iatrogenic - caused by medical procedures, and nosocomial - acquired in a hospital; both terms refer to health damage, usually an infection.
Let's begin from the beginning: decades earlier and thousands of miles away from the Libyan "crime scene", a virus found a new host. The following citation is from http://main.uab.edu/show.asp?durki=8535.
"Origin of HIV-1 Discovered
...Scientists at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) have discovered the origin of Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 (HIV-1)...The researchers identified a subspecies of chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes troglodytes) native to West-Central Africa as the natural reservoir for HIV-1...The final piece of the puzzle was put in place when the researchers realized that the natural habitat for Pan troglodytes troglodytes overlaps precisely with the region in West-Central Africa where all three groups of HIV-1(M, N, and O) were first recognized. Based on these findings, Hahn and her colleagues concluded that Pan troglodytes troglodytes is the origin of HIV-1 and has been the source of at least three independent cross-species transmission events...While the origin of the AIDS epidemic has been clarified, an explanation for why the epidemic arose in the mid-20th century, and not before, remains a matter of speculation."Chimpanzees are frequently hunted for food, especially in West-Central Africa, and we believe that HIV-1 was introduced into the human population through exposure to blood during hunting and field dressing of these animals," says Hahn. She further believes that while incidental transmissions of chimpanzee viruses to humans may have occurred throughout history, it was the socio-economic changes in post-World War II Africa that provided the particular circumstances leading to the spread of HIV-1 and the development of the AIDS epidemic. "Increasing urbanization, breakdown of traditional lifestyles, population movements, civil unrest, and sexual promiscuity are all known to increase the rates of sexually transmitted diseases and thus likely triggered the AIDS pandemic," adds Hahn."
Dr. Hahn omitted one very important factor for spreading HIV: the health care system, which was practically not present in Africa until the 20th century. You think I am stretching my thesis too much? First, please read the following translation from the book "Sanu, bature" by Bulgarian zoologist Peter Beron. He describes his experience in Nigeria in 1976:
"Before returning to Bulgaria, we had to be immunized against cholera. There was a special immunization center in the town. However, before we went there, Dr. Malyavko (a Russian physician - M.M.) gave me three sealed disposable syringes and told me to insist that the local doctor uses them. I was hesitating - the doctor could be offended by such lack of trust. I went to the center with Kinka and Vladko (the author's wife and son, respectively - M.M.). In the street, there was an endless line. The doctor was sitting in front of the door and immunizing everybody with one and the same needle. These were prospective hajjis. They were preparing to travel to Mecca and the local Asclepius evidently thought that Allah wouldn't let any hepatitis creep into such pious Muslims. At that time, nobody knew about AIDS. Seeing us, the Asclepius called us and offered to immunize us immediately. I told him I had had polyo before and for that reason had to use a separate syringe. Vladko had been in contact with a person with hepatitis etc. The doctor showed full understanding. He unsealed the first syringe, injected Vladko, then injected Kinka with the second syringe and me with the third one. Then he, with my needle, continued injecting the long line of the candidate hajjis."
The case of the infected more than 400 Libyan children would be tragic even if it were exceptional, but unfortunately it isn't. We shall never know the exact number of AIDS victims throughout Africa and elsewhere whom medicine, instead of helping, failed, betrayed and doomed. The following citation (as well as others which I'll indicate by their PubMed identification numbers) is obtained from PubMed, a database of biomedical literature. PubMed abstracts and some full text articles can be accessed at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?DB=pubmed.
Gisselquist D. et al. (2003). Let it be sexual: how health care transmission of AIDS in Africa was ignored. PMID: 12665437
"The consensus among influential AIDS experts that heterosexual transmission accounts for 90% of HIV infections in African adults emerged no later than 1988. We examine evidence available through 1988, including risk measures associating HIV with sexual behaviour, health care, and socioeconomic variables, HIV in children, and risks for HIV in prostitutes and STD patients. Evidence permits the interpretation that health care exposures caused more HIV than sexual transmission... Preconceptions about African sexuality and a desire to maintain public trust in health care may have encouraged discounting of evidence."
Another work: Brewer D.D. et al. (2003). Mounting anomalies in the epidemiology of HIV in Africa: cry the beloved paradigm. PMID: 12665436. The citation is from http://www.cirp.org/library/disease/HIV/brewer1/, where the full text of the article is given.
"A number of these observations raise the question of an alternative route of transmission, for which medical care and the use of injections are prime candidates17,19-22. Prostitutes, for example, are often recruited for studies from STI clinics, where treatment is frequently given by injection, where non-sterile equipment is used with high frequency, and wherein the underlying prevalence of HIV is high7. Many studies that have assessed the impact of sexual activity on HIV transmission -notably those in Mwanza and Rakai, whose discordant results are still a subject of debate23-failed to consider the potential confounding effects of medical care in the propagation of HIV24.
Rapid HIV transmission in Africa has often occurred in countries with good access to medical care, like Botswana, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. For example, high rates in rural South Africa have paralleled aggressive efforts to deliver health care to rural populations. It is difficult to understand how improved access to health care, with its offers of public health messages, free condoms, and preventive services, would be associated with increased HIV transmission. Similarly, HIV prevalence is often higher in cities and among persons of high socioeconomic attainment than in rural areas or among less fortunate persons. Favourable access to health care is one of the differences that distinguishes between these groups."
In my recent post, I argued that sexually transmitted diseases shouldn't be regarded as God's punishment because they infect the innocent as well as the "guilty". In fact, it is worse - they infect first and foremost the innocent. Just read the following citation:
Gisselquist D. et al. (2004). HIV transmission during paediatric health care in sub-Saharan Africa--risks and evidence. PMID: 15034989
"Health care systems in sub-Saharan Africa are challenged not only to improve care for the increasing number of HIV-infected children, but also to prevent transmission of HIV to other children and health care workers through contaminated medical procedures and needlestick accidents. HIV-infected children aged to 1 year typically have high viral loads, making them dangerous reservoirs for iatrogenic transmission... This leads to high HIV prevalence among inpatient and outpatient children... Investigations of large iatrogenic outbreaks in Russia, Romania, and Libya demonstrate efficient HIV transmission through paediatric health care... In addition, several studies have reported much higher HIV prevalence in children 5-14 years old than could be expected from mother-to-child transmission alone."
