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The end of the Tripoli six

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

I have been worrying about miscellaneous personal matters in the last few days and have completely ignored what is happening around the world, only to find out today that the six medics sentenced to death by Libyan authorities only two weeks ago, for supposedly infecting 438 children in a hospital in Libya through blood transfusions workers were finally released.

This may sound strange, but for an hour, I felt relieved and in a sense, as pleased as some Bulgarians and Palestinians must have been to hear that their compatriots were flying back to their homeland, for the first time since 1999, when the group of six was arrested.

I'd been thinking about the six for a while, as they had gone to Libya to help people in need and probably find some work to support their families. Bulgaria in 1999 was a country still recovering from the communist past and migration and unemployment were just two of the problems the country was going through. Eight years later, Bulgarians enjoy a European Union membership.

Somewhere down the line, the medics had become victims, some say, of a system gone awry which wanted to use them as scapegoats for a problem that someone else had created, a problem that is spread nationwide and not limited to the Benghazi hospital, where the initial infections were reported.

I was translating for a family doctor today who is originally from Libya. He said to the patient I was translating for that he was going on vacation for a month to Libya. As I left his office, I mentioned to him about the case of the freed medics [after the Bulgarian government paid $1 million/victim = $438 million to the Libyan authorities] and how big a news item it was today.

Meanwhile, I continued to think about the medics' families and how glad they must have been to have their husbands, fathers, daughters, come back home.

The doctor wasn't so moved by it all. He shrugged, said he didn't care and added that he doesn't really follow the news.

Photo credit: [left] Reuters -Nikolay Doychinovn / [right] Campaign to Free The Six Medics in Libya

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