Europe, others weigh risks

CASABLANCA, Morocco (AP) — After seven months in Ebola-stricken Liberia, Vijay Kumar was getting his temperature scanned yesterday at the airport by medical crews in blue gowns and masks — one of dozens who relied on Royal Air Maroc’s continuing flights to West Africa.

“Of course we are all scared,” the cellphone worker said as he and dozens of passengers made their way through the international airport in Casablanca, Morocco. But “we really appreciate their procedures, it’s a good system”.

He was finally heading home to Chennai, India, relieved that there were still flights operating, after British Airways and Emirates suspended travel to the region. Airlines from Morocco, France and Belgium are still flying in and out of West Africa, encouraged by the World Health Organisation, because stopping would keep out needed aid workers and supplies — and wouldn’t necessarily halt the spread of the disease.

It can take up to 21 days before a person infected with Ebola starts to show symptoms that can be found in airport screening tests. During that period, an individual carrying Ebola can get a flight to anywhere in the world and fall ill later — as happened with a Liberian man who developed Ebola and died in the US this week.

Departing passengers in Africa are being screened. US officials have started screening arrivals from the affected countries as well. European governments so far have held off, even though it’s conceded infected passengers could arrive undetected. If someone gets sick in Europe, they are hoping to focus on quick response in advanced isolation wards like the one at Frankfurt, Germany’s University Clinic — not far from its international airport.

As a major hub for travel to West Africa, Casablanca airport functions as a gateway to the rest of the world. Yesterday morning’s arrivals board included flights from the Ebola-hit cities of Monrovia, Liberia and Freetown, Sierra Leone, among others. Besides Royal Air Maroc, Air France and Brussels Air also still fly to and from West Africa.

Travel bans aren’t the way to go, says a top WHO official.

“You can stop a direct flight, but you can never stop people from moving,” either by connecting through other cities or crossing land borders, said Dr Isabelle Nuttal from the World Health Organisation.

The UN health agency is not asking countries to have people screened when they arrive on a flight. Nuttal warned that on-arrival screening could lead to a false sense of security, when the key step is that doctors “need to ask people where they have been”.

She cited the case of Thomas Eric Duncan, who died Wednesday in Dallas. He passed an airport screening at Monrovia before he flew to Brussels and on to the US because he was not yet showing symptoms. When he did fall ill, he was sent home by a Dallas hospital at first.

Ilham Kazzini, senior vice-president with government-owned Royal Air Maroc, said the company is still flying to West Africa because Morocco has an official policy of solidarity with the region.

“It also is in response to the calls by international organisations fighting against Ebola, like the UN and WHO, who called on the company to maintain its flights as the best way to fight the disease,” she said. “We transport members of international organisations, food and medical aid.”

As the passengers lined up in Casablanca to be scanned by thermal cameras and checked by remote thermometers, they expressed relief that there were still flights. Passengers from West Africa who stay in the country have to give the police contact details, travel plans and are handed a free mobile phone to stay in touch with medical officials.

Passenger John Hyland, who had visited Sierra Leone on a mission for Virginia-based Project Hope, emphasised the importance of not cutting West Africa off from the rest of the world.

“These countries need foodstuffs and all the things they usually import,” he said. “If Air Maroc can fly there, why not British Air?”

The airport’s chief medical officer, Mohammed Moussif, said they had yet to discover a case of Ebola in months of screenings, but travellers staying in the country must remain in contact.

“By default, we consider all of them to be in the phase of incubation and they are followed up with by a medical team no matter where they are in Morocco, in the north or south, until the end of the incubation period,” Moussif said.

US officials say exit screening of about 36,000 people attempting to board airplanes in West Africa showed 74 had a fever and three others had some other symptom that led to them being pulled out of line. That’s roughly one in 500 people. None are believed to have had Ebola.

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Europe, others weigh risks

Mexican vigilante legalisation plan carries risks

BY MARK STEVENSON Associated Press News Analysis

Sunday, February 02, 2014    

MEXICO CITY, Mexico (AP) — After months of tacit co-operation with rural vigilantes trying to drive out a cult-like drug cartel, the Mexican Government is seeking to permanently solve one of its toughest security problems with a plan to legalise the growing movement and bring it under the army’s control.

But the risks are high.

To succeed, the Government must enforce military discipline and instil respect for human rights and due process among more than 20,000 heavily armed civilians, then eventually disband them and send them back home in the western state of Michoacan.

