Liberian soldiers on Wednesday fired into a crowd of young men who were trying to escape a quarantine that cordoned off an Ebola-stricken neighborhood in the capital.
The clash marks the most worrisome sign to date that a public-health crisis is fast becoming a security crisis in Liberia, a nation where nerves are still raw from a 14-year-long civil war.
Residents of Monrovia's West Point neighborhood woke early on Wednesday to learn that security forces had been ordered to enforce a quarantine—effectively barring any resident from entering or leaving the labyrinth of tin-roof homes near the Atlantic coast.
Some 75,000 people live in West Point, a community that filled the breadth of a sandy peninsula during the war. Many of its residents sleep head-to-toe on thin foam mats that line concrete floors, a density of population that along with poor sanitation explains why the township was battered with cholera epidemics even before Ebola took root there.
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In the Liberian capital of Monrovia, the city's main hospital has very little staff and few patients—an exodus triggered by several Ebola-related deaths at the facility.
Several cases of Ebola have been reported in West Point. Speedboats from Liberia's threadbare coast guard bobbed off the coast as part of the security cordon.
"These measures are meant to save lives," President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf said on her administration's website.
Later Wednesday, though, groups of young men tried to force their way through a line of troops, residents said. The men complained that they didn't have enough food and some suspected that at least one government official was evacuated from the neighborhood.
The confrontation posed a weighty challenge for Liberia's police and army, which only recently began carrying guns after the Liberian civil war ended in 2003. Several residents said security forces fired live ammunition.
Liberian security forces stand in front of protesters after clashes in Monrovia on Wednesday. Reuters
"Not even giving a warning shot," said Lawrence Kollie, saying he was present at the scene. "They were shooting straight at the crowd."
Information Minister Lewis Brown didn't return calls seeking comment.
Deputy Police Chief Abraham Kromah said forces later restored order.
"Please remain law-abiding; throwing stones at police officers and security officers is not the best way out," he said in an interview with the Associated Press.
Liberia is a caldron of social and political tension—even during periods of relative calm. The West African nation splintered during a civil war that began in 1989. Fourteen years and three governments later, an estimated 250,000 people were dead. Many men spent their childhood fighting in or fleeing conflict.
A Liberian Army soldier, part of the Ebola Task Force, chases a local resident while enforcing a quarantine on the West Point slum in Monrovia on Wednesday. Getty Images
While the country has since emerged as a democracy—its economy averaging 8% growth a year, according to the International Monetary Fund—employment has lagged behind. Many of Liberia's wartime generation now live without work in the shacks that line the beach at West Point.
Ebola has further frayed nerves in Liberia. When the government tried to set up a holding center last week where potential Ebola patients could be detained for further examination, locals worried that the disease was being introduced to their neighborhood. Several lashed out, stealing sheets and mattresses from the holding center and chasing away health workers.
The World Health Organization has reported 2,240 suspected or confirmed cases of Ebola since the beginning of the outbreak, with 1,229 deaths. Those cases are limited to Liberia, Guinea, Nigeria and Sierra Leone.
The tallies are also vastly underestimated, the organization says, in part because many residents insist that their loved ones are dying from more familiar diseases such as malaria or typhoid.
"They say West Point is infested with Ebola, but from what I see I do not see any Ebola," said Gerald Moore, a resident. "What worries me is: How will I be able to get food? Nobody is bringing in food for us."
His daughter, Sarah, echoed her father's words: "Right now, we don't have water. Food. The basic things. There's no way of escaping."
The outbreak is a social problem as well as a public health crisis, the WHO's director-general, Margaret Chan, wrote in Wednesday's New England Journal of Medicine.
"Fear remains the most difficult barrier to overcome," she wrote, with people hiding family members suspected of being infected, and people fleeing treatment centers and falling prey to "miracle cures."
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