So we are coming to the Libyan scene. The following citation, I think, illustrates well how the Libyan health care system initially reacted to the crisis - it focused efforts not on controlling the infection but on attempting to cover it up:
Kovac C, Khandjiev R. (2001). Doctors face murder charges in Libya. PMID: 11157524
"Nine Libyans, including the director of the Al-Fateh Hospital and the undersecretary of Benghazi's Department of Health, are charged with exposing 19 of the mothers of the infected children to HIV. They "hid the fact that the children were already infected" and failed to take prophylactic measures to protect the mothers... Ironically, according to a UNAIDS report, Libya has not supplied any information on AIDS cases in that country for 1998-2000."
In the same year, doctors in Switzerland analyzed the blood of infected children:
Yerly S. et al. (2001). Nosocomial outbreak of multiple bloodborne viral infections. PMID: 11443566
"After a major outbreak of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection in approximately 400 children in 1998 in Libya, we tested HIV, hepatitis C virus (HCV), and hepatitis B virus (HBV) markers in 148 children and collected epidemiological data in a subgroup of 37 children and 46 parents. HIV infection was detected in all children but one, with HCV or HBV coinfection in 47% and 33%, respectively... The children visited the same hospital 1-6 times; at each visit, invasive procedures with potential blood transmission of virus were performed."
The finding of other blood-borne viruses in such a high proportion of the HIV-infected children supports the poor hygiene hypothesis, not the intentional infection hypothesis which lies so close to the hearts of Libyan prosecutors. Mention also that some children visited the hospital several (up to 6) times, so it is possible that they after being infected became secondary sources of infection for other young patients.
The next report is by Italian scientists:
Visco-Comandini U. et al. (2002). Monophyletic HIV type 1 CRF02-AG in a nosocomial outbreak in Benghazi, Libya. PMID: 12167281
"A cluster of HIV-1 infection has been identified in Libya in 1999, involving 402 children admitted to "El-Fath" Children's Hospital in Benghazi (BCH) during 1998 and 19 of their mothers... Out of this group, 104 children and 19 adult women have been followed at the National Institute for Infectious Diseases L. Spallanzani in Rome during 1 year. At BCH, all children had received intravenous infusions but not blood or blood products. A single child receiving a blood transfusion in 1997 and the 17 infected mothers were never hospitalized in Benghazi. In addition, two nurses were diagnosed as HIV-1 infected... The phylogenetic analyses showed that a monophyletic recombinant HIV-1 form CRF02-AG was infecting all of the HIV-1-seropositive patients admitted at BCH... A different strain was found in the child infected by blood transfusion."
Please mention that a child was infected in 1997 by blood transfusion with a different strain of HIV. This fact alone seems to disprove the claims of many Libyans that before the accused medics introduced the virus in 1998, there had been no HIV in Libya. Rather, the virus had arrived but the Libyan health care officials weren't ready to confront the threat and preferred to bury their heads into the sands of wishful thinking - our people aren't promiscuous, so it won't happen here...
The other noteworthy detail in this report is that the HIV strain is described as "recombinant". This English term can mean "product of natural recombination process" (as above) or "product of recombinant DNA technology (gene engineering)". Bulgarian journalists reporting from the Libyan courtroom said that the term was translated to Arabic and interpreted by Libyans in its second meaning only, i.e. that it was not a natural HIV strain but one modified by gene engineering. Hence, the infection must have been intentional. I don't know whether this misinterpretation was due to deliberate framing of the accused or to incompetence of the Libyan "experts". Let's not be paranoic and prefer the second explanation. In fact, the incompetence of some of the experts seems to be a public secret in Libya. Defense lawyer Byzanti at one point, after hearing reports of such experts accusing his clients, exclaimed, "But what scientists are they?". (The judge didn't like the remark.) If we talk seriously, even if the infection was intentional, it wouldn't make sense to use modified virus. If you intend to use a common cold virus as a bioweapon, you of course first have to modify it quite a lot, because the original virus is almost harmless. But why modify a virus which is lethal as it is? Just to leave a smoking gun at the crime scene? Why don't people use their heads, why are they ready to believe every nonsense they hear?
The next citation is from one of the most prestigeous scientific journals, Nature.
De Oliveira T. et al. (2006). Molecular epidemiology: HIV-1 and HCV sequences from Libyan outbreak. PMID: 17171825
"In 1998, outbreaks of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) and hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection were reported in children attending Al-Fateh Hospital in Benghazi, Libya. Here we use molecular phylogenetic techniques to analyse new virus sequences from these outbreaks. We find that the HIV-1 and HCV strains were already circulating and prevalent in this hospital and its environs before the arrival in March 1998 of the foreign medical staff (five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor) who stand accused of transmitting the HIV strain to the children."
No comment needed, I think.
The last PubMed citation I'll give is an appeal by Sidaction (I don't know this organization but its name is evidently derived from SIDA - AIDS in French):
Fleutelot E. (2006). 'Libyan Trial': a verdict running counter to scientific evidence. PMID: 17192180
"Sidaction denounces this trial as a parody of justice, which cannot hide the total incapacity of the Libyan Government to promote an appropriate politics of prevention and take care of people who are ill secondary to HIV infection-adults and children-in an appropriate way. It is useful to recall that the majority of Libyan people living with AIDS who are in need of an antiretroviral treatment can still not afford it."
***
It is easy to violate safety rules when working with blood and other human material under inadequate funding and supervision. I admit I have done it myself.
In recent decades reusable syringes, needles and other items were largely replaced by disposable ones. This was meant to assure safety, because sterilization of reusable equipment can always fail for some technical reason. However, as a result medical workers lost their expertise in sterilization and the good habit to perform it. So, when they are short of disposable equipment, they are quite likely to reuse it without even attempting sterilization or at least disinfection. Simple boiling would kill HIV without damaging most types of disposable equipment; but there must be somebody to do the boiling.
What exactly happened in Benghazi? Of course I cannot know exactly, but this is how I imagine it. The hospital has too many patients and too few syringes and needles. So, a nurse or a sanitary worker at the end of the day collects the used ones, soaks them in water and then washes them. Just washing, no sterilization. The boss hasn't ordered sterilization or disinfection. Trapped in the "good-people-don't-get-STDs" mentality, he cannot even think that the hospital's patients, these little angels, may have AIDS. But one child has it, contracted somehow outside the hospital. He is injected and then, when his syringe and needle are soaked, the virus contaminates all the other soaked needles. So other children, possibly dozens of them at once, are infected. The remaining virus in the hospital eventually dies out, it cannot reproduce outside the human body, but then one of the infected children comes for a new shot...
