/ 30 July 2007

High price for freedom

Take five Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor who are working in an ill-equipped hospital. Accuse them wrongly of infecting 426 children with HIV-contaminated blood. Then lock them up for eight years, torture confessions out of them and sentence them to death, and you end up with a full partnership deal with the European Union. This is what has just happened to Libya. The release of the nurses is welcome, but it is not the first time the Libyan leader, Moammar Gadaffi, has reaped reward from past misdeeds.

The colonel supplied the IRA with battlefield weapons and then gave Britain details of past shipments. He handed over two intelligence officers for their involvement in the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, and paid $3-billion in compensation to the families of the victims of that flight and the French UTA airliner, which his agents downed in 1989. In 2003 he handed over his nuclear programme to the United States, revealing precious secrets of an illicit international trade in bomb-making equipment. The result today is that Western investors are queueing up to modernise the oil-rich country.

The final stages of the eight-year drama over the Bulgarian nurses were carefully choreographed, and it is still not clear who paid what to whom. Neither the Bulgarians nor the EU wanted to be seen paying compensation to the families of the 426 children, as that would have been an admission of guilt. A fund was set up by Gadaffi’s son, Seif al-Islam, but, as the Financial Times reported, the $460-million compensation package may have come from Libya. Bulgaria, the EU and the US have made separate payments in kind to support the hospital in the city of Benghazi where the children were infected, but the settlement enables both Libya and the EU to save face by claiming that the other side paid.

The deal was negotiated by the EU, but, in a bizarre twist to a sad tale, Nicolas Sarkozy’s wife, Cecilia, turned up in Tripoli to gatecrash the delivery of the nurses. The emergence of France’s first lady as a humanitarian midwife probably has more to do with her turbulent relationship with her husband than with the intricacies of doing a deal with Libya. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the Euro-MP and Green Party leader, said the trip was all part of the couple’s family therapy.

French stunts aside, the Libyan deal is another achievement for the EU’s much-vaunted ”soft” power — the ability to influence a country through sanctions rather than brute force. But it involves suspending moral judgement and concentrating on outcome rather than responsibility. As we have seen with the case of the innocent Bulgarian hostages, this is not as easy as it seems. — Â