Bulgaria’s medics are home from their eight years of captivity in Libya, and it is time to consider the present and future, and move beyond the past.
For now, it is difficult to say that there is only one form of reaction to their release. There has been joy aplenty among the families of the medics, among their friends and colleagues, and for the vast majority of the people of Bulgaria. Yet that joy is tempered by the knowledge that the people who stepped off the French aircraft on July 24 have been subjected to unimaginably profound and prolonged trauma. Their lives can never be the same again. Few could have failed to notice that while some of the medics were smiling, others looked - difficult as it was to read their expressions - stunned, disorientated, perhaps even disbelieving.
Some immediate steps are required, and it is reassuring to note that the Government has gone some way to providing psychological, medical and financial backup for the medics. It is to be hoped that all required forms of support for the medics and their families will be guaranteed for the long term.
It may equally be noted that it may help the medics return to some form of normality if there is a consensus agreement to ease them swiftly away from the glare and pummeling of the world of the media and politicians. On one level, given the level of national passion about the medics and the emotions about their plight and their return, it was understandable to a degree that their first day home meant that their only glimpses of their home Bulgaria was over the shoulders of media people and politicians. Even as night gathered on a day that, before dawn, had found them still in a Libyan jail, the medics continued to be forebearing about giving interviews and sitting in long conservations with Cabinet ministers. But now there should be a time in which they are left in peace, in a calm and natural atmosphere with those close to them, to begin to pick up the threads of their lives torn asunder more than eight years ago. Many countries and many people made valiant efforts to give the medics their freedom. Now Bulgaria must continue the process, to help the medics achieve real freedom.
On another level, at some point there will be discussion about the price paid for the medics’ freedom. It must swiftly be pointed out that it is difficult to imagine a price that would have been too high to pay to Gaddaffi and his fellow goons to bring the medics home. Yet the price has been high. Not only in monetary terms, but also for all the people who had to do obeisance, plead, threaten and wheedle Libya, and in the end, sign generously lavish undertakings, of diplomatic rehabilitation, and of support for the children infected with HIV. Much money is to be given for HIV treatment facilities in Libya. Let us hope that the money is used well. We hear that one facility is intended to become Africa’s leading HIV treatment hospital. How ironic that it will be hosted in a country that on the balance of probabilities is guilty of infecting its own children in just this way.
Let us not forget the HIV-infected children. In the way that the medics were used by Libya as pawns, so were the children, paraded for photo opportunities with placards hung about their necks. Some of the children died long before the day of settlement came. Let us hope that, in spite of the profound flaws of Gaddaffi’s Libya, those children too are given the freedom to live the best possible life that could be made available to them.
Gaddaffi has indeed wrung out of the tragedy a diplomatic triumph for himself and his ridiculous regime, but in the indeed the victory must go to those who value and who deserve true freedom.