I would wish to end my post here, but I remember something I read on Highlander's blog:
"Whilst I’m sure many of them (medics-guest workers in Libya) honoured their contracts I can tell you from personal experience that some of them could not care less, and even the fact that US sanctions resulted in the deterioration of Libyan hospitals and that probably some Libyan health workers were also unscrupulous does not give the right to foreign workers to treat the Libyan patients like 'shit'. I’ve seen it as some of them ruled unconditionally in the hospitals and clinics, and you don’t want to be on their bad side as they may not treat you or worse may give you the wrong treatment. So again I wanted to say that not all of them were angels and saviours" (http://lonehighlander.blogspot.com/2005/04/case-441999-story-of-bulgarian-medics.html).
Of course, among the health workers from any country some are not very good professionals, some are capable but not very polite, and even those who are both may have their bad days; besides, miscommunication because of language barrier can create impression of rudeness. This is not the point. The point, I think, is the implicit question behind the cited text: Was it a mere coincidence that the infection happened in a hospital with so many foreign workers? My answer: Maybe it wasn't. I must immediately state that this is not an admission that the defendants are guilty - there were dozens of other guest workers in the El Fateh hospital, while two of the accused had never worked there.
First, one of the most important factors pushing us to do good work is pressure from our clients. If we are health workers, this means that we shall work better if our relations, friends, neighbours or their children can become our patients any minute. If we are treating some completely unrelated people, we are more likely to take it easy. Remember, one of the other major iatrogenic AIDS outbreaks was among Romanian orphan children. The doctors and nurses immunizing them relaxed the safety rules because they knew their own children and their friends' children wouldn't be among the patients.
Second, a guest worker is unlikely to become a whistleblower. He'll prefer just to do what he is paid for and not risk trouble. Remember the Egyptian doctor who warned a Bulgarian nurse (in Part 2). However, he didn't warn the Libyan patients and the local community. The Bulgarian workers in fact couldn't do this even if they wanted, because they didn't speak Arabic. It was the journalists of the La magazine who first gave publicity of the outbreak, and they did get into trouble. They knew they were risking, but still wrote the article because they cared. They regarded it as their duty as citizens. So, before we all become true citizens of the world, it makes no harm to remember that only a citizen is likely to care.

The HIV trial in Libya, part 3: A tale of two idiotic states

This is the third part of my sequel; the first two parts are, respectively, at http://mayas-corner.blogspot.com/2006/09/hiv-trial-in-libya-part-1-infection.html and http://mayas-corner.blogspot.com/2006/09/hiv-trial-in-libya-part-2-victims.html (the trial is mentioned also in a number of other posts). Here, I'll try to tell how the accused medics were used as pawns in the unscrupulous chess games of Qaddafi and Bulgarian politicians.
Libya had been for decades the preferred (and often the only available) destination for Bulgarians willing to earn money as guest workers. Bulgaria and Libya as Socialist dictatorships were natural friends. Things began to change after 1989. Ordinary Bulgarians continued flocking to Libya, but the state policies became more pro-Western. In late 1991, the rightist government of Filip Dimitrov came to power and held it until the end of 1992. In order to move Bulgaria closer to the West, it condemned Libya as a state sponsor of terror. I liked this government, which I voted for, and still like it. I think it was right to condemn Libya. However, it was obliged then to discourage Bulgarians from going to Libya and to summon back the thousands of guest workers already there. Instead, the government "forgot" to inform the Bulgarian public about the move it had made! So the relations between Bulgarian and Libyan state became as bad as they could be without an official declaration of war, but Bulgarian guest workers in Libya were in happy ignorance of this important fact. If they knew it, possibly some would prefer to stay home.
As I wrote before (forgive me that I'm repeating some points from the previous part), when Libya made the first arrests of Bulgarian nurses in late 1998, the Bulgarian diplomatic missions "slept" and failed to intervene effectively. Later, there was much blame that Poland and the other nations whose nationals were arrested managed to release them and only Bulgaria failed. If we talk seriously, it is clear some country would fail, exactly as it is clear that in any sport contest there will be a loser. Qaddafi needed scapegoats and would get them, exactly as Scylla would take six men from every passing ship. (It is a curious coincidence that now, after Bulgarian doctor Georgiev was acquitted, the number of Qaddafi's victims is also six.) Even almighty USA felt unable to protect their citizens and, instead, prevented them from going to Libya.
I also don't know what exactly the diplomats had to do. I can't imagine myself being in their shoes and calling the Polish ambassador, "Hello, here is the Bulgarian ambassador. Colleague, could you please tell me how you got your medics released? Whom did you bribe, and how much?". So I don't blame the Bulgarian diplomats in Libya for not saving our arrested nurses; I blame them for apparently not trying to do this at all, for serving their own interests only and letting Bulgarian citizens in grave and undeserved trouble to save themselves.
After detained nationals of other countries were released and more Bulgarians were arrested, it became clear that local diplomacy was becoming powerless and intervention from Bulgarian government was needed (although still unlikely to succeed). At that time, Bulgarian government had other worries. There was war next door in Serbia and, to the horror of Bulgarians, our sky was being used by the NATO air forces and wayward NATO missiles were falling on our land (one hit a house in Sofia). The authorities had to deal with this.
However, the war ended and the Libyan problem could top the agenda. It didn't. Somewhen in the summer of 1999, I saw a head title in the 168 Hours weekly paper, Our nurse in Libya: I infected with AIDS intentionally. You could expect the public opinion to mobilize and force the government to act. It didn't happen. The efforts of the government (a rightist one, headed by Ivan Kostov) were focused on attempts to underestimate the seriousness of the case in Libya and to suppress the unofficial information that the arrested Bulgarians were being tortured and their lives were in danger. At some much later time, Ivan Kostov even said, "We mustn't just say that the accused Bulgarians are innocent. What if they are guilty?".
