The Ebola epidemic´s hotspot appears to be Liberia, a country founded by colonial settlers from the USA. The following is a brief overview of the country´s sad history, including the events which led to the health system´s collapse, which in turn allowed the Ebola epidemic to become much more deadlier than in nearby nations.
Liberia in 1830, map prepared by the American Colonization Society
Founding of Liberia, 1847
The founding of Liberia in the early
1800s was motivated by the domestic politics of slavery and race in the United
States as well as by U.S. foreign policy interests. In 1816, a group of white
Americans founded the American
Colonization Society (ACS) to deal with the “problem” of the growing number
of free blacks in the United States by resettling them in Africa.
In 1818 the Society sent two
representatives to West Africa to find a suitable location for the colony, but
they were unable to persuade local tribal leaders to sell any territory. In
1821, a U.S. Navy vessel resumed the search for a place of permanent settlement
in what is now Liberia.
Once again the local leaders
resisted American attempts to purchase land. This time, the Navy officer in
charge, Lieutenant Robert Stockton,
coerced a local ruler to sell a strip of land to the Society. The local tribes continually attacked the new
colony and in 1824, the settlers built fortifications for protection. In that
same year, the settlement was named Liberia and its capital Monrovia, in honor
of President James Monroe who had procured more U.S. Government money for the
project.
Other colonization societies
sponsored by individual states purchased land and sent settlers to areas
nearMonrovia. Africans removed from slave ships by the U.S. Navy after the
abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade were also put ashore in Liberia. In
1838 most of these settlements, with up to 20,000 people, combined into one
organization. The settlers attempted to retain the culture they had brought
from the United States and for the most part did not integrate with the native
societies. Today, about 5 percent of the
population of Liberia is descended from these settlers.
The U.S. Government lent some
diplomatic support, but Britain and France had territories in West Africa and
were better poised to act. As a result, in 1847, Liberia declared independence
from the American Colonization Society in order to establish a sovereign state
and create its own laws governing commerce.
Despite protests by the affected
British companies, London was the first to extend recognition to the new
republic, signing a treaty of commerce and friendship with Monrovia in 1848. Because of fears of the impact this might
have on the issue of slavery in the United States, Washington did not recognize
the nation it had played a role in creating.
The United States finally
established diplomatic relations with Liberia in 1862, and continued to
maintain strong ties over the years.
The black settlers came to be called
Americo-Liberians. They emulated their former homeland, however painful their
experience in the New World had been. They used the Declaration of Independence
as the vehicle for launching their fledgling nation and the U.S. Constitution
as the model for their new government. They designed a flag with red and white
stripes and a single white star on a field and used the American dollar as
their currency, a practice that continued until the mid-1980s.
1912…US President Taft helps Liberia´s colonial elite end a native
rebellion and retain its independence…
In 1912, President William Howard
Taft opened a new chapter in U.S.-Liberian relations by sending three black
former army officers to train the new Liberian army, then called the Frontier
Force, which was charged with protecting the country's border and suppressing
internal opposition. An international loan provided temporary relief but
failed to solve Liberia's troubles.
In 1915, the coastal Kru people, who had long
resisted Monrovia's authority, rose in rebellion, declaring their loyalty to
Great Britain and demanding annexation by Sierra Leone. The USS Chester was
diverted to Africa on route home from Turkey to help quash the uprising.
By the early 1920s, Liberia's
financial crisis had worsened and the Harding administration proposed a new $5
million loan from the U.S. government. The House gave its approval but the
Senate refused, creating what Sawyer calls "a sense of desperation among
Liberian officials," who worried that British and French designs on their
country might now prove unstoppable. Liberia had become a charter member of the
League of Nations in 1919, and Monrovia was determined to safeguard its
sovereignty. Instead of a European takeover, however, Congressional inaction
opened the way for a new American foothold in the country -- the establishment
of the world's largest rubber plantation by the Firestone Tire and Rubber
Company.
Firestone makes a deal.
During the 1920s, the United States
access to rubber was restricted by the European colonial powers (Britain and
the Netherlands), which held a monopoly in rubber production. Herbert Hoover,
then Secretary of Commerce, considered the rubber resources a vital resource
due to its usage for car tires and began working with American rubber companies
in order to find a rubber source that was controlled by US interests.
