Soon, maybe as soon as the end of the month, the Libyan Supreme Court will hear the appeal of the five Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor, the "Tripoli 6" (here, here, here, here, here and here). As it approaches there is intense activity from the international scientific community. On March 23, ten major medical associations wrote to Colonel Qadhafi:
We the undersigned leading health professional associations in the United States are writing to urge you in the strongest terms to immediately release and exonerate the five Bulgarian nurses--Valya Cherveny, Snezhanka Dimitrova, Nasya Nenova, Valentina Siropulo, and Kristiana Valcheva--and Palestinian physician Ashraf Ahmad Jum'a who were sentenced to death on December 19, 2006 for "deliberately infecting" 426 children with HIV at Benghazi children's hospital. This situation is tragic for the children who were infected with HIV and for the health professionals who have been unjustly imprisoned and now sentenced to death.
It is signed by the American Medical Association, American College of Physicians, American Medical Student Association, Association of Nurses in AIDS Care, HIV Medicine Association, International Human Rights Committee of American Public Health Association, Physicians for Human Rights, Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America, Society of General Internal Medicine, World Federation of Public Health Associations.
Then an Editorial in the prestigious Journal of Infectious Diseases:
How will this sad and deplorable episode end? Six foreign health care workers have now been jailed in Libya for â¼8 years, reportedly tortured, and now once again (on 19 December 2006) sentenced to death. Appeals are being considered, and ransom negotiations continue. Assuming the presumption of innocence as a basis for a fair trial, it must be stated that, by any objective standard, there is no scientific evidence to convict anyone of deliberately infecting unfortunate Libyan children. Moreover, epidemiologic and molecular evidence demonstrates that the HIV strain that caused the nosocomial outbreak was circulating in the hospital before the arrival of the foreign health care workers, and poor hygiene standards, such as the reuse of needles, were reportedly widespread. We can only hope that world pressure will continue until this miscarriage of justice is reversed. (via Declan Butler's blog)
This week, the US State Department's second in command, John Negroponte, will visit Libya. It isn't clear he will discuss the Tripoli 6 case. The State Department has not exactly been stalwart in its efforts.
If the US State Department isn't stalwart on their own, we need to "encourage" them. Physicians for Human Rights has put together a web page you can use it to send letters to Senators Joseph Biden and Patrick Leahy so they can pressure the State Department. If you are a blogger, please consider posting on this. The tremendous response of the science blogosphere made an immediate and powerful difference last October.
We are running the last lap. We will have more as events unfold.
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I'm glad you posted on this. It's a tragedy for the children as well as for the healthcare workers.
And it takes so little time to email a Senator, or fax, or call. My minimal effort - or yours - or the next person - might be the last nudge needed to get their attention and make a big difference.
Thanks.
Okay folks here it comes again from the middle-right. Whether you ever agree with Revere or not this is one you can agree with him on. It takes about a second to email a Senator and they have this neat link too now. Not that you would ever get me to agree with Biden or Leahy on anything but yep, this is it.
Reveres world is one where everyone is treated with respect and decency, fairness and justice. If the Libyans get away with this government sanctioned murder its no different than Locherbie. There just is no plane involved. Hey, I'll write a dozen letters to keep from having to lose one guy in a combat situation but thats what happens if Reveres world fails. These folks petition NATO for an immediate armed response and we HAVE to respond in accordance with the charter. There will be a vote after a little discussion and they will first ask on the part of NATO to give them back and when they dont, well they'll wheel a lot of guys like me out. That would be a very bad turn of events. Would they kill them? I dont know. I know if they do they will have signed the death warrants for a lot of civilians in Libya upon a NATO go to war vote.
So for you lefties who dont like me please by all means write the bloody letters, I just had a whole squadron that just got back from Iraq write one. They dont want another war but they look at it like I do, some fights are just pure necessary.
The Koran says, "A scholars ink is far stronger than the martyrs death." Lets hope we dont have to get to that. Lets try Revere's way first. If not then give me a ring and I'll know how to handle it.
Cat among the pigeons here.
Do we really want to pull yet another country into the conflict in the Middle East?