In other Latin American countries, similar experiments have created State-backed militias that carried out widespread human rights abuses as armed civilians turned to vengeance, or assisted in mass killings. The Mexican army itself has been accused of rights abuses during the more than seven-year war against organised crime that has seen it deployed as a police force in much of the country.

Vigilante leaders met last Tuesday with Government officials to hash out details of the agreement that would put avocado and lime pickers with AR-15 semi-automatic rifles under army command. The Mexican military has a century-old tradition of mobilising “rural defence corps” manned by peasants to fight bandits and uprisings in the countryside.

If the latest experiment works, it will resolve one of the thorniest dilemmas in the barely year-old administration of President Enrique Pena Nieto: how to handle a movement that sprang up outside the law but successfully took on a pseudo-religious drug cartel, the Knights Templar, which Mexican authorities had been unwilling or unable to take on for years.

Over the last year, the vigilantes, many of them former migrant workers who spent years in the United States, have seized a dozen towns terrorised by extortion, killings and rapes at the hands of the cartel’s gunmen. Members of the Knights Templar have tried to portray themselves as soldiers in a reincarnation of a medieval religious order dedicated to Christianity and the expulsion of abusive police from their communities.

In many instances, Associated Press reporters have witnessed federal forces stand on the sidelines while the “self-defence” forces routed the cartel, and occasionally even aid the vigilantes by conducting joint patrols and manning highway checkpoints together.

Mexican experts so far have widely accepted the Administration’s plan announced late last Monday, calling it a smart way to maintain the movement’s momentum against the Knights Templar while protecting the Government against charges it was ceding the rule of law in the “hot lands” of Michoacan, a rugged Pacific Coast state of rich agricultural land and mountains studded by marijuana fields and methamphetamine labs.

But in other parts of Latin America, the news stirred traumatic memories.

Claudia Samayoa, a human rights activist in Guatemala, said the thousands of deaths attributed to the army-backed Peasant Self Defence Patrols during the country’s 1960-1996 civil war are too fresh to allow for more paramilitary forces in the region.

“The cure is going to be worse than the disease,” Samayoa said. “It would be better not to go down that road, and instead strengthen law enforcement and the justice and public safety systems.”

Margarita Solano, of the US risk-analysis firm Southern Pulse, said Mexico’s vigilantes have awakened memories of her native Colombia’s experience with self-defence forces such as the Convivir movement that fought leftist rebels in the 1990s. While the groups were initially welcomed, some were later accused of rights abuses.

“I’m finding differences and certain similarities that are frightening,” Solano said.

Mexican authorities are portraying the legalisation of the “self-defence” forces as a stop-gap measure. Unable to disarm the vigilantes because of the popular support they have for kicking the Knights Templar out of much of the state, federal officials will now have to work with them to clean up the rest of the gang — and then persuade the vigilantes to demobilise. The Government has stressed the plan is temporary, and says vigilantes will have to register their guns.

With self-defence checkpoints on most major roads in Michoacan’s hot lands, and armed vigilantes often drinking beer or smoking marijuana at their posts, there are ample possibilities for abuses.

But many Mexicans are less concerned than outsiders about the potential for wrongdoing by the vigilantes. They note there are fundamental differences between Michoacan, where relatively prosperous farmers are funding the vigilantes to fight cartel extortions, and Guatemala, Colombia and Peru, where poor farmers were pressed by right-wing governments into fighting bitter wars against leftist rebels.

In the rich, flat lands of Michoacan, “there aren’t any leftist guerrillas or poor farmers,” said Raul Benitez, a security expert at Mexico’s National Autonomous University. “Here there are well-off farmers fighting criminals.”

Unlike the vigilante movement in the neighbouring Mexico state of Guerrero, where “self-defence” forces are often anti-government, many of Michoacan’s vigilantes say they just want to get back the rich pasture and lime groves that the Knights Templar stole from them.

It is a mixed movement, in which upper middle-class orchard owners, ranchers and businessmen often pay farmworkers to help man self-defence patrols and buy them guns. But the poor were also affected by the cartel’s extortions and abuses, and have often had reasons of their own to join the movement.

“The comparisons with Colombia, Peru or Guatemala are an aberration,” Benitez said. “Right now, the self-defence forces need the respect of the local residents and public opinion, so I think they are not going to commit any crimes now.”

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Mexican vigilante legalisation plan carries risks