Firestone is Liberia´s largest plantation owner (photo from the BBC)
In 1926, the Liberian government
granted rubber magnate Harvey Samuel
Firestone a 99-year lease for a million acres at a price of 6 cents per acre, Firestone
thus had access to land to enable it to create the world's largest rubber
plantation. Firestone provided a $5 million loan at a 7% interest rate to the government to pay foreign debts and to
build a harbor needed by Firestone. The loan was given in exchange for complete
authority over the government's revenues until the loan was paid.
The loan took a larger and larger
portion of the Liberian government's incomes: it grew from 20% of the total
revenue of Liberia in 1929, to 32% in 1930, to 54.9% in 1931 and nearly the
whole revenue in 1932.
During the Great Depression, as
rubber price fell, Firestone stopped its
development of the plantation (using just 50,000 acres and cutting wages in
half), and, depriving the Liberian government of tax incomes, the government
missed a payment to the loans to the company.
Firestone asked the US government to
send a warship to Monrovia to enforce the debt payment, but President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt rejected the request. The loans to the company were finally paid
in 1952.
Let´s jump forward to 1979….the rice riots
Demonstrations in
Monrovia against the increase in the
price of rice destabilized Liberian society. The Tolbert
Administration increased prices in an effort to discourage the importation of rice (Liberia's staple food) and encourage the production of locally grown rice. The opposition group PAL, headed by G. Baccus
Matthews, called for a massive demonstration through out Monrovia.
On Saturday, April 14, 1979,
hundreds of Monrovians turned out to protest.
The government had called out both the Military and the Police to turn
back the demonstrators. The soldiers
stood on the sidelines and watched, refusing to fire into the crowds, the
police confronted the demonstrators.
Shots were fired, some people got killed and almost every store, shop and
supermarket in Monrovia was looted. Matthews was arrested and later released.
The end of the Colonization Society´s Settler´s rule….
In the predawn hours of April 12,
1980, President William R. Tolbert was overthrown by Master Sergeant Samuel Doe
and 16 other enlisted men of the Armed Forces of Liberia.
Tolbert was assassinated
along with 27, other government officials. Thirteen top ranking ministers and members of the Tolbert family were tied to
poles on South Beach in Monrovia and shot to death. Their bodies along with the
president's, were dumped in a common grave.
During the coup, Foreign Minister Cecil Dennis had sought refuge at the
U.S. embassy, but he was refused shelter. He was later arrested and executed at
South Beach.
Many high ranking government
ministers who survived were tried, beaten up and paraded through the streets of
Monrovia without clothes and shoes. The coup gave the indigenous inhabitants
real political power for the first time, but Doe's violent overthrow was
condemned by other African countries, allies and trading partners. A flight of
capital and the upper class from the country occurred after the coup.
President Doe´s first policy
statement on April 14, 1980, justified the coup with these lines: "The coup was most necessary, because of uncontrolled corruption; failure
of the deposed government to be meaningfully responsive to the problems of the
Liberian masses; as well as its disregard of the "civil, human and
constitutional rights of the Liberian people". Samuel Doe promoted himself to
General and Commander in Chief and managed to survive several coup attempts.
After Ronald Reagan took office in early 1981, support for Doe´s government was increased. In 1982, Doe was invited to Washington for
an Oval Office meeting with President Reagan. As part of the expanding
relationship, Doe agreed to a modification of the mutual defense pact granting
staging rights on 24-hour notice at Liberia's sea and airports for the U.S.
Rapid Deployment Force, which was trained to respond to security threats around
the world.
The government shut
down the leading daily, The Observer, in early 1984. It also used a ban on political activity,
enacted in the aftermath of the coup, to crackdown on critics. Even after the
ban was lifted, the authorities refused to let students engage in political
activities.
Prior to scheduled presidential
elections, Doe set up an Interim Assembly (with himself as president), changed
the election timetable and his date of birth to meet the age eligibility
requirement in the constitution, created his own political party, and declared
his candidacy for office.
The regime barred
two of the largest parties from competing prior to the vote, including one headed by Sawyer, who
was arrested for suggesting in an interview with a Monrovia newspaper that Doe
should resign his job. When the balloting took place, Doe declared himself
the winner by 50.9 percent of the vote, despite ample evidence that he had been
defeated. Nevertheless, the Reagan
administration accepted the results.
