The present Congo ebola epidemic is one of the many effects of the Congo Wars, itself the result of US support for Rwandan dictator Paul Kagame, in what is part of a familiar pattern of “humanitarian” assistance from our government for one group in a remote nation leading to horrible outcomes.
The Democratic Republic of Congo has suffered centuries of civil conflict since Mobutu Sese Seko’s downfall at the end of the First Congo War in 1997. Among the worst colonial abuses, the DRC, a former Belgian colony, suffered horrific misrule, exploitation, national violence, foreign invasion and looting, and frequent disease outbreaks.
Remember the 1994 genocide in Rwanda? Allegedly, Rwanda’s Hutu-dominated government initiated an unprovoked assault on the Tutsi minority that continued until Paul Kagame’s Tutsi military effectively invaded Rwanda from neighboring Uganda and ended the slaughter, becoming Rwanda’s dictator. The United States and Britain supported the Hutu government in Kagame, France and Beligium. A very significant article in the Guardian from 2017 by Helen C. Epstein demonstrates that CIA support for Kagame’s “Rwandan Patriotic Front” goes back years before the Hutu massacres and was the consequence of our assistance for Ugandan strongman Museveni, who was the patron saint of Kagame. Kagame’s RPF at least partly caused the Hutu massacre through incessant attacks on Rwanda.
The Second Congo War, sometimes referred to as the “African World War” and the most lethal conflict since World War II, which caused about 5 million deaths, began with the Rwandan invasion in 1998, allegedly to protect Tutsis living in the eastern DRC. The invasion was also attended by Museveni’s Uganda, and both nations plundered the country’s wealthy natural resources.
Endemic chaos reigned in the eastern DRC, especially in the provinces of Kivu and Ituri, with between 50 and 100 armed groups currently active in the two decades since the invasion.
Since August 2018, the present ebola epidemic has devastated Kivu’s eastern region, causing 2597 instances and 1746 fatalities. It is now ranked as the second-deadliest outbreak after the West African epidemic in 2013-2016, which murdered 11,300 people. Experts fear, however, that if the spread is not stopped, the present epidemic may end up worse than the earlier one.
The WHO declared an international emergency in the current Kivu ebola epidemic in the DRC on July 17, 2019, after the nation’s government confirmed on July 14 that the disease had spread to Goma, a city of about two million people on the porous border with Rwanda. This development triggered concerns that this might be a turning point in the epidemic, as tens of thousands are frequently crossing the border on foot and the town has an international airport with flights to Ethiopia.
The Goma outbreak was caused when a pastor, while infected but asymptomatic, traveled by bus from neighboring Butembo town. In that vast town he became symptomatic but succeeded even after getting therapy. Fortunately, care workers managed to find and vaccinate all the other passengers on the bus and no further cases have been reported. However, there is still a high level of interest. Until now, Rwanda is ready to battle the disease if it crosses the frontier, as healthcare staff have already been vaccinated in neighboring fields.
Despite the availability of a reliable vaccine created in 2014 for West Africa, stopping the spread in the DRC was hard. This is due to violence in the Kivu region and an endemic climate of government mistrust towards outside medical employees that has resulted in brutal assaults against them. After killing staff, many aid organisations withdrew from the region. From the point of view of local individuals traumatized by years of chaos, when a family member is diagnosed, outsiders wearing strange protective suits slip in, steal their possessions and bring them to a mysterious location they are not permitted to visit and where their family member usually dies. Families are then not permitted to perform traditional funeral rites after this unfortunate sequence of occurrences. It has achieved the point that 25% of Butembo’s population views ebola as a hoax
The original vaccine, developed by Merck, has an efficacy rate of 93 percent, but the DRC government recently decided to supplement it with a second, untested, vaccine developed by Johnson & Johnson, which uncomfortably requires a second dose because the supply of the Merck vaccine is insufficient for large-scale vaccination of the area’s population. Minister of Health Oly Olunga has resigned in protest at this decision, stating that it will lead to government confusion and exacerbate distrust.
Organizations have started training local people in safe practices to care for and bury Ebola patients in order to combat this mistrust, so that families can care for their own loved ones at home. In addition, the CUBE (Biosecure Emergency Care Unit for Outbreaks) was developed, a clear plastic module where patients can be cared for through gloves built into the walls, without having to donate protective suits to medical workers, allowing family members to visit patients and see what is going on.
The hazards of further spread of the Congo epidemic can be seen in the consequences of the West African ebola outbreak, resulting in long-term stunted economic growth in the impacted nations and more than a thousand extra fatalities from malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV caused by disproportionate fatalities of health care personnel.
Stepping away from the instant emergency, the present epidemic of Ebola appears to be part of a pattern in which US foreign policy, pursuing some supposedly humanitarian objective – stop the Hutus from massacring Tutsis, stop Qaddafi from massacring rival clans in Bengazi, stop Assad from massacring Sunni people– It leads to horrific’ unforeseen effects’: Islamist slave markets in’ freed’ Libya, ISIS killing and enslaving Yezidis, and now Congo’s Ebola. Maybe one day, instead of having to make huge efforts to repair the consequences of our misguided policies, in the first place we can stop implementing those policies.