I had voted for this government and still find it, together with Filip Dimitrov's government, the best in our recent history. The non-Bulgarian reader here is likely to exclaim, "If these are your best governments, I wouldn't want to try your worst ones". And would be right. I wouldn't call my own state idiotic without a reason. Foreign minister in Kostov's government was Nadezhda Mihailova, a lady who did much harm to the Bulgarian democracy (Bulgarian readers know that I don't mean the Libyan case alone). She not only didn't hold to any moral principles, but evidently had too little intellect for the positions she occupied and used this intellect exclusively to enrich her family. Historians will (hopefully) reveal what brought her to the top of Bulgarian politics and kept her there for so long.
The wake-up call was an article about the process in the popular 24 Hours newspaper, titled Libya going to hang 6 Bulgarians?. It lingers in my memory that it was in late 1999, but checking the case's chronology, it is more likely to have been early 2000. The article reported that the six Bulgarians were charged with intentionally infecting Libyan children with HIV and the prosecutor was insisting for a death sentence. The public finally reacted and the government was forced to react as well.
What would I do if I were foreign minister at that time? I think I would speak loudly, bring the case to international human rights institutions, call the international media. This would most likely result in execution of the medics, but if we regard any hostage crisis from purely moral viewpoint, it's most important not to save the hostages but to avoid any appeasement of the hostage taker. Unfortunately, authorities more often follow the easy path and offer to the terrorist whatever he wants, just to have back the hostages. This of course only leads to more kidnappings.
There was another detail that determined our government's stance at that time. It was engaged in a "gas war" with Russia because of unwillingness to yield to insolent blackmail by Gasprom. Russia bought many of the Bulgarian media and the latter were attacking the government all the time. Most notably, it bought TV host Slavi Trifonov, whose show had a very large audience and was almost an institution. Now, the Libyan crisis came as a God's gift. All the pro-Russian, anti-government chorus began to sing, "The government must resign if the medics are executed". Satirical paper Starshel was one of the few sober voices. It wrote that whatever Bulgarian citizens thought about their current government, demanding its resignation in connection with the Libyan case would mean letting the Q-man decide who would rule our country. Unfortunately, nobody listened. Facing this internal crisis, the government naturally went to negotiate with Qaddafi, ready to make any concessions just to postpone the medics' executions till the end of its term!
Now, it's time for me to pay attention to the other idiotic state - Libya. On March 22, 2006, Highlander wrote, "If all the accused had been executed ages ago this story would not have dragged .... but then maybe they ARE innocent ?" (http://lonehighlander.blogspot.com/2006_03_01_archive.html). While the end of the sentence is typical for Highlander, I believe many Libyans and other Arabs would put their signatures under its beginning. Many think that the Bulgarians are guilty and had to be executed swiftly. Dear friends and enemies, don't blame Bulgaria that it didn't happen. It was up to the Q-man. And can you guess why he didn't do it? One needn't be in MENSA to answer this question. Qaddafi wanted things from Bulgaria. He wanted it to entreat in the UN for lifting of sanctions. More importantly, he wanted money - for the Libyan budget and for his own deep pocket. So he and the Bulgarian government had a common interest to protract the case.
Initially I suppose Qaddafi intended to use the Bulgarians just to solve his PR problem. However, when Bulgarian government became active in early 2000, he realized that the detainees were hens bringing him gold eggs. He of course wasn't motivated either to release or to slaughter them. Over the years, the Libyan foreign debt to Bulgaria was reduced more than tenfold. Now, it's reported to be only about $ 50 million and Libya will never pay it, but will put the money in a charity fund for the infected children on behalf of Bulgaria. Besides, undisclosed sums of money have been paid over the years to Qaddafi fund, managed by his son Seif al Islam (the name means "sword of Islam"). This was the legal way for his dad to fill his private pockets. To offer some appeasement to the Bulgarian donors, Qaddafi played the good cop, bad cop game. He was the bad cop and Seif al Islam the good one. The latter repeatedly said that the epidemics must have been due to poor hygiene and the defendants most likely hadn't any intention to infect anybody with AIDS. These statements were clearly meant for export use and, I believe, are still largely unknown to the Libyan public. Also, Seif al Islam gave the green light to call Western AIDS experts as defense witnesses - a move his dad possibly regrets now.
Meanwhile, Bulgaria's position in the world changed. It used to be just a small, poor postcommunist country separated from civilized Europe by the Serbian battlefields. But it became NATO member and recently EU member. So mighty countries began to feel obliged to show solidarity with Bulgaria. The country used the situation and, after so many years of fruitless "quiet diplomacy", gave maximum publicity to the case.
I think that, as Qaddafi observed these changes, he had to jump off the train at some point. He could have the nurses convicted of negligence. Alternatively, he could use the other scapegoat - Palestinian doctor al Hajuj. It was the easiest thing to add an attempt to accuse innocent people for his own crimes to the already long list of charges against the poor man. So Qaddafi could close the case and have no problems. But he didn't, because he wanted more and more gold eggs. Greed never leads to anything good. Now, Qaddafi has no easy way out, pressed by the international community, on one side, and the Libyans, on the other. He has repeatedly stated in public that the Bulgarians are guilty and it isn't easy for him now to admit the opposite. Unfortunately, this means the defendants also have no easy way out.
To the decent Libyans who suffer as they see their country not only scorned but also laughed at by the Western world, I wish to say that such idiocies sometimes help. I am not the only one who thinks that the idiotic move of our dictator Zhivkov to rename the Bulgarian Turks in 1984/85 facilitated his toppling in 1989. But only God knows whether and when Libya will enjoy a similar event. So, those who believe could just say a prayer for all in this case who deserve it - the accused Bulgarians and Palestinian and their families, the infected Libyan children and their families and, most importantly, the uninfected Libyan children.

What made Libya at the end of 2006 similar to Bulgaria at the end of 1944

A month ago, just 3 days before Christmas, the five Bulgarian nurses and Palestinian doctor accused of intentionally infecting Libyan children with HIV were sentenced to death, again. For details see e.g. http://www.post-trib.com/lifestyles/181771,Condemned.article.
Too busy to check the news, I heard about it from my father when he visited us at Christmas Eve. With more sadness than anger, he added, “And these crowds shouting “Death”! It was quite like our People’s Court.”
He was referring to the tribunal hastily established at the end of 1944, after the Soviet occupators installed Communist rule at Sept. 9 of the same year. Communists like to call everything “people’s”, their government was “People’s Rule”, even the country itself was soon renamed to “People’s Republic of Bulgaria”. (Here, the adjective “people’s” not only doesn’t match its literal meaning, but also corrupts the noun which follows.)
