Opinion

Ebola’s terrorist allies

November 20, 2018

Ebola is a terrifying disease. And until now, the terror it inspires has been its greatest ally. In their attempt to escape an outbreak, people already infected carry the contagion to fresh areas. This proved to be an important reason for Ebola’s spread in West Africa where, in the three years from 2013, some 11,300 people died.

But now with a fresh outbreak in the northeastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), this appalling disease, which on average proves fatal to half of those infected, has acquired a new ally - terrorists.

Thugs from a group calling themselves the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) have assaulted UN peacekeepers and health professionals struggling with the latest outbreak at its epicenter in the city of Beni, population of around a million, in the DRC’s North Kivu province. This gimcrack collection of killers, which originated in neighboring Uganda, pretends to be seeking to establish an Islamic state and is supposed to have links with Al-Shabaab and Al-Qaeda. However, besides the possibility that an Al-Qaeda financier did channel some money to these terrorists, it seems very much as if they are simply brigands among the scores of similar robber bands that have taken advantage of the long-standing instability and misrule in the DRC.

As a result of an ADF assault Friday on Beni, health workers were forced to suspend their critically important operations both to care for those already ill with virulent Ebola and continue their program to inoculate the local population with a serum developed during the West African outbreak. International teams, including those from Canada and UK as well as NGOs such as Medecins Sans Frontieres and the Gates Foundation are reportedly staying, despite the death of several UN peacekeepers and the shelling of a clinic where patients were being treated. Unfortunately, the Trump administration last month pulled back US teams on the grounds of deteriorating security.

The latest reports are that so far 213 people have died in and around Beni and 358 cases are being treated. But the World Health Organization is warning that the population in North Kivu province, of whom a million have already been displaced by terrorist violence, could now flee taking contagion into South Sudan and Uganda or elsewhere in the DRC. If this happens the effort to contained Ebola that has so far been concentrated in and around Beni will prove useless. A far wider response will be required. And if the disease reaches South Sudan, a country that, since independence seven years ago, has been tearing itself apart, the lack of basic infrastructure will prove catastrophic.

President Trump has surely not been wise both in pulling back US medical personnel who in West Africa acquired considerable experience in dealing with Ebola and in cutting funding for further research into the contagion. In the end it is in the interests of the entire international community to deal with this latest outbreak as quickly as possible. The clear danger is that the disease will spread beyond Central Africa and pose a worldwide health threat. But the real villains here are the ADF terrorists. Either through ignorance or out of sheer evil they have allied themselves with Ebola. How apt it would be if these vicious thugs themselves fell victim to this deadly virus.


November 20, 2018
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