It was Boxing Day 1989 and I was sitting in my flat watching the early afternoon news.

The leading item was about the execution of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, the hated communist dictators of Romania.

The phone rang – it was my old friend George Galloway, then the MP for Glasgow Hillhead.

“Haw Boab fancy going to Romania?” he bawls down the phone. Six words which would change my life.

The Bucharest we arrived in early in January still had smouldering ruins from the street fighting of the last of the anti-communist revolutions which engulfed Eastern Europe in 1989.

I had witnessed Warsaw and Prague, but Bucharest would be the bloodiest with the darkest of secrets – among them a hitherto unknown epidemic of child Aids.

George Galloway and I first stumbled upon the rumours of dying children with faces like haunted geriatrics a matter of days after we reached Bucharest.

But it was in the Black Sea port of Constanta that we came face-to-face with the epidemic that would stay with us for life.

Nothing could really prepare you for your first visit to the Municipal Hospital in Constanta, and the child Aids ward there.

Here were what I would describe later as “canyons of horror” – children who were grey, sunken skeletons, many with hands outstretched and twitching as they approached death.

The stench was overwhelming. There were 63 children sharing 43 cots that day in the hospital in Constanta.

I know because I counted them in. Counted them out also.

Galloway, by then a veteran of sub-Saharan Africa as well as the famine in Ethiopia, stood in their midst with a solitary tear rolling down his cheek…more

Sursa: BBC.co.uk

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