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French Posturing Over Bulgarian Nurses

Why Did Cecilia Sarkozy Go to Tripoli?

French first lady Cecilia Sarkozy flew to Libya last weekend and ushered six long-jailed medics to freedom on Tuesday morning. She got to smile for the cameras in Bulgaria, but officials in Berlin and Brussels consider her a PR queen who meddled in delicate negotiations at the last minute.

As soon as a French government jet bearing five Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor landed in Bulgaria on Tuesday, new French president Nicolas Sarkozy gave a press conference. With the release of the six medics from a Libyan prison, a "nightmare" had ended, he said -- not neglecting to mention the role of his wife. "Cecilia," he declared, "has done a remarkable job."

It was the second time Madame Sarkozy had appeared in Tripoli in two weeks. Alongside the European Union External Affairs Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner, she met with Libyan President Moammar Gadhafi to discuss the medics, who had been jailed in Libya since 1999. For years they had faced execution on charges of infecting 426 Libyan children with HIV.

EU Commission President José Manuel Barroso thanked the Sarkozys and called the contribution of the French first lady "essential." But in Brussels as well as Berlin -- not to mention on the editorial boards of some French newspapers -- the opinion was general that Madame Sarkozy had no real role in Tripoli. "In this context the wife of the president, whatever her personal qualities, had no legitimacy -- none," wrote the Strasbourg newspaper Dernières Nouvelles d'Alsace. "We can only hope that the purpose of this trip was not just to win publicity," wrote La Croix.

In fact, according to information obtained by SPIEGEL, her two visits were regarded by negotiators in Berlin and Brussels as at best annoying and at worst counterproductive. The general feeling in Berlin political circles is that the Sarkozys' last-minute interference threatened to undo a complex deal which diplomats had been working on for months.

In the deal, the EU paid €9.5 million to improve conditions at the childrens' hospital in Benghazi where the medics had worked. EU Commissioner Ferrero-Waldner and German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier had settled a deal before the EU summit in June, according to SPIEGEL's Berlin sources. But on her first visit to Tripoli, Mrs. Sarkozy reportedly offered funds to modernize yet another hospital -- which gave the Libyans a reason to hold out for more money.

The centerpiece of the negotiations was the so-called Benghazi Fund, set up to help families of the infected children. The goal was to pay $1 million (€724,000) in damages per child. The first $44 million came from Bulgaria in the form of debt forgiveness. The Libyan government contributed $74 million, while the EU promised only the money earmarked to clean up the hospital.

The structure of the Benghazi fund allows the EU to argue that no actual ransom was paid for the medics, and President Sarkozy reiterated today in his press conference that neither France nor the EU had paid a cent for the medics' freedom.

"The nurses, in my heart, were French," he said. "They were French because they were unjustly accused and because they suffered and because we had to get them out of there."

msm/cvo/ap