1989: civil war....
Two dozen armed
insurgents quietly crossed into Liberia from the Ivory Coast on December 24, 1989, ushering in a new
and tragic phase of the Liberian saga. The 1989 insurgents were led by Charles
Taylor, 40, a former procurement clerk in Doe's Army. The rebels expected to
quickly garner support and cover the 200 miles to Monrovia in a matter of
weeks. Doe's army responded by rushing reinforcements to Nimba County, where
the rebel force was advancing, but the soldiers, who were mostly Krahn (Doe's
ethnic group), helped stir antigovernment sentiment throughout the area by
indiscriminately attacking villages and murdering civilians.
The Liberian Civil War´s savagery
inspired movies and a video game.
During the early days of the Liberian-Civil war, thousands of Gio and Mano Liberians had traveled to Monrovia, many on foot to escape the fighting in their home county of Nimba. Many of them on their arrival to Monrovia, took refuge in the Saint Peter's Lutheran Church in Sinkor, Monrovia.
On the night of July 29, 1990, Doe's soldiers walked along the beach to Sinkor and then entered the St. Peter's Lutheran Church. About 200 soldiers from the Armed Forces of Liberia headed by Charles Julu carried out a horrible exercise in cruelty and mass murder. When the soldiers were done and the screams were silenced, 600 Liberians had been slaughtered and 150 others wounded.
Eventually US Marines landed in
Monrovia to rescue foreign residents, but withdrew once their mission was
accomplished.
When hostilities returned to fever
pitch in Monrovia, the city became a 'killing field' of previously unimaginable
proportions.
The USA administration gave encouragement to West African mediation and
peacekeeping, initiated by the 16-nation Economic Community of West African
States (Ecowas), with Nigeria playing a leading role.
However, before the ECOWAS intervention could start President Doe was captured, tortured
and killed on September 9, 1990 by a rebel leader, Prince Johnson, ending his 10 years of rule
over Liberia.
Even by the standards of the time it was a particularly brutal
slaying. Before he was killed, Doe was mutilated, his ears sliced off. Prince
Johnson supervised the proceedings sitting in a chair while one of his soldiers
fanned him. The whole affair was video-taped. Bootleg copies are still doing
the rounds in the markets of Monrovia.
Unfortunately, by the time Ecowas was able to
organize an intervention force in late 1990, the country's dismemberment was
far advanced and domestic division had been cemented with widespread bloody
conflict.
The civil war ended in 2003,
elections were held in 2005, and the winner was Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (born 29
October 1938). She took office on 16
January 2006, and she was a successful candidate for re-election in 2011. Sirleaf
is the first elected female head of state in Africa. Sirleaf was awarded the
2011 Nobel Peace Prize.
Liberia street scene, the end of the Civil
War didn´t mean the end of poverty
Liberia´s Health System…
In 2012 Liberia´s Human Development Index Ranking was 182nd out of 187 countries, and GDP per capita was $360.
Liberia received
significant amounts of foreign aid in recent years to strengthen its health programs. However,
by 2012 CSIS, a Washington think tank, reported there was little progress due
to overall lack of government and foreign aid funds (The Road to Recovery –
Rebuilding Liberia´s Health System”, see reference below).
Quoting from the report: “The overall standard of
services remains low”, “funding issues cloud the horizon”, and “Liberia faces a
chronic shortage of health workers”. The report concludes by recommending the US government
should help Liberia build a stronger health system, train more health workers,
and work closely with other governments to ensure a coordinated effort.
2014….The Ebola Epidemic…
Researchers from the New England
Journal of Medicine have traced the 2014 Ebola outbreak to a two-year-old girl,
who died on 6 December 2013 in Meliandou, a small village in south-eastern
Guinea. In March 2014, hospital staff alerted Guinea's Ministry of Health and then
the charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF). By the end of March, Ebola had crossed the border into
Liberia.
The CDC reports over 2200 cases of
Ebola in Liberia (this number is probably under reported). The number of cases seems to be growing steadily.
Girl, sick with Ebola, is taken to a care center in Monrovia
Approximately 4000 US
troops will be sent to Liberia to help stop the epidemic. Special arrangements
are being made to bring any sick soldiers back to the US for treatment.
The above was copied liberally, redacted, or sourced from the following:
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