The San Francisco Chronicle - Tuesday, February 9, 1999
Frank Viviano, Chronicle Staff Writer

Like the trial of President Clinton, the case will be heard in a special court drawn from the national legislature. But the life-and-death moral issues at stake, involving hundreds of people who contracted AIDS from HIV-contaminated blood transfusions, are far removed from the tawdry preoccupations of Monica-gate.

The three are charged with complicity in the deaths of people who died of AIDS-related diseases as a result of blood transfusions. They face up to five years in prison and $130,000 in fines if convicted.

The trial's brooding Hamlet is Laurent Fabius, 52, who became the golden boy of French politics when President Francois Mitterrand appointed him the nation's youngest head of government in history at the age of 38 in 1984. Fabius, now president of the National Assembly, France's counterpart to the U.S. House of Representatives, has become obsessed with the case, reportedly speaking of virtually nothing else in his conversations with friends and other legislators.

In 1992, when Socialist deputies tried to block publication of the evidence against him in the Assembly, Fabius himself sponsored the bill lifting his legislative immunity, and called for a "trial of honor" to clear his name. "I have just asked you to accuse me of crimes which I have not committed," he declared.

The trial is being heard before the Court of Justice of the Republic, composed of six deputies from the Assembly, six members of the French Senate and three full-time judges. The court was created in 1993 to rule on the contaminated blood charges and to hear future cases of alleged crimes by government officials.

Next to Fabius in the dock is former Minister of Health Edmond Herve, 55, an embittered provincial "outsider" who regards himself as a victim of sinister intrigue in the political backrooms of Paris.

"No communications adviser instructs me in what to say," he told the French daily Le Monde. "I don't have a strategy up my sleeve. I am neither a network man nor a courtier."

The third defendant is former Minister of Social Services Georgina Dufoix, 55, whose own tortured response to the accusations led her to become a born-again Christian and withdraw completely from the public arena in 1988. "The only real turning point in my life was when I experienced conversion to Jesus Christ," she said in a 1994 videotape produced by a Swiss Pentecostal group.

A 10-YEAR JOURNEY

The case, which has taken 10 years to reach trial, focuses on a mysterious five-month delay in the onset of mandatory testing for blood bank donations in 1985.

The delay proved fatal for an estimated 300 blood transfusion recipients in 1985 alone.

The explanation, prosecutors maintain, lies in a high-level government conspiracy against an American pharmaceutical firm.

In February 1985, U.S.-based Abbott Laboratories and France's Diagnostics Pasteur had both sought preliminary government approval for experimental tests that could identify HIV in blood samples.

In early March, Abbott announced that its test had been perfected and was ready for immediate application.

But French officials are alleged to have blocked the U.S. firm's application until Pasteur -- which had lobbied fiercely for the contract under a corporate director with extensive ties to the Socialists -- was able to develop its own test.

Memorandums leaked to journalists indicate that a secret meeting on the Abbott bid was held at the Matignon Palace, the prime minister's residence, on May 9, 1985. No evidence has yet been presented that Fabius was in attendance or that he read the memorandums.

In excerpts from the meeting's notes, Fabius' medical adviser voiced fears that "a large part of (the French market) would be captured by the American test" and that "a decision was required if we want to reserve the future for a French product."

DELAY IN TESTING

The decision was to delay the implementation of testing, which did not begin until the end of August -- "a government policy line dictated solely by the industrial imperatives of the Diagnostics Pasteur corporation," in the words of the indictment.

By that point, say many experts, Paris' entire blood supply carried HIV, as a result of the pooling of supplies by the city's medical authorities. The former director of the national blood bank, Dr. Michel Garreta, has already been convicted of criminal fraud for his part in the deaths of 250 hemophiliacs who contracted AIDS from transfusions. In 1992, he was sentenced to four years in prison and a $90,000 fine.

Overall, according to public health records, 2,381 people have contracted AIDS in France as a result of blood transfusions, 75 percent of whom have since died. An additional 2,000 are HIV-positive.

The rate of HIV transmission through contaminated blood here is the highest in Europe, six times the figure for Germany and 13 times that in Great Britain.

ACCUSATIONS OF WITCH HUNT

Defenders of the three former ministers say the trial is a witch hunt, in search of scapegoats for widespread government inaction in France and elsewhere during the early years of the AIDS epidemic.

They point out that Fabius was ahead of other Western politicians in calling for mandatory public testing of blood bank donations in 1985.

Nonetheless, said Anne Pietrasik, a French nurse who has written extensively on medical issues, "if officials knew there was an American test that worked, but chose not to authorize it for five months, their behavior was absolutely criminal."

The question, she adds, "is whether these three really were aware, or whether someone else was out to destroy them. Fabius is the sort of man a lot of people hate."

The animosity, rooted in jealousy of someone who was born wealthy, went to all the right schools, made all the right contacts --and whose good looks earned magazine cover stories describing him as the "sexiest politician in France" -- has grown increasingly ugly with the case finally coming to trial.

Fabius' apartment building on the fashionable Place du Pantheon is guarded round-the-clock by police. His children have been confronted by the parents of classmates at school and told that their father is "an assassin."

VAMPIRE PORTRAYAL

In the newspaper of the anti-Semitic National Front, the Jewish former prime minister has been pictured in cartoons as a vampire, his mouth dripping with the blood of "innocents" -- an allusion to the medieval folk tale that Jews conducted ritual murders of Christian children.

The lives of former Cabinet ministers Dufoix and Herve are also haunted by the events of 1985, although both insist on their innocence.

When the trial opened this morning, court representatives were unsure whether the reclusive Dufoix would even appear to defend herself. "In my soul and conscience, at the deepest level of my self and before the Lord, I have no sentiment of guilt," she said in the Swiss videotape.

Currently the mayor of Rennes, in western France, Herve has been the subject of endless rumors of suicide attempts since the indictments were issued in December 1992.

An enormous portrait of Fabius' successor as prime minister, Pierre Beregovoy -- who himself committed suicide in 1993, allegedly in despair over Socialist election setbacks -- stares directly at Herve's desk at City Hall.
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