A year or so back, some TWOGS were released from captivity in, I believe, Iraq due to some delicate negotiations, and the negotiation skills of Muslim Imams.
Would working with some of the well known and well placed Muslim Imam's, within Libya and without, help secure a reduced sentence or even the release of the Tripoli 6 into jail in a second country?
With the Tripoli 6 we are not dealing with a legal system similar to our own. The legal systems in many Middle Eastern States is tied very closely to the Koran for centuries. Some family blood feuds in the Middle East go back centuries. It is rough justice in the Middle East.
V-Not really. They need a goat for their failed healthcare system and this is it. They cant come out and declare that they were in the wrong and the foreigners were right. If they even pardoned them they should pack their stuff and haul tail for the first embassy that would take them in. That pardon would last only about an hour or two before they charged them again.
A military option wouldnt be just the US it would be NATO they are taking on and they have been rattling that noisy sabre about this thing for months. Mo G. aint stupid but he is goat roped by his own religious status and from a very vocal Muslim radical group in the country that wants to hang them.
There is an answer and that would be to give them diplomatic status from their countries. That ends all debate and Revere you may want to pass that on to Declan C. they have to let them go then.
I am afraid that I am constrained to agree with Randy here.
This is scapegoating, pure and exceedingly simple. Mixed, no doubt, with some extremely cynical extortion on the part of Qadhafi.
We're in no position to go to war with these people. For reasons that a casual inspection of the present wretched state of the United States Army, and the strategic options available to our enemies, should make abundantly clear.
But if they murder these people, which, in the present state of witch-hunting hysteria over there, they seem quite capable of doing, then the signal they send is going to be received more strongly by the EC countries, the former Warsaw Pact countries, and the Palestinian people than by the United States. Since, to the best of my knowledge, US humanitarian assistance personnel over there right now are nil.
If the Libyan government feels free to scapegoat, torture, and murder HCWs, then they should receive exactly NOTHING from any other nation on Planet Earth until and unless they go through an internal regime change.
Cut them off. Tighter than we cut off Iraq, between the wars. Refugees can come out, but NOTHING goes in.
Since their present regime seems intoxicated with the idea of a seventh century standard of government, then they ought to get the opportunity to experience a seventh century standard of living. Firsthand.
Both valid arguments.
However, I have two points of contention.
1. Name a time when sanctions have not been subverted by other countries eg. when Iraq was blockaded, by sea and by air, she was getting oil and food from neighbouring Muslim countries. We, in the West, could certainly implement very stringent sanctions, but I fear Libya's Arabic neighbours, would on the quiet, subvert those sanctions.
2. If NATO was to go into Libya then the rules of engagement would need to change. In Kosovo the rules of engagement for NATO troops were - to fire only if the other side fires first. The Serbs knew of and understood the NATO rules of engagement. Thus when a Dutch NATO troops, guarding a couple of thousand Muslim refugees, was forced to leave the refugees to the Serbs - not a shot was fired at the Dutch. No survivors.
Randy, NATO is just as hog tied by convention as the UN. If NATO does not change its rules of engagement, rogue states will do as they have always done.
The overall effect of the subversion of sanctions against Iraq was not what one could call "spectacular success".
Just read Iraq's Nuclear Mirage: Memoirs and Delusions, the account of one of Saddam's nuclear scientists, to understand the crippling effect the sanctions had on weapons development in post-1991 Iraq.
IIRC, the conclusions of independent scientists about the source of the children's infections (that they took place before the foreign doctors arrived) were not allowed in court because (the excuse was), the scientists were not Muslim, and so didn't have standing to testify in the Islamic court.
What I want to know is, why couldn't Muslim scientists run the same tests, and offer their testimony? No, the tests shouldn't have to be done by Muslims, any more than the testimony of women should be held to have less weight than the testimony of men. But since this is a case where the evidence can be re-assessed, why not do it, and deprive the Libyan court of that excuse to exclude it?
I know it is not in the nature of scientists to cater to irrational rejection of science, but when there is a clear path around that rejection, and it could save lives...