The Ebola Virus and War
By Connor Worley
The direct health effects of war are readily apparent to observers. Soldiers and civilians alike are susceptible to bullets, landmines, airstrikes, and the multitude of ways humans have invented to harm each other. Less visible, however, is how the state of war destroys health infrastructure in the affected region, which disproportionately affects the civilian populace.
Three northeastern provinces in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ituri, North Kivu, and South Kivu, are in the midst of the second-largest Ebola outbreak in history. In August of 2018, the World Health Organization declared an Ebola outbreak in the D.R.C, which has, as of October 15th, claimed 2,157 lives. These three provinces are also in the throes of two different civil conflicts, which greatly exacerbates the work needed to contain the outbreak.
The war in Kivu is a quagmire muddled by the ethnic tensions of peoples who fled the Rwandan Genocide, the region’s abundant natural resources, and foreign intervention. The near-continuous violence for the last three decades has made the local populace incredibly distrustful of authorities. Reuters have reported multiple instances of health clinics being raided by armed groups and the staffers subsequently driven out of town and or killed. Evacuations or killings such as these cause a breach in containment protocol and allows for Ebola to spread. The violence against health workers is so prevalent that Doctors without Borders has withdrawn all personnel from the region, a massive blow to containment efforts. The locals are suspicious of the work of those combating Ebola, and a poll by the BBC found that one-fourth of locals don’t trust the vaccines administered by health officials. They believe the outbreak to be a hoax concocted to further destabilize the region.
As in Kivu, Ituri is also grappling with systemic violence. In Ituri province, ethnic Lendu farmers’ militias frequently clash with the militias of the Hema herders. Armed groups are extremely brutal, they attack civilian populations, loot villages, rape women, and kill men and children. These displays of barbarism have caused an estimated 300 people a day to flee to neighboring Uganda, where, according to Al Jazeera, over 300,000 Congolese have found refuge. Unfortunately, this mass exodus of people has carried Ebola with it, and Uganda has reported four cases of Ebola within its borders. The WHO has also reported that another bordering state, Tanzania, has been withholding information on possible Ebola cases within its territory. The region’s porous borders, combined with the refugee crisis from the conflict in Ituri, has made the containment of Ebola more difficult than ever.
Systemic violence in Northeastern D.R.C has created the perfect storm of factors for Ebola to spread unchecked throughout the region. The wars in the Congo have allowed for the additional deaths and incapacitation of thousands due to the destruction of trust and efficacy in health officials’ work. If left unchecked, this current Ebola outbreak can overtake the 2014 West African outbreak as the deadliest in history.
Connor Worley is an arm control fellow with Peace Economy Project.