The official function of the People’s Court was to punish the people responsible for Bulgaria’s participation in World War II as ally of Nazi Germany, for the persecution of the Communist insurgents and for unspecified “crimes of the monarcho-fascist regime”. Today’s Communist historians link our People’s Court to the Nuremberg tribunal, although mere comparison of numbers reveals the disparity (in Bulgaria, only the death sentences were about 2000, exceeding with orders of magnitude the Nuremberg death sentences, as if Bulgaria and not Germany was the leader of the Axis.) The real function of the Court was to behead the Bulgarian nation, to destroy its elite. Bulgarian communists and their Soviet masters knew that Communist rule could be stable only if the ruled nation is degraded to scum. Hence, any important position of the person in the society was enough to get him tried and convicted. So, besides politicians who had worked for the German cause and policemen who had acted against Communist insurgents (as if any government could be required or expected to tolerate armed “opposition”), the victims included many opponents of “fascism”. Vladimir Kurtev, one of the four men who initiated the campaign to save Bulgarian Jews, was sentenced to death and executed. Dimitar Peshev, who did for the salvation more than anybody else, “the man who stopped Hitler”, received a prison term.
My father, then 22, remembers the People’s Court very well. It concerned him personally: among the victims was his own father, Georgi Markov. He was actually murdered in the blood bath orchestrated in the second half of September 1944, estimated to have taken at least 20000 lives (the exact number isn’t known to this day). Some of the killed were sentenced posthumously by the People’s Court. This served both to justify the murder and to allow convenient “legal” confiscation of their property. My grandfather had never done anything akin to a crime, but as an important member of a local community (he was a well-known lawyer in his town of Pleven) and as a political opponent of the communists (he was an activist of the Social-Democratic party) he represented a typical target of the September 1944 massacre. It was aimed to do at local level what the People’s Court had to do at national level, i.e. to destroy the brain and backbone of the Bulgarian society.
The communists never renounced the People’s Court. Until the very fall of the regime in 1989, applicants for “sensitive” jobs, visas etc. had to answer the question, “Have you relations who have been affected by the actions of the People’s Rule?” After 1989, communists (now calling themselves socialists) continued to claim that the People’s Court did justice and the sentenced people were guilty. Some of the victims, including my grandfather, were vindicated after they or their relations appealed the sentences, using the cumbersome procedure of the ordinary criminal cases. During one of the rare periods when socialists were not in power, a law was proposed to declare the People’s Court illegal and so to vindicate en masse the people sentenced by it. However, three leftist members of the European Parliament, alerted by Bulgarian socialists, passed a resolution appealing to Bulgaria not to support fascism. Bulgarian Parliament didn’t dare to oppose “Europe”. (After that, some members of the European Parliament privately admitted that they often nap or read unrelated texts when draft resolutions are proposed, and so later vote without really knowing what it’s all about.) So “world opinion” wasn’t very useful in the case of our People’s Court. Another example: a memorial plate in Israel devoted to Dimitar Peshev was removed because four Bulgarian communists asked Israeli authorities to do so.
Once I watched on TV a discussion on Tengiz Abuladze’s movie “Repentance”. One participant said, “The screenplay includes elements from very different historical periods; I don’t think this was a good idea.” Another one replied, “I, on the contrary, like this; it shows the ability of evil to erode tunnels through time.” I think that man was right – evil erodes tunnels, connecting points located at different times and places. At one stage, the HIV case in Libya was handled by an institution called People’s Court (if the translation is correct). This court is defined by Wikipedia as “a special status court for crimes against the state”. Any comment needed?
The similarity isn’t just in the court itself. As my father mentioned, it is also in the crowd. During the sessions of the Bulgarian People’s Court, the courthouse was filled and surrounded by a crowd shouting “Death!”. Now, we see the same crowd around the Libyan courthouses when the HIV trial is on the agenda. And it is shouting “Death” again. Every time in history when the tissue of the society becomes thin, this crowd emerges. It is always the same and always wants the same things – arson, destruction and death.
I checked several Libyan blogs and was happy to see that their authors didn’t mention the confirmed death sentences. I hope those Libyan bloggers didn’t quite believe that the sentences were just. When you read that the journal Nature and scores of Nobel Prize winners stand for the defendants, and at the same time under your windows a crowd able to make the bravest shiver wants their death, perhaps the best is to keep meaningful silence.

The HIV trial in Libya, part 2: The victims

(This is coutinued from Part 1, which is at http://mayas-corner.blogspot.com/2006/09/hiv-trial-in-libya-part-1-infection.html.)
From now on, the story may be wrong in some details because it will rely only on occasional official and unofficial Bulgarian and Libyan sources, which are not very trustworthy (esp. the official ones). Corrections are welcome. However, I believe the picture as a whole is fairly accurate.
An author of detective stories once said that the victim of a crime usually has some characheristics that have led to him/her becoming a victim. In this story, we have two groups of victims: the infected little patients of Benghazi and the accused medics. Let's consider them, the children first.
Why Benghazi
In a recent comment, I called the Iranian opposition "better and stronger" than the Libyan one, implying that the latter, apart from being weak (no wonder - Qaddafi is not the ruler to tolerate alive opposition), doesn't appeal very much to me. It is because, while Iranian opposition is generally pro-Western, opposition-minded Libyans (those who live in Libya and still make their voices heard) are Islamists. In other words, they rebel against the Q-man not because he is an incompetent ruler, liar, oppressor, terrorist and mass murderer, but because they think he isn't Islamist enough. And the center of this opposition is the city of Benghazi. Here, I expect the reader to remember that exactly this city was the center of Libyan February cartoon riots, when at least 11 people laid down their lives (at the same time, residents of Tripoli were reluctant to take part even in an official peaceful demonstration - testimony of Khadija-Teri). Hanu thought that the Benghazi protests were orchestrated by government. I would rather suppose they were provoked by government agents but the ordinary participants were quite sincere. So, the residents of Benghazi must have (on average) more courage than any other group of Libyans but, unfortunately, the same cannot be said about their intellect. The Q-man knows this, understands their way of thinking very well and although they hate him, he can most of the time manipulate them as he wishes.
