Human rights groups working with thousands of