Liberians repel quarantine revolt

Poor in Ebola-hit slum awake to find area cordoned off

Liberian soldiers patrol in the West Point area Wednesday as the government clamps down on the movement of people to prevent the spread of the Ebola virus in Monrovia, the capital. Security forces deployed to enforce a quarantine around a slum in the city.

Liberian soldiers patrol in the West Point area Wednesday as the government clamps down on the movement of people to prevent the spread of the Ebola virus in Monrovia, the capital. Security forces deployed to enforce a quarantine around a slum in the city.

Thursday, August 21, 2014

MONROVIA, Liberia -- Liberia's efforts to contain the Ebola outbreak spreading across parts of West Africa quickly turned violent Wednesday when angry young men hurled rocks and stormed barbed-wire barricades, trying to break out of a neighborhood that had been cordoned off by the government.

Soldiers repelled the surging crowd with live ammunition, driving hundreds of young men back into the neighborhood, a slum of 50,000 people in Monrovia known as West Point.

One teenager in the crowd, Shakie Kamara, 15, lay on the ground near the barricade, his right leg apparently wounded by a bullet. "Help me," pleaded Kamara, who was barefoot and wore a green Philadelphia Eagles T-shirt.

Lt. Col. Abraham Kromah, the national police's head of operations, arrived a few minutes later.

"This is messed up," he said, looking at the teenager while complaining about the surging crowd. "They injured one of my police officers. That's not cool. It's a group of criminals that did this. Look at this child. God in heaven help us."

The clashes marked a dangerous new chapter in West Africa's five-month fight against the Ebola epidemic, already the deadliest on record. Outbreaks in neighboring Sierra Leone and Guinea have mostly been concentrated in rural areas, but the disease has spread to Liberia's capital, Monrovia.

Fighting Ebola in an urban area -- particularly in a place like West Point, an extremely poor and often violent place that still bears deep scars from Liberia's 14-year-long civil war -- presents challenges that the government and international aid organizations have only started grappling with.

The risk that Ebola will spread quickly, and the difficulties in containing it, are multiplied in a dense urban environment, especially one where the health system has largely collapsed and residents appear increasingly distrustful of the government's approach to addressing the crisis, experts say.

Many people in West Point were already seething at the government's attempt to open an Ebola center at a school in their neighborhood, complaining that suspected Ebola patients from other parts of the city were being taken there as well. Their neighborhood, they feared, was effectively being turned into a dumping ground for the disease.

On Saturday, hundreds of people stormed the school, carrying off supplies and allowing suspected Ebola patients to flee the facility, heightening concerns that the disease would spread through the city.

President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf responded by imposing a nighttime curfew and ordering "quarantines" of West Point and Dolo Town, another densely populated slum outside the capital. She also ordered movie theaters, nightclubs and other gathering places closed and stopped ferry service to the peninsula.

"There will be no movements in and out of those areas," Sirleaf said in a national address late Tuesday night. "Additional sanctions" were necessary because her citizens failed to heed health warnings, she said.

On Wednesday, the residents of West Point awoke to learn that the entire area was under government quarantine. Soldiers and police in riot gear blocked roads in and out of the seaside neighborhood. Coast guard officers stopped residents from setting out aboard canoes from West Point, the neighborhood with the highest number of confirmed and suspected cases of Ebola in the capital.

Life is tough for West Point residents even in the best of times. Drinking water is carted in on wheelbarrows, and people depend on a local market for their food. Now many of the market's traders are stuck inside, prices have doubled and "the community is in disarray," slum resident Richard Kieh said.

Sirleaf didn't say how long the blockades would last, or how people trapped inside would get food, water or other help.

"Why are you ill-treating people like this? How can we take this kind of government to be peaceful? It is not fair -- we are human," complained another resident, Mohamed Fahnbulleh.

After residents realized the entire area had been sealed off from the rest of the capital, frustration began to mount. In one midmorning attempt to break through the cordon, at an entrance to the neighborhood next to an electrical station, soldiers fired into the air to dispel the protesters. Some of the bullets appeared to have hit the crowd.

Liberia has already been hit hard by the Ebola epidemic, with an estimated 576 of the 1,350 deaths reported in the four nations that have confirmed cases in the region: Guinea, where the outbreak is believed to have begun; Liberia; Nigeria; and Sierra Leone.

The estimated death toll in Liberia alone already exceeds the total number of deaths in the deadliest outbreak on record before this one, which occurred in 1976, the year the virus was discovered.

At least 2,473 people have been sickened across West Africa, which is now more than the caseloads of all previous Ebola outbreaks combined.

"It's out of control; the numbers keep rising," Lindis Hurum, a coordinator for Doctors without Borders in Monrovia, said this week. "It's very difficult and complex in Monrovia. We've never had a large outbreak like this in an urban setting."

Beyond the threat of Ebola itself, experts warn that there has been a broader collapse of the public health system, resulting in a range of life-threatening illnesses and conditions that are being left untreated as hospitals close and the facilities that remain open become overwhelmed with suspected Ebola cases.

"The emergency within the emergency is the collapse of the health care system," said Dr. Joanne Liu, the president of Doctors without Borders, who recently surveyed Liberia and other affected nations.

"People don't have access to basic health care," she said, including malaria treatment for children, medical care for pregnant women and other common but essential needs.

"All the health care facilities are basically closed in Monrovia," she added. "I think there may be some marginal activities, but basically there's nothing really working right now."

Information for this article was contributed by Norimitsu Onishi of The New York Times; and by Jonathan Paye-Layleh, Wade Williams, Abbas Dulleh and Maram Mazen of The Associated Press.

A Section on 08/21/2014