EU Looks at Options to Deal with Ebola Crisis

10/10/2014

2014-10-10  According to Andrew Rettman writing in the EU Observor, the EU is considering various responses in Africa including use of military forces as part of the containment effort.

The EU foreign service, in an internal paper discussed by EU countries’ ambassadors in Brussels on Thursday (9 October) – and seen by EUobserver – said: “The EU and MS [member states] have not yet designed an operational strategy making the best of all our collective assets”.

CDC Map of Ebola Outbreak

It speaks of the “unprecedented nature of the crisis”.

But it notes the EU response to the “pandemic” so far has “obvious limitations” due to “inadequate operational [and] financing frameworks”

It adds that EU institutions already put forward options for “a co-ordinated EU mechanism” to evacuate infected health workers and for a “strategic airlift mechanism” for humanitarian aid, but it says member states’ “responses did not fully meet expectations”.

The foreign’ service’s military staff has also carried out a “Strategic Military Estimate”.

The estimate considers: “possible military responses from the most basic scenario of co-ordinating scarce assets in support of emergency response operators to the most complex and degraded scenarios, including evacuation of EU citizens or the conduct of military operations to contribute to maintaining/restoring safe and secure environment in a given area”.

For the rest of the article see the following:

http://euobserver.com/foreign/126004