Virus diplomacy: From HIV/AIDS to Ebola

He died on 25th July, 2014. As an Americo-Liberian ethnic aristocrat he was deeply embittered by Nigeria’s ‘kidnapping’ of President Charles Taylor from Liberia; a presidency lost to a 1980 military a coup by Sergeant Samuel Doe. Sawyer may have decided to give historic value to his life by dropping a biological warfare bomb on […]

He died on 25th July, 2014. As an Americo-Liberian ethnic aristocrat he was deeply embittered by Nigeria’s ‘kidnapping’ of President Charles Taylor from Liberia; a presidency lost to a 1980 military a coup by Sergeant Samuel Doe. Sawyer may have decided to give historic value to his life by dropping a biological warfare bomb on Nigerians.
Sawyer’s hostile act did not fit Professor Jacek Kugler’s classification of international war as: ‘’a substantial armed conflict between the organized military forces of independent political units’’; but has enormous fecundity. He could, for example, be considered perfidious for abusing the ‘’emblem’’ of travelling to attend an ECOWAS conference in Calabar, and ‘’feigning non-combatant status’’.  If he had travelled by a Liberian or American warship, it would have been legitimate for him to ‘’fly a false (enemy or neutral) flag’’ –as an ECOWAS –associated person – at any time ‘’prior to opening fire’’ or infecting Nigerian immigration officers, physical spaces, and medical personnel.
He also raised the issue of using a civilian aircraft to broadcast the Ebola bomb while on transit from Monrovia to Lagos; achieving maximum infection of victims as a form of ‘’sky raid’’; thereby violating the International Law norm that civilians ‘’must not be the object of either a deliberate or even indiscriminate attack’’.
Mr Sawyer’s attack came at a peculiar time of frenzied Euro-American commemoration of the First World War (1914 -1918) in which 16 (sixteen) million British combatants died and 20(twenty) million people were wounded. NATO led a campaign to dismember Syria; terminate her threat to Israel’s security, and being an ally of Russia in an oil-rich Middle East. Gaddafi was murdered to terminate his expanding ideological and financial power across Africa. Egypt and Nigeria as Africa’s military power were paralysed through a civil war between its military and the Muslim Brotherhood; and murderous Boko Haram weakening Nigeria’s growing sense of nationhood, respectively.   Senseless ethnic-cleansing in South Sudan and Central African Republic appeared incited; while assassinations of members of parliament in Somalia; the mysterious disappearance and shooting down of Air Malaysia planes in quick succession; the civil war in Ukraine, all raise a singer’s lyric that: ‘’the times they are a-changing’’.
Jon Meacham writes in Time Magazine (August 14, 2014) that ‘’we live in a world that remains vulnerable to chaos and mischance and misery’’. President Barrack Obama (on 22 July, 2014) prefaced his August chat with Africa’s presidents/prime ministers with the dictum that ‘’around the world the old order isn’t holding and we are not quite yet to where we need to be….. a sense of common humanity’’. Simon Shuster laments that ‘’A generation of Westerners has grown up in the happy belief that the Cold War ended long ago….They are slow to rally to the chore of once again containing Russia’s ambition’’. Chaos by whom; and the content of Russia’s ambition are not stated.
This raises the possibility that Mr Sawyer was not acting alone on a desperate Americo-Liberian ethnic mission to avenge Charles Taylor’s tragedy. A member of the Liberian Diaspora who is also an American citizen would be tempting to Euro-American intelligence operatives. The Encyclopaedia Britannica defines ‘’biological warfare’’ as the ‘’military use of disease-producing agents, such as bacteria and viruses on humans, animals, or plants and the means of combating such agents’’. A Diaspora Americo-Liberian bitter at Nigeria would be very attractive during times when Nigeria, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea – very rich in mineral resources, including: aluminium, iron ore, gold, diamonds and oil – are willing to invite China to assist in using them for ‘’another development’’. Racism is also rising in Euro-America.
Sierra Leone once suffered severely from foreign companies arming militias to dig raw diamonds and sell them cheaply in exchange for cocaine, guns and guitars. In 1958, furious French officials hauled away files, furniture, telephones and smashed offices to punish Sekou Toure for leading his people to choose independence against continued French colonial rule. The British once used rinderpest to decimate livestock and smallpox to decimate people in Omukama Kabalega’s Bunyoro-Kitara country for fighting British invasion. During World War 1, German agents infected livestock in the United States destined for shipment to feed American, British and French troops ‘’with glanders, a lesion-producing bacterial disease’’. Mr Sawyer’s wrath had potential buyers.
The glaring challenge is how Africa must confront the panic in Europe and the United States over China’s scramble for resources in Africa. China has a record of crafting with Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Egypt’s Abdel Nasser, India’s Jawarhlal Nehru   and Indonesia’s Sukarno the ‘’Bandung Declaration’’. It was a collective call for shaping the international order to serve the interests of their own peoples. Euro-America has blood-soaked hands and a habit of inventing ancestors of HIV/AIDS and Ebola for decimating Africa. They appear determined to frighten Russia out of BRICS; and burn China’s bags of investment capital in Africa with chaos and bombings.
Africa must react with a reactivation of their OAU/AU Liberation Committee; fund more imaginative intelligence agencies; and pursue diplomacy for developing scientific human resources and internal industrialisation. Cuba, China and Obama’s post-2008 internal policy, recommend African self-reliant creativity to confront AIDS/Ebola diplomacy.