The language is familiar: “A potential threat of a human catastrophe unparalleled in modern times.” More than 2,500 have died and the same number are dying. Incidence of the disease is said to be doubling, even tripling, in some parts of Africa by the month. Hundreds of thousands now face death.
US President Barack Obama declares a menace “spiraling out of control, getting worse ... with profound economic, political and security implications for all of us.”
The window of opportunity to contain the outbreak is apparently closing.
Illustration: Yusha
Africa is now six months into the worst Ebola epidemic in modern history. WHO Director-General Margaret Chan (陳馮富珍) calls the outbreak “the largest, most complex and most severe we’ve ever seen.”
The UN remarks that people could “stop the Ebola outbreak in west Africa in six to nine months, but only if a massive global response is implemented.”
As it is, the number of new cases is moving far faster than the capacity to manage them.
According to Chan: “There is not one single bed available for the treatment of an Ebola patient in the entire country of Liberia.”
The language of crisis is banal. Threat, disaster and catastrophe lie flat on the page. The nouns may be awesome, but are let down by qualifiers: “could, may face, potential.”
Lines of Africans are seen waiting helplessly to die, but many have been seen over the years. The suspicion is always of hyperbole, what the US calls agency log-rolling.
When Obama speaks of Ebola having “profound security implications,” I eyed my nearest defense lobbyist.
The true measure of how seriously the world takes a “crisis” is not the description, but the response. This Ebola outbreak began in December last year. The US is now slowly coming forward, with 17 treatment centers, and “training 500 medical staff.” Cuba is sending 165 helpers. China is sending 60. Britain is “planning a clinic.” Nurses are flying to help, former patients giving blood and volunteers lining up in Oxford for vaccine trials.
The lumbering dinosaur of the pharmaceutical industry has at least been galvanized into life. GlaxoSmithKline is producing 10,000 doses of vaccine in case tests show it can work. True, as with the experimental cure ZMapp, the vaccines will go to medical workers. However, the regulators have found they can process the paperwork “in just four working days,” when it takes months, even years, to process other life-saving drugs. We might ask: Why the difference?
This belated activity hardly measures up to the words quoted in my first paragraph. Ebola was first isolated in 1976. Central Africa has experienced increasing outbreaks since the mid-1990s. Yet this spring there were still no drugs available and no sign of the millions of dollars required in associated aid.
The best Washington’s Federal Drug Administration could do, under the bludgeon of the pharmaceutical firms, was warn Africans against fake medicines. Pushing untested “experimental” ones was unethical, it said.
Drug companies had enough trouble before when accused of testing drugs on developing countries. Whatever the crisis, there must be no bad karma for Big Pharma.
Contrast this hesitant humanitarian intervention with the hysteria driving the next military intervention in Iraq. This needed no talk of catastrophe, no drums from the media.
Events in Syria and Iraq were monstrous, inhuman, cruel and — as the British say — unacceptable. So a “threat to national security” is declared and, bang, in go the airstrikes. Anyone who protests is a wimp. The US is putting 1,600 troops back on Iraqi soil “as advisers.” Iraq is said to be flooded with special forces.
Every military pundit now warns against doing in Iraq precisely what the Islamic State, formerly known as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), wants, which is offer it a powerful Christian enemy to rally extremists to its flag.
US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Martin Dempsey is deaf to such warnings. He says he will be deploying ground troops in rescue missions and even “attacks against specific ISIL targets.”
The Pentagon was planning to widen “the types of targets it hits from the air, focusing on the Islamic State leaders.” That was, said Dempsey, a “first step.”
What about the step after that? The idea of military escalation seems to electrify democratic politicians. British Prime Minister David Cameron dives to his bunker. Tabloids scream for revenge. Everyone congas to the deadly dance of mission creep.
It must be ever more likely that a fundamentalist enclave in western Iraq will survive for a while. As with the Taliban’s rule in Kabul, the West helped create it and will have to live with it. After the most appalling slaughter, much of it at the West’s hands, it finds another part of the world resolutely refusing to behave as it ordered. It bombs and kills, and it is as bad as it was before, probably worse.
That said, the most encouraging news this week was that al-Qaeda in Syria had pleaded with the Islamic State not to kill aid workers, since they were trying to save Muslim lives.
This was some antidote to one of the gloomiest talks I have heard recently, by International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) director-general Yves Daccord. Never had relief work been so compromised as now, through being seen as a partisan proxy in a civil conflict, he said.
Frequently, as in Syria, the Red Cross was seen as on the side of the ruling regime; elsewhere it was seen as on the side of rebels. Everywhere its image was tarnished by association with foreign, especially Western, military intervention. The humanitarian ethic of the ICRC and the early UN had been corrupted by militarism.
Local commanders demand that the UN and its local agents, “prove to me that you are really independent and impartial, that your service is relevant,” Daccord said.
Relating the relief of suffering to “national security” — as Obama does, even in the case of Ebola — is madness. A casualty of the “anti-terror” wars of the past 15 years has been the confusion of humanitarian with politico-military intervention. It not only undermines the ideological purity of aid, but also endangers aid workers. The impartiality of the founders of the ICRC and the UN has been swamped in the rush to war. Humanity loses out to killing.
The West has dithered for six months over Ebola in Africa, yet in Iraq chases once more that will-o’-the-wisp of political machismo: the perfect bomb strike.
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