In 1986, a group of Benghazi residents killed a high-ranking Libyan official. Nine were sentenced and hanged (http://www.libyanet.com/feb1987.htm; warning: graphic photos). I've read (though can't give a link) that the plot was not just secret work of a few people but had wide popular support. Some Bulgarian journalists wrote that, after crushing the rebels, Qaddafi decided to punish the entire city by sharply reducing its funds. Such measures are used in many countries by the central governments against regions expressing dissent (in dictatorships) or just voting for the other party (in semi-democracies). Of course most severely affected are the industries most dependent on subsidies, such as health care.
In the following years, as admitted by a former Libyan health care minister, hospitals throughout Libya were poorly supplied with even the most basic consumatives and medications. This was conveniently blamed on the sanctions and may indeed have been partly due to them. However, in Benghazi the situation was worse than in other places. A Bulgarian nurse who worked for some time at the El Fateh Children's hospital later said, "The senior nurse every morning distributed syringes - 5 for each nurse. No more, no matter how many patients would come."
Another Bulgarian nurse, when beginning work at the same hospital in early 1998, said, "Upon arrival, I was immediately warned by an Egyptian doctor to be very careful, because there was an ongoing AIDS epidemic in the hospital." But nobody warned the patients and the community of Benghazi. Parents continued to bring their little ones to the hospital, thinking they were doing the best for them.
Later in 1998, another Bulgarian nurse - Nasya Nenova, was assigned to work at the same hospital, at a department newly formed especially for the children with AIDS. She wrote to her family: "I am of course very afraid that I may get infected, I work with two pairs of rubber gloves... Some of the children are already in very grave condition. One died last night. At least I hadn't to watch him die, a Philippino nurse was on duty then."
In the following years, dozens more children would die.
Why Bulgarians
As anger accumulated in Benghazi, the regime had to find a way out of the crisis. Of course the truth - that the epidemics was due to the punitive starvation funding of the city, plus shocking incompetence of the hospital's most responsible people - would do little to calm down the spirits. But if the virus was distributed intentionally, then the Q-man and his officials would deserve no blame. So scapegoats were needed. And because the goal was to pacify the Libyans, foreigners would make the best scapegoats.
The regime had plenty of them. Highlander once wrote, "in Libya we have thousands of foreign guest workers in the health sector for whom I am grateful as they make up the deficit." As I wrote before, I'm not sure she should be grateful. Even when they are good and caring professionals, they take positions that would otherwise be occupied by Libyans. To keep the status quo, "they enjoy an enormously better salary than the locals" (same Highlander's post). So they, together with the numerous guest workers in other industries, allow the regime to minimize the number of educated and skilled workers-citizens who are the brain and backbone of any society and in dictatorships often form dangerous opposition. Ottoman Turks made their best to keep the Libyans uneducated and unqualified, and I think Qaddafi today is following their example. Of course the guest workers themselves don't realize this (I haven't seen such a discussion in Bulgarian media, and what isn't in the media doesn't exist for the public). Nor do they realize that one of the reason they are hired is to serve as scapegoats if something goes wrong.
The first scapegoat was Ashraf al Hajuj, a doctor of Palestinian origin. I know little about him; he had lived in Libya since early childhood (probably born there) but, according to the good Arab tradition, was regarded as a Palestinian and not a naturalized Libyan. He was engaged to a Libyan girl who supported him during the following 5 years, but then left him, exhausted to be a fiance of an inmate on death row. After the arrest, al Hajuj was tortured until he was ready to confess anything that was wanted from him.
It is easy to figure out why he was taken. Much later, he said, "The interrogators were telling me that there was nobody to entreat for me because I (as a Palestinian) had no state. I am sure that, hadn't Bulgaria taken me under its protection together with the nurses, I would be now rotting in some mass grave." (I think that if Palestinians had common sense, the name and fate of al Hajuj would be known in every Palestinian house as an illustration of how much their Arab "allies" care for them. If I had such friends, I'd try to strike an immediate deal with my enemy! But of course if Palestinians had common sense, the world would be another and much better place. Mention also that he said "mass grave", not just "grave".)
However, al Hajuj alone was not enough. Non-Arab infidels would make far better villains in the eyes of Benghazeeans, so numerous guest workers were arrested - not only from Bulgaria but also from the Philippines, Poland and other countries. At this stage, there were only two Bulgarian detainees - nurses Snezhana Dimitrova and Sevda Yablanska.
I believe that Libyan authorities made these wide and apparently random arrests to probe which country was least able and willing to protect its nationals. (This protection, I think, contradicts to the very idea of justice, but unfortunately seems needed in today's imperfect world where so many countries are eager to put foreigners to cangaroo courts.) The guest worker communities of Poles and Philippinos, but NOT Bulgarians, swiftly organized and threatened that they would all abandon their contracts and leave Libya immediately if their fellow countrymen were not released. Also, the diplomatic missions of these countries made some unknown to me but apparently effective moves. The Bulgarian embassy also took measures, if you read the official Bulgarian site. However, the unofficial story is different. When a nurse informed the Embassy that two her colleagues were arrested, she obtained the answer, "Let the whores save themselves". So the Bulgarian tradition to fill the diplomatic missions with arrogant, incompetent and lazy people who care neither for the Bulgarian state nor for its nationals brought disastrous results.
There were also other reasons making Bulgaria a good target. It was a small poor coutry outside the mighty Western alliances: we were only applying for NATO, and the EU membership was behind mountains. At the same time, the Bulgarian government in 1992 had condemned Libya as a atate sponsor of terror. Significantly, this government "forgot" to inform its people about this, so Bulgarians going to Libya didn't know that Qaddafi had a reason to regard them as citizens of a hostile state. Next door in Serbia, the next Yugoslavian war was about to burst out (it would be the last one, but nobody knew it at the time). And finally, Libya had a debt to Bulgaria and Qaddafi hoped, with good reason, to get rid of that debt and even to extort additional money.
So the first group of arrested foreign nationals were released, but then 17 Bulgarians were detained. Nurse Nelia Zhdereva said, "They had come for me also, but I didn't open the door. I just stayed quiet, pretending not to be at the quarter." After this, she returned to Bulgaria within days and nobody tried to apprehend her. Those who have read Gulag Archipelago will remember quite similar cases in Stalin's Soviet Union when the security forces, unable to find immediately their intended targets, arrested other people instead. This is to be expected when a certain number of detainees is planned, but their personalities are not very important because they have actually done no crime and the police know this better than anyone else.
