End in sight for medics' Libyan ordeal

"In all this negotiation there have always been two lines. One issue was for us to give money for compensation. The second was to deal with al-Megrahi – the Lockerbie guy," says Georgi Milkov, a Bulgarian journalist for the newspaper 24 Hours who has covered the case and is currently in Libya. "It is connected with our case. The people who are negotiating [the Lockerbie settlement] case are the same people who are negotiating in our case."

On both sides of the issue has been a heated national constituency placing enormous pressure on their governments not to give in.

Libyan parents of the infected children threw rocks at police and fought with them last year after a decision on one of the appeals in the case was delayed. Benghazi is historically a trouble spot for the regime where just last spring Islamists rioted against the iron-fisted police state.

In Bulgaria, the nurses, as well as the doctor who has since been granted Bulgarian citizenship, have become a national cause.

"Still now in Bulgaria you can find people who want to go to war against Libya, to cut absolutely relations, to not make deals, to close the embassy, and ask our friends from NATO to invade," says Mr. Milkov.

For the closed-off and secretive Libyan regime, the case is also a window into its normally opaque political system.

"It's an issue that goes to the heart of an internal fight going on inside Libya between the revolutionaries and reformers," says Dierderik Vandewalle, an associate professor of Asian and Middle Eastern studies at Dartmouth College and author of several books on Libya.

"[Muammar] Qaddafi is trying to prove it's a Libyan issue [of] 'we won't bow to pressure.' But reformers are saying, 'We really need to get this resolved. We're just shooting ourselves in the foot,' " says Mr. Vandewalle.

"One important factor here was the cost domestically," says Haizam Amirah Fernandez, an author of several books on Libya and analyst at el Cano Institute in Madrid. Qaddafi needed to show that Libya "didn't accept pressure from outside and the [won] payments to the families---this is important in a tribal community."

“One important factor here was the cost domestically,” says Haizam Amirah Fernández, an author of several books on Libya and an analyst at Real Instituto Elcano in Madrid. Qaddafi needed to show that Libya “didn’t accept pressure from outside and [won] payments to the families,” he says. “This is important in a tribal community.”

Libya's international isolation at the time the medics were arrested – as well as Mr. Qaddafi's assertions that HIV, and the AIDS disease it causes, was a plot by the West to control Africa – "fit in with the revolutionary rhetoric and now it became so much a part of that rhetoric he really can't back down," says Vandewalle.

The spotlight on the charges of torture leveled by the medics against Libyan police did result in the unusual circumstance of the police being tried in Libyan court. They were found innocent.

But that has not translated into better treatment for average Libyan prisoners, says Sarah Leah Whitson, the director of Human Rights Watch's North Africa and Middle East division.

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