I cannot even begin to imagine how the parents of these children must feel. To send your kid to a hospital for something minor, possibly, and have him or her returned to you with HIV…god. How awful. Of course they want to blame someone! But for the Libyan government to simply turn to the closest foreigners and accuse them of a hideous (not to mention completely unbelievable) crime is disgusting and a perversion of justice.
I can’t even get any invective going on this. This is just too absurd and sad.
Note: I didn’t just notice this case today, but I’m forbidden to comment on or participate in Bulgarian politics, and I wanted to make sure it was okay to say this publically. Although it is, as ever, my opinions are my own.
I know of people who worked in the hospital involved in this case, and yes, feelings run very high indeed. The general sentiment is that the accused nurses were in the pay of the Israeli government and that the whole thing is a Zionist plot. :rolleyes: I’m not sure what the “official” explanation for the motive was, though.
I personally believe the whole trial was a farce and can think of no credible reason why a group of medical staff would conspire to deliberately infect kids with HIV. One lone whacko? Maybe. But a whole group? It just beggars belief.
Incidentally, how exactly *do * 50+ kids contract HIV in a hospital anyway? Could it have been infected blood transfusions? Improperly sterilised needles?
It’s actually 400 kids, the 50 is the number of kids who’ve already died. Everything I’ve read has said “unsanitary conditions”, which is kind of vague. This isn’t that unique, something similar happened in Kazakhstan recently, IIRC. Tragic. You’d think that it would make authorities wake up and clean house, but they seem to have whacked priorities in Libya.
400? That’s pretty horrendous. I can totally understand that the grief must be overwhelming, but I still think the nurses were just scapegoats. It must be pretty embarrassing for the Libyan Government to have an outbreak on this scale, especially given that it was most likely due to shoddy conditions. Coupled with the fact that they are now trying to be taken seriously by the West and claw their way back from being a pariah state, they are obviously very touchy about being labelled a third-world country and it’s unsurprising that they wanted to blame someone convenient for this mess.
Except it’s backfiring, big-time, since no one outside of Libya thinks these people are guilty of anything other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The priorities are well in order for a third world Islamist state. Cowtowing to public hysteria will make everybody happier in the short run than cleaning up hospitals, and there is no long run.
Here (I hope; the URL is really long) is a great article from the New England Journal of Medicine on this issue. (It’s a PDF.) They’ve used flimsy evidence and made the offer of dropping the cases if all kids were offered “compensation” from the Bulgarian government for their infection and treatment. When Bulgaria didn’t play they went ahead with prosecution.
This case has been going on for several years and I’ve been following it intermittently, and every time it pisses me off so bad I almost don’t want to read about it - this is the 2nd or 3rd time I’ve seen this thread and not clicked. Imagine being a foreigner, who came to an impoverished country (when your own is not so rich) to help, and getting thrown into prison where you don’t fully understand the language, or the legal system - but definitely understand that you could die for something you didn’t do.
I’ve been follwing the case for months, & the whole thing is like something out of Kafka. I’ve set up a Google Alert for news on the subject.
“Confessions” extracted by torture, deranged accusations, contorted & unbelievable conspiracy accusations…Truths are Lies, Crime Is Justice, Freedom Is Slavery, Love Big Brother Omar. :smack:
They’re gonna execute them, & it is judicial murder.
Qaddaffi is asking for “repatriations”–in cash–for the release of the nurses & doctor. By a “coincidence” :rolleyes: it is the exact same sum he paid for the victims of the Lockerbie Explosion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_flight_103
Cause I’m a Peace Corps Volunteer; we don’t want anyone to think we’re really CIA agents or something. But I asked my country director if it was okay if I wrote about this online and he said unless I was taking a pro-Libya stance, go for it.
Here in BG, people are wearing white, green, and red ribbons with “YOU ARE NOT ALONE” written on them in English and Bulgarian. I don’t know how much it helps, but I guess it makes people feel better than doing nothing. Which is why I started this thread, I guess. What else can you do?
Imagine this: the morally bankrupt UN wanted this guy to supervise “human rights”? As for these poor Bulgarian nurses: you now have a taste of “Islamic” justice: this case was tried according to “Sharia” “Law” (whatever that is!!).
Surely. those of you contemplating allowing Sharia law (in your countries): take a look and see what might happen. I’m surprised that even high salaries attract people to work in muslim countries-it could be very dangerous! :smack:
What makes me so emotional about this is that these are health care workers. Despite all the bitching about the state of health care, these people trained themselves and signed up so save lives and help people in a place in which they really need help. And this is their reward. The injustice of it boggles my mind.
I hope Quaddaffi gets his virgins when he dies. I hope they’re the tightest virgins he’s ever had in his life. And I hope the insides of their genitalia are lined with sandpaper. And he has to fuck all 72 of them.
I think your anger is misplaced. When it comes to the internal affairs of Libya, it is as democratic as a country can be. This situation is more of a problem for Qaddaffi than for you or me.
I suspect that the real crime of these health workers is that they are Christian. I’ve tried in vain however to ascertain the religion of the Palestinian doctor.
