Wall Street Journal - July 6, 2004

One of the immediate benefits of deposing Saddam Hussein was to cause other dictators to worry about their own future. Nowhere was this clearer than in Gadhafi's decision to open up his own WMD program for American inspectors to dismantle. After his government finally accepted responsibility for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, the U.S. and Britain rewarded Gadhafi by initiating Libya's political rehabilitation. Sanctions were lifted, Prime Minister Tony Blair visited Libya in March, and last week the U.S. added its voice to those welcoming Tripoli back into the family of nations.

Back home, however, political assassinations, arbitrary arrest, torture and other human rights abuses have continued -- as they have for the past 35 years. This idyll may soon be interrupted if May's decision by a Libyan court to put five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor to death by firing squad is upheld by the Supreme Court in Tripoli and carried out.

Their crime was being in Libya at the same time that Gadhafi needed a scapegoat for the infection of more than 400 Libyan children with HIV-contaminated blood, almost certainly caused by the country's unsafe hospital hygiene practices. First the foreigners were accused of being part of a CIA-Mossad plot to destabilize the country -- an old Gadhafi favorite. Then, perhaps realizing such an accusation wouldn't improve relations with the U.S., the accusation became that they were experimenting on the children to find a cure for AIDS.

Despite the absurdity of the claim, and the fact that the doctor who first isolated the HIV virus, Luc Montagnier, testified that the infections started a year before the Bulgarians arrived at the hospital and was probably due to poor hygiene, the medics were declared guilty in a farcical trial. According to Amnesty International and others, confessions were extracted through torture -- rape, beatings and electric rods -- and written in Arabic, a language the Bulgarians can't read.

Whether the medics live or die probably depends on what Gadhafi calculates world reaction to be. The international community, led by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, has gone through the motions of expressing its usual "outrage," denouncing the verdict and promising to do the "utmost" to free them. But the credibility of this U.N. protest can be measured by the fact that the ordeal of the medics actually started in 2000, and in the years since the U.N. has placed Libya as head of its Commission on Human Rights and completely lifted sanctions. Utmost indeed.

President Bush and Mr. Blair have so far done little better, even though both have spoken passionately in the past on the connection between domestic oppression and international terrorism, and the right of all people to liberty and justice. Libya need not be an exception to this principle, whatever the merits of acknowledging its cooperation on nuclear disarmament. Merely because Gadhafi seems to have stopped sponsoring terrorism abroad does not mean that the U.S. should ignore his reign of terror at home.

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