Most of the arrested Bulgarians were soon released (some after being tortured), but six were kept. Of the original two detainees, Snezhana Dimitrova was rearrested. Three other nurses working at the El Fateh hospital were also arrested: Valentina Siropulo, Valya Chervenyashka and the above mentioned Nasya Nenova. Another arrested nurse, Kristiana Valcheva, had never been in the hospital in question. She was working at another hospital hundreds of kilometers away from Benghazi, so she couldn't be accused of infecting kids. Her alleged crime was that she collaborated with Hajuj and obtained the virus from the CIA/Mossad agents "John the Englishman" and "Adel the Egyptian" and handed it to the other nurses to inject the children. Kristiana's husband, Dr. Zdravko Georgiev, was working away from both Benghazi and his wife's workplace. Hearing that his wife had disappeared, he tried to find out what had happened and how to help her. He was arrested also, finishing the list of the accused.
The six Bulgarians were tortured in order to confess. Some of them showed remarkable courage. Valya Chervenyashka later said, "I never considered it possible to help them, to confess the nonsense they wanted from me. I was just awaiting my death." However, she was middle-aged and with kidney and heart problems (her heart stopped twice during the interrogations), so her torturers were aware she could die if they pushed her too hard - and this was not what they wanted.
Kristiana Valcheva and Nasya Nenova were younger and healthier and were pushed harder. Kristiana confessed, but this was not found enough. The investigation brought also evidence - blood banks with HIV found in her quarter. Just don't ask why the banks were found during the 4th search of the quarter, how the virus remained detectable in dried droplets after weeks at room temperature and what methods were used to detect it.
Nasya Nenova, when threatened to be injected with HIV, said, "Well, inject me, so please don't beat me more!" (This is the same nurse who had worked with double rubber gloves to avoid HIV infection.) The worst torturer was Juma Misheri. At one point, he left the city for a couple of days; when Nasya heard he had returned, she attempted suicide. Finally, she was so broken that she confessed three times and now is in a worse situation that even Kristiana.
Juma Misheri was later accused of having used torture but of course was acquitted. He is hailed as a popular hero because he has made the "witches" confess. Oh sancta simplicitas! Don't the people of Benghazi ever ask how many of THEM have been tortured by him?

UPDATE: Today (Sept. 26) I received an e-mail from Dr. Declan Butler, a senior reporter at the top science journal Nature. He is currently trying to use the opportunities of the blogosphere to help the accused medics in Libya. Here is a citation from his Sept. 20 post "Can the blogosphere help free the Tripoli six? — innocent medics risking execution in Libya" (http://declanbutler.info/blog/?p=59):
"“Imagine that five American nurses and a British doctor have been detained and tortured in a Libyan prison since 1999, and that a Libyan prosecutor called at the end of August for their execution… on trumped-up charges of deliberately contaminating more than 400 children with HIV in 1998. Meanwhile, the international community and its leaders sit by, spectators of a farce of a trial, leaving a handful of dedicated volunteer humanitarian lawyers and scientists to try to secure their release.
Implausible? That scenario, with the medics enduring prison conditions reminiscent of the film Midnight Express, is currently playing out in a Tripoli court, except that the nationalities of the medics are different. The nurses are from Bulgaria and the doctor is Palestinian.”
These are the opening paragraphs of an unusually strongly-worded editorial — ‘Libya’s travesty‘ – published in tomorrow’s issue of Nature. It is accompanied by a news story over two pages — ‘Lawyers call for science to clear AIDS nurses in Libya‘ — explaining the case. (Both articles are on free access; to access free articles on Nature you just need to register once, and it is free.)"
At http://www.connotea.org/user/Declan/tag/tripoli%20six?num=100, Dr. Butler has listed the blog posts since on the Libya HIV affair.

The HIV trial in Libya, part 1: The infection and the charges

I have intended to write about the HIV trial in Libya ever since I begun this blog. I have mentioned this trial in two earlier posts, here and in a here. These days Libyan-American blogger Suliman expressed wish to put a comment about this trial on my blog, so I am providing an appropriate post. I warn from the beginning that I won't try to be "objective" and when writing of what evil and crazy people did, will use the adjectives that seem appropriate to me.
To my surprise, the trial has its own page in Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDS_scandal_in_Libya. A chronology of the events by the Bulgarian news agency BTA can be found at http://www.bta.bg/site/libya/en/02chronology.htm. However, it reflects exclusively what official Bulgarian institutions say.
Because the text will be too long, I'll divide it into more than one post.
The infection
The core of the story are the numerous cases of HIV-infected children among those treated in the El-Fateh Children's Hospital in Benghazi, Libya. It is difficult to say when the infections began, given the various and often long incubation periods of the disease, the tendency of the Libyan authorities to lie even when the dates of infections are known in order to dismiss the possibility that some occured before the defendants began work in the hospital, and the wish of the same authorities to put under the common denominator all childhood HIV infections in Libya. According to two Western scientists who later became defense witnesses, the epidemic began in 1997. The official number of the infected children is 426.

At any rate, in 1998 it became evident that there was a real AIDS epidemic among children in Benghazi and that at least for some of them the only possible infection source was the El-Fateh Children's Hospital. At first, the reaction of the authorities was to try to cover up the problem. A Libyan, when later asked by the Bulgarian journalist Nina Spasova why such an important event wasn't widely discussed in public space, answered by asking, "In 1986, was there much public talk about Chernobyl in Bulgaria?".
However, the three-digit number of infected children made silence impossible. The story was made public by the Libyan magazine La in an article including interviews with victims' parents and linking the infection to the particular hospital. Years ago, I read an English translation of this article at the Libya Our Home site. Unfortunately, I cannot find it now. The article was published without (and as it turned out, against) the authorities' approval. For that reason, the journal was closed. I don't know what happened to the journalists; I hope they just lost their jobs and didn't suffer further consequences.

To prove how unobjective I am, I'll state right now what my opinion is: the infection was due to poor hygiene and violation of safety rules in the hospital. This was clear to all people with common sense right from the beginning. Later the above mentioned scientists, Luc Montagnier (co-discoverer of HIV) and Vittorio Colizzi, wrote a report coming to the same conclusion. However, the official Libyan opinion was different.
