Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!enterpoop.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.twt.comment From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: Political AIDS toll in France Date: Thu, 26 Nov 92 15:00:28 EST Message-ID: Lines: 107 \SE G;COMMENTARY \SS (WS) \HD Political AIDS toll in France \BY Wilbur Landrey \DT PARIS PARIS - Nothing that happens now will bring back Stephane Larroque, who died on Aug. 23 at age 14 from the AIDS virus he contracted from transfusions of infected blood. Nothing will bring back the approximately 270 other hemophiliacs who have died for the same reason in the past seven years. Nor is anything likely to prevent the deaths of still others, dying at the rate of 60 to 65 a year, among the more than 1,250 people who tested positive for the AIDS virus after transfusions of tainted blood before France tardily forbade its use in 1985. No scandal in living memory has shaken France more profoundly, all the more so because the delay of several months in adopting available tests to detect and purify the blood was apparently for reasons of profit and national pride. The tests were available, but they were American. French tests were slow coming onto the market. After three months of high legal drama, a Paris court in October convicted three former officials, all doctors, of responsibility. Dr. Michel Garretta, former head of the National Blood Transfusion Center, was sentenced to four years in prison, fined the equivalent of $100,000 and ordered to share in paying $1.8 million in compensation to the victims and their families. The hunt for others to blame goes on, and in advance of parliamentary elections in March, has become to many what seems like a political witch hunt. Now accused are former Socialist Prime Minister Laurent Fabius and two of his ministers. Their accusers are from the two mainstream opposition parties, the Rally for the Republic (RPR) and the Union for French Democracy (UDF), which hope to wrest power from the Socialists. Mr. Fabius, secretary-general of the Socialist Party, is named in a resolution before the French Senate as politically and morally responsible for the delay in decontaminating the blood even though he was not present at the decisive meetings. Former Health Minister Georgina Dufoix and her then-junior minister, Edmond Herve, are charged with failing to withdraw the tainted blood from the market. Both argue they were only following the judgment of their medical advisers. Over the weekend the Socialist Party rallied behind its three former ministers, especially Mr. Fabius, who is leading its campaign for re-election and has been widely viewed as an eventual president. He, in turn, seems not without some bitterness against his political mentor, President Francois Mitterrand, also a Socialist, who opened the door to the trial of his former ministers last week by favoring the naming of a special High Court of Justice, made up of parliamentarians, to judge ministerial responsibility. No such court has met since the Fifth French Republic was established in 1958, and forming it is a complicated procedure. The first steps came last week in the French Senate, but by the time the court meets, if it does, the elections are likely to be long over. The affair of the contaminated blood is only the latest example of how politics has come to dominate the French agenda. Another is the French foot-dragging in the dispute between the United States and Europe over farm subsidies that is holding up the conclusion of a new world trade agreement and is approaching another showdown in Washington this week. In any case, neither the farm dispute nor the charges against Mr. Fabius is likely to lose next March's elections for the Socialists. They probably have done that already themselves in a decade of holding office. France, too, appears ripe for a change, and the French right is favored to win control of Parliament simply by being there. If so, Mr. Mitterrand, 75 and suffering from prostate cancer, would be faced with trying to work with a hostile right-wing prime minister as he did so uncomfortably once before when conservatives won control of the National Assembly between 1986 and 1988. Since French presidents are elected on a different timetable, his second seven-year term runs until 1995, but the widely expected defeat of the Socialists in March would again raise the prospect that he would quit ahead of time. The only political trump he holds is the fact that he controls that calendar and could call elections while the parties of his center-right opposition are still quarreling over who their presidential candidate will be. Coming now, the charges against Mr. Fabius may well be seen as so blatantly political that they blacken the accusers as well as the accused. Wilbur Landrey is a writer for the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times in which this article appeared prior to distribution by Scripps Howard News Service. This article is copyright 1992 The Washington Times. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM