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Ebola fears spark claims of racism in Europe

Nele Obermueller and Angela Waters
Special for USA TODAY
German volunteering soldiers wear protective equipment as they take part in an intensive course to prepare volunteer helpers for their deployment in Ebola-hit countries at the Marseille baracks of the German Armed Forces Bundeswehr in Appen near Pinneberg, northern Germany Oct. 23, 2014.

Corrections & Clarifications: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Robtel Neajai Pailey's citizenship status. She is Liberian.

BERLIN — Italian mothers in suburban Rome recently organized a petition drive to keep a 3-year-old black girl from attending kindergarten after her family traveled to Uganda — a country thousands of miles away from the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

In Germany, soccer fans chanted "Ebola, Ebola" when Charles Atsina, a black player from Ghana, came onto the field to play.

Two British landlords refused to rent an apartment to a black Sierra Leone radio newscaster, Amara Bangura, who was moving to England to study. The landlords feared he might bring the deadly virus with him.

As Americans debate quarantining health workers returning from Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone or banning travelers from those countries — as Australia has already done — fears of Ebola have also gripped Europe. And that fear is giving some people license to vent racist attitudes.

"The stigma of the Ebola outbreak is similar to that of AIDS when it first came to the public's attention," said Louis-George Tin, president of the Representative Council of Blacks in France. "People associated AIDS with black people and homosexuals. But not all black people and homosexuals had AIDS, and not all people with AIDS were black. A disease doesn't discriminate."

In the past few months, around nearly 5,000 people have died from Ebola in the three West African countries of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. In Europe, there have been less than a dozen people infected with virus, mostly people from West Africa brought for care in European hospitals, especially Germany.

Yet fear of the deadly virus abounds in Europe.

"In France there is definitely unjustified fear," Tin said.

Politicians have moved to capitalize on that fear. Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right Front National, made a case for isolationism during an interview with Radio Sud.

A passenger passes an Ebola warning sign in London's Gatwick Airport, Oct. 21.

"We need to stop flights to and from infected countries in order to protect our country," she said recently. She also wants to suspend the so-called Schengen zone, which allows people to travel freely through Western Europe. "These people could be flying into Belgium and entering France."

Her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the party, went further with an incendiary comment, telling Le Figaro: "Overpopulation is threatening to submerge France with immigrants … but Monsieur Ebola could fix this in three months."

In areas where border security has been stepped up, accusations of racism are increasingly common.

"I was interrogated and harassed by several airport officials at Heathrow, simply because I carried a Liberian passport," said Robtel Neajai Pailey, a University of London doctoral student. "This bordered on racial profiling, because I had not traveled directly from Liberia, and the airport screenings were intended for those traveling from the three most affected countries."

Pailey said she was severely disappointed. "Discrimination in the time of Ebola has exposed the latent bigotry, ignorance and racist venom that African people have been at the receiving end of for centuries," she said.

Distinguishing between outright discrimination and legitimate public health measures can be difficult.

"It is wrong to discriminate against someone based on their national identity or skin color," said Jens David Ohlin, an international law professor at Cornell University. "However, making public health decisions based on someone's travel itinerary is just sensible policy. It's just more efficient to take sensible precautions in the first instance, rather than wait until someone gets sick and then spend enormous resources in a frantic search for everyone that might have come into contact with them."

That is exactly why the governor of Italy's Veneto region, Luca Zaia, formally asked the United States this week not to quarantine soldiers returning from Liberia at the U.S. military base in Vicenza.

"I confirm my closeness and friendship to the United States. ... But this friendship cannot be the reason for saying no when you think that something is wrong," Zaia said. "And I think it's wrong to quarantine the soldiers who were in Liberia here in the Veneto …considering that it is potential risk for Veneto."

Comments about strengthening border control often conceal racism, said Gavan Titley, a lecturer in media studies at the National University of Ireland.

"They expose another durable form of racist imagination — the fantasy that strong borders and tough immigration controls can preserve our security and way of life regardless of what happens elsewhere on the planet," Titley said.

That 3-year-old girl in Fiumicino, having never shown any symptoms of Ebola, returned to kindergarten after local authorities assured her parents she would be OK after they kept her home for a week out of fear for her safety.

"The fact that the mother's child is African is the only reason why they took action," Fiumicino Mayor Esterino Montino said. "It was an action that should have been avoided. We intervened and the situation is under control."

Contributing: Luigi Serenelli

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