The charges

Libyan authorities finally reacted to the scandal by arresting dozens of foreign medics-guest workers from various countries. Most foreigners were soon released but another wave of arrests followed, smaller and targetting exclusively Bulgarians. So in early 1999 the list of the defendants "crystallized", including 6 Bulgarians (5 nurses and a doctor), a Palestinian doctor and 9 Libyan doctors holding high positions at the El-Fateh hospital. The foreigners were accused of INTENTIONALLY infecting the children, while the Libyans were accused only of carelessly letting the satanic foreign plot unveil under their very noses. At least some of these Libyan defendants later, speaking before the court, supported the official version of intentional infection and so tried to save their asses by sacrificing their colleagues. They were acquitted, so the only court they may have problems with is that of their conscience. (By the way, not all Western media kept silence about these defendants, as seemed to Highlander; e.g. San Francisco Chronicle mentions them athttp://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/06/06/INGUQ6VPD91.DTL.)
The alleged motivation of this monstrous alleged crime? I'll cite a BBC report: "At one point, the Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, had accused the health workers of acting on orders from the CIA and the Israeli secret service, Mossad. Libya later rowed back on this allegation." (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3689355.stm). I know from the media (unfortunately, I cannot find a link) that currently the Libyan prosecution says the accused were performing an illegal trial of anti-HIV vaccine developed by a Western company. They allegedly injected the children first with the vaccine and then with the actual virus to see whether the vaccine works (and it evidently didn't).
Should I discuss the original charge, after it is so absurd that even its authors couldn't maintain it after the case received international publicity? It seems to me that to duscuss it, means to offend the intellectual capacity of my readers. However, I cannot skip it because, according to opinion polls and my personal observation, many Muslims either believe it or for some reason find it necessary to claim that they believe it. I won't state that Bulgarians are not so blood-thirsty and it is virtually impossible to find not one or two but six Bulgarian psychopaths to realize such a plan. This would be akin to the statements of many Arabs and Muslims that Arabs and Muslims are good people and would never crash kidnapped planes into buildings. Nobody buys such arguments, and with good reason.
However, each crime (unless done by absolutely insane people) has its motivation and purpose. Why would CIA and/or Mossad attack Libyan children? Both secret services have had enough experience with totalitarian regimes to know that a regime like Qaddafi's one cannot be harmed by terror against civilians. It is democratic governments that are vulnerable to terror. So why waste the virus? I can imagine CIA encouraging some top Libyan officials to overthrow Mr. Qaddafi, but not to supply virus for Libyan children. As for Mossad, they lack even the motivation. As far as I know, the Q-man doesn't do much harm to Israel. Well, he brainwashes his people with anti-Semitism, but who doesn't do this? If Mossad wanted to fight their Arab enemies by infecting children, wouldn't you rather expect Palestinian children to be infected?
Besides, both secret services would have enormous problems with the law and the public opinion once the operation comes to light. Remember what problems Sharon had with the Sabra and Shatila massacre, although it was done by Israel's Lebanese allies and not by Israelis themselves. As for the USA, they are still in shock because years ago the penises of suspected criminals and terrorists were photographed in Abu Ghraib.
Also, when one is considering a current event, it is often helpful (though no proof) to compare it to similar earlier events. I know of two accusations of deliberately causing epidemics in order to hurt a regime or a community: against the medieval Jews (e.g. http://scarab.msu.montana.edu/historybug/YersiniaEssays/Doherty.htm) and against Jewish doctors at the end of Stalin's rule (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctors). It is now evident that both were phony: in the first case, the Jews couldn't have the necessary knowledge of plague epidemiology needed to use it as a bio-weapon, nor could they have any means to protect themselves; in the second case, there was simply no epidemic at all. On the other hand, known iatrogenic (i.e. caused by medical procedures) AIDS epidemics have been found to be due to "incompetence, greed, bribery, denial, and conflict of interest" - but not to malicious intent (see e.g. http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/340/12/973 and for cases of children's infections, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=990CE7DE1730F932A0575BC0A963958260 and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=14534057&dopt=Abstract).
Let's now consider the current charge that the children were infected in order to perform an illegal vaccine trial. At least, this is not a thing unheard of in history: Edward Jenner did exactly this, vaccinating with cowpox and then innoculating with smallpox first his baby son and then another 8-year-old boy. However, his vaccine worked and so he is remembered as a hero, not as a villain. Of course today it is absolutely unthinkable to innoculate a pathogen in order to test a vaccine's efficiency. You have to recruit a large group of volunteers, inject half of them with the vaccine (of which you believe that it is at least safe) and the others with a placebo, then let them live their lives and check how many will catch the infection naturally. If you do the things like Jenner did, you not only risk to find yourself behind bars, but you cannot publish the results in any scientific journals and hence cannot make money from your vaccine. So why make an illegal trial, after you have to make a legal one anyway to obtain publishable results? Why do the work twice?
"But the illegal trial will show you whether the vaccine works or not, and if it doesn't work, you needn't perform a legal trial and will save money and time," somebody might say.
No, the illegal trial will show nothing. You need to recruit some idiots to do it and smuggle first the vaccine, then the actual virus. If the injected children remain healthy, this means either that the vaccine works or that the virus has lost its virulence because of the non-standard conditions of the trial (e.g. overheated during the smuggling or improperly manipulated by the idiots). If the children become infected, this means either that the vaccine doesn't work or that it has lost its activity, as was just described for the virus. At the end of the day, you know nothing. No one pharmaceutical company operating this way would survive in business for more than three days. So, I think that the vaccine trial hypothesis also doesn't hold water.
Anyway, at some time the epidemics was halted. Not immediately after the arrests, but some time after them the young patients of the El Fateh hospital stopped being infected. To my opinion, this shows that while the professional torturers were weaving fairy tales about CIA and Mossad, another team of professionals was sent to the hospital to find out what was wrong and fix it. However, these men and women remain unknown to us because any acknowledgement of their work would blow up the official conspiracy theory. So they haven't received and are unlikely ever to receive the gratitudes of the Benghazi parents whose kids would otherwise also be infected and the whole Libyan society. But, as Walter Scott once wrote, people who fulfil their duty are rarely rewarded by the world, their reward is a sense of internal satisfaction which the world could neither give nor take away.