Cynicism
    By Pierre Haski
    Lib ration

    Wednesday 20 December 2006

    AIDS remains a very real illness, but one with a fantastical side that provokes aberrant attitudes from various governments. We saw that in South Africa, where official denial did much damage in one of the countries most affected. And also in China, where the Communist government tried to shove under the rug several tens of thousands of poor, infected peasants who had sold their blood. The Libya of Colonel Muammar al-Khadafi - who has lost some of the messianic magnificence of his beginnings - is also demonstrating such an attitude in the so-called Bulgarian Nurses Affair, which would be better named simply the Libyan Affair. Condemning to death the five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor imprisoned since 1999 is an act of revolting cynicism, when we know that the infection of the Libyan children antedates the arrival of the foreign medical team. The last straw for a regime that blew up a DC-10 full of passengers and got off so easily. But to not declare the foreigners guilty of having deliberately introduced the HIV virus would be to acknowledge the Libyan authorities' own fault in the tragedy that affects hundreds of children. And that would risk opening the way to a critique of the despotic power of the aging "Guide" of this revolution that has been emptied of any meaning. The foreigner constitutes an ideal scapegoat for this demonized evil, even if that scapegoating must bring into question the policy of rapprochement with the West begun by Tripoli in recent years. That's the risk Khadafi takes when he says, "AIDS is the foreigner."