American Reaction to Libyan Verdict Is Muted
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WASHINGTON — A Libyan court’s decision to sentence five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian Arab doctor to death, saying they deliberately infected 426 children with HIV, is being met with a muted reaction from America.
Appearing with the Bulgarian foreign minister yesterday, Secretary of State Rice expressed sympathy for the fate of the Libyan children but said she was “disappointed”with the verdict from the lower court in Tripoli. Scientific evidence has shown that the children contracted the virus before the foreign medical workers arrived in Libya.
But the secretary’s disappointment will not result in much censure or penalty for Libya, whose regime normalized relations with America in 2004 after the Libyan leader, Muammar Gadhafi, verified that he had dismantled a secret nuclear weapons program.
A State Department official said yesterday that Ms. Rice is still planning a trip to Libya, possibly in late January or February, that would make her the highest-ranking official to visit the country since the resumption of diplomatic relations. The official, who requested anonymity, added that America is in the process of selecting a fully credentialed ambassador to run the newly reopened American Embassy in Tripoli.
Indeed, the assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs, David Welch, discussed the matter with members of the Libyan government in Tripoli last weekend, the official said. And while Ms. Rice expressed regret at the Libyan court’s decision in Washington, the American Embassy in Tripoli released no independent statement yesterday from its ranking diplomat condemning the verdict.
“We also are concerned that these medics will be allowed to go home at the earliest possible date,” Ms. Rice said yesterday in an appearance with her Bulgarian counterpart, Ivaylo Kalfin. “These are people who deserve to go home, and we are very disappointed at the outcome of this verdict. And I want you to know, minister, that we will continue to work for their early return to Bulgaria.”
“We feel compassionate also, and wish all the sympathy with the tragedy of the children,” Mr. Kalfin said. “So hopefully, we shall do our best to urge the Libyan authorities, including the judicial authorities, to go ahead and complete the whole procedure and to allow the nurses to come home to Bulgaria.”
When a State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, was asked yesterday whether the sentence against the medical workers was an impediment to America’s relationship with Libya, he said it was a factor. But he went on to stress the positives in the relationship, as well.”U.S.-Libyan relations have come a long way over the past several years, beginning with the point at which the Libyan government decided to make that fundamental decision to give up its weapons of mass destruction and also to come to terms with the families of Pam Am 103,” he said, referring to the 1988 plane bombing that Libya orchestrated, which killed 270 people.
Mr. McCormack said the Libyan verdict would not affect the naming of an ambassador or a visit to Libya by Ms. Rice. “There’s not one single variable that will lead to a positive decision on either of those,” he said.”I think there are a lot of different things that go into that calculation.”
The trial against the six medical workers — Dr. Ashraf Ahmad Jum’a, Nasya Nenova, Kristiana Valceva, Valentina Siropulo, Valya Chervenyashka, and Snezana Dimitrova — has generated outrage among international rights groups.
The six were originally arrested in 1999, and Libya’s superior court overturned a 2004 death sentence in the case under intense pressure in December 2005. But the court ordered a retrial whose verdict yesterday can still be appealed. Human Rights Watch interviewed the defendants in the case in May and found that earlier confessions of guilt had been extracted through sexual assault, electrocution, and beatings.
Yesterday, a Libyan opposition figure whose brother is a prisoner of conscience said the treatment of the medical workers was the equivalent of blackmail. “We condemn terrorism and hostage taking, and this is hostage diplomacy,” Mohamed ElJahmi said.
“As long as we let him, he will use the Bulgarian nurses to get something. He is using them as hostages,” Mr. ElJahmi said of Colonel Gadhafi. “If I am not mistaken, Bulgaria is part of the coalition on Iran. If we cannot stand by our friends against these terrorists, it undercuts our credibility with everyone.”
Mr. ElJahmi submitted a petition to President Bush last month on behalf of his brother, Fathi ElJahmi, who was rearrested on March 26,2004, two weeks after Mr. Bush praised him as a liberal dissident. The petitioners included Senator Kyl, a Republican of Arizona, and Senator Kennedy, a Democrat of Massachusetts.