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Imperialism and the Ebola
Catastrophe
"The present [Ebola]
epidemic is exceptionally large, not primarily
because of biologic characteristics of the virus,
but in part because of the attributes of the
affected populations, the condition of the health
systems, and because control efforts have been
insufficient to halt the spread of infection."
—Dr. Christopher Dye,
director of strategy, World Health Organization
Ebola (tomado
fototeca Granma)
In the
understated words of a health professional, this is
a diagnosis, not just of the Ebola catastrophe, but
of the failure of capitalism as a world system.
Thousands have died and millions are at risk because
the social conditions in the affected countries,
long oppressed and exploited by the imperialist
powers, have made adequate treatment of the outbreak
impossible.
Ebola is a well-understood
disease, spread only through direct contact with
bodily fluids, and almost self-limiting in isolated
rural areas because it usually kills victims before
they can transmit the virus to many other people.
The cumulative death toll from all previous
outbreaks of Ebola was barely 2,500 people—a number
exceeded in only three months by the current
outbreak.
The epidemic
began in rural Guinea before spreading to
neighboring Sierra Leone and Liberia. In Liberia,
for the first time, Ebola became an urban and not a
rural phenomenon, and the capital Monrovia is the
first large city to experience such an outbreak,
with terrible consequences.
In all three
countries, the local health care systems have
collapsed under the impact of the epidemic. In
Sierra Leone, for example, the country’s only large
children’s hospital has been forced to close after a
child was diagnosed as suffering from Ebola. In
Liberia, there are only a few hundred treatment beds
available, meaning that most victims stay home and
are cared for by family members, who then become
infected.
These three
countries are among the poorest in the world,
ranking 161st (Sierra Leone), 176th (Guinea) and
181st (Liberia) in per capita GDP according to the
2013 World Bank listing (185 countries total). The
combined health care spending of the three countries
is only $900 million, a pitiful $45 per head.
Their people
live in misery, but the countries themselves are
rich in natural resources that have been ruthlessly
exploited by major corporations and the imperialist
powers that enforce their interests.
Liberia
(founded by freed American slaves, and a de facto
US colony) has vast resources of iron ore and palm
oil, and Firestone (now Bridgestone) has operated
the world’s largest rubber plantation there since
1926. Sierra Leone, a former British colony, is a
top-ten diamond producer, with large reserves of
rutile, a titanium-based ore. Guinea, a former
French colony, has iron ore, diamonds, uranium, gold
and an astonishing half of the world’s total
reserves of bauxite, from which aluminum is derived.
The Australian-Canadian firm Rio Tinto Alcan and
Dadco Alumina of Germany dominate bauxite extraction
in Guinea.
In the past
three decades, all three countries have been ravaged
by civil wars, coups and ethnic massacres, with
their ruling elites fighting to control sources of
raw materials to sell to the giant Western
corporations amid increasingly difficult economic
conditions on the world market. The imperialist
powers directly intervened, with British and UN
troops occupying Sierra Leone and the US Marines
landing in Liberia.
It was the
combined effect of decades of imperialist
exploitation and intervention, exacerbated by the
global economic crisis that erupted in 2008, which
created the conditions for the present health
catastrophe. When the Ebola virus made its way out
of isolated jungle areas where the borders of the
three countries come together, the resistance of the
social organism to the epidemic was as weak as the
resistance of the individual human organism to the
attack of the virus.
A worst-case
estimate by the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention forecasts 1.4 million cases by the end of
January. With a 70 percent mortality rate, the Ebola
outbreak could account for nearly a million deaths
by early 2015. Moreover, as a new report published
in the New England Journal of Medicine warns, the
transformed role of the Ebola virus means that it
could "become endemic among the human population of
West Africa, a prospect that has never previously
been contemplated." In other words, Ebola could
become a permanent feature of West Africa, with
incalculable consequences for social and economic
life throughout the region.
Against that
backdrop, Thursday’s session of the United Nations
General Assembly, devoted to the Ebola crisis, was a
further demonstration that there will be no serious
response from the major powers.
So far there
has been a tiny influx of aid from the wealthy
countries, the mobilization of a few hundred
dedicated volunteer doctors and nurses—many now dead
or withdrawn for fear of infection—and, inevitably,
the Obama administration’s decision to send
thousands of troops.
These soldiers
have no expertise in Ebola and their only contact
with the local population is likely to be shooting
down victims and their panic-stricken families
demanding treatment. Washington’s major concern is
that the epidemic could destabilize its political
stooges like Liberian President Ellen Johnson
Sirleaf, and threaten the profit interests of major
corporations.
President Obama,
in his third address to the UN in three days,
admitted the failure of the world response: "We are
not moving fast enough. We are not doing enough …
people are not putting in the kinds of resources
that are necessary to put a stop to this epidemic."
The combined
total of all aid donations to Liberia, Sierra Leone
and Guinea barely tops $1 billion, and that is
pledges, not actual deliveries of supplies,
equipment and healthcare personnel. Contrast that to
the billions made available by the imperialist
powers, and their allies among the Gulf monarchies,
for the new war in Syria and Iraq, let alone the
hundreds of billions squandered on wars in Libya,
Iraq and Afghanistan and the trillions made
available for the bailout of the banks and other
financial institutions in the 2008 crash.
From the
standpoint of world imperialism, the value of this
region lies in the mineral wealth under the ground.
The lives of the human beings who inhabit the
territory are entirely secondary. As the epidemic
spreads, the local people will be regarded more as
an obstacle than a labor force, and their
extermination will begin to be regarded as a
necessary cost of doing business.
Taken from
http://www.globalresearch.ca/imperialism-and-the-ebola-catastrophe/5404405
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