HIV in Kibya: A Test Case for Human Rights

Another Test for Qaddafi: Who Infected the Children?
By PATRICK E. TYLER

Published: January 11, 2004

ENGHAZI, Libya, ?- Nesma Wershefani looks at visitors warily, with piercing black eyes.

Last fall, at age 6, she went to first grade with a backpack and a brightly colored tunic, full of excitement about learning. Now she is back at home because the other children teased her about having the virus that causes AIDS, a disease she does not yet understand.

"The children and the teachers treated her very badly, and she was socially rejected," said her father, Naji Wershefani, a truck driver in Benghazi, a port city of 700,000. Mr. Wershefani, his wife and five children live in a tiny apartment on a muddy street where potholes overflow with sewage and rainwater.

Across town, Suhaila Awad, 17, struggles to endure her isolation in the second year of high school; the other students know she carries the same virus. She hates to talk about it.

"Her best friend won't see her anymore," says her father, Muhammad Awad. "It is making me very sick, too, but in my heart."

These victims of what is known as the Benghazi epidemic, which spread H.I.V., the human immunodeficiency virus, to more than 400 children here in 1997-98, are the most visible face of one of the most difficult political problems Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi is facing as leader of Libya.

Blame has not yet been assigned, although a number of doctors and nurses, foreign and Libyan, have been charged with negligence. Some of them ?- only the foreigners ?- are in jail, facing the death penalty.