MONROVIA, Liberia — Liberia’s armed forces — once responsible for toppling the government, killing civilians, and setting the nation on a course toward a devastating civil war — have suddenly become a linchpin in the fight against the Ebola virus rampaging through the country.
Huddled with US military personnel in the capital, government soldiers discussed their role in the effort to build 18 Ebola treatment units across the nation.
“At the Monrovia medical unit yesterday, over 100 citizens were out there watching the construction,” Major General Darryl A. Williams, the commander of US Army Africa, noted pointedly. Be nice to them, he instructed the group.
But rebranding the Armed Forces of Liberia as a force for good is no easy task.
The room where the group was meeting is just a few yards from the beach where in 1980, drunken soldiers executed 13 top Liberian government officials after staging the coup — a chilling start to the military dictatorship under Samuel K. Doe.
One of the new treatment centers being built to fight Ebola is just a few miles from a refugee camp where soldiers with machine guns and cutlasses slaughtered 400 men and women and 200 children in 1993 — one of many atrocities committed during the civil war that began after rebels tried to oust Doe.
Replacing such images in the public consciousness with ones of Liberian soldiers working side by side with US troops and making nice with ordinary Liberians is a tough sell, even if the enemy now is a terrifying virus steamrolling through the country, killing more than 2,300 people in six months.
In the latest sign of the rapid spread of the outbreak, the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Liberia said Saturday that it has placed 41 staff members, including 20 military personnel, under medical observation after an international member of its medical team was diagnosed with Ebola this week.
The patient was the second mission member to test positive for the deadly disease. None of the 41 people who have had contact with the infected staffer has shown any symptoms, but all will be under observation for the three-week incubation period, the mission said.
The patient, whose name and nationality have not been disclosed, has been taken to Germany for treatment.
Many Liberians love the American military but hate their own.
Beatrice K. Yates, 45, said that only last month, Liberian soldiers beat up her son, Titus, and a friend for standing on the porch of her family’s home in Caldwell in violation of a 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. Ebola curfew.
The faith in the US military is rooted in historical ties between the two countries that began in 1822, when Liberia was founded by freed American slaves.
Still, the relationship has been a complicated one. The US government openly supported Doe after the coup, despite the absence of elections for years.
After the civil war ended in 2003, the Liberian government disbanded the armed forces as part of an effort to demilitarize the country and soothe residents, showing that soldiers who had committed atrocities would no longer represent them.
President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who took office in 2006, promised a new, kinder and gentler army, made up of soldiers who had been vetted and actually went through basic training — something many soldiers, particularly during the reign of former president Charles G. Taylor, had not done.
The US military has had trainers in Liberia for years to help reinvent the country’s army. Now, President Obama’s decision to send American troops to build Ebola treatment units has added another layer to these already complex ties.
On Thursday afternoon, four Marine V-22 Ospreys landed at Liberia’s international airport in a thunder of noise. Williams, the US commander here, was making plans to buzz Monrovia with the $70 million aircraft, counting on the visual and audio impact to tell Liberians that they are not alone in the Ebola fight.
Brigadier General Daniel D. Ziankahn, the Liberian military’s chief of staff, has suspended all other training and exercises so that he can throw his entire army into the war against Ebola. He is dispatching troops to each of the treatment centers under construction, and Liberian soldiers have deployed to the borders to enforce screening measures.
Today, there are only 2,000 enlisted men and women in the Liberian armed forces. They must have a high school degree, and officers must have a university degree. Ziankahn, 43, got a master’s in military arts and science at the US Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.
Two months ago, with no warning, the Liberian government sent the army and the police to impose a 21-day Ebola quarantine on West Point, a crowded slum where tens of thousands of people live, many in two-room shanties.
Clashes broke out as angry residents tried to get out. Shots were fired into the crowd, killing a 15-year-old boy.
“All those soldiers . . . were shooting,” Nancy Jellehs, 76, a still-angry West Point resident, said recently.
Ziankahn was doing a two-month course at Harvard University when the quarantine and shooting took place. He hurried home and launched inquiries into the behavior of the enlisted soldiers and the officers who gave orders, promising to punish those found responsible.
“Even if there had not been a shooting, we would still be investigating, because I saw the videos and there were other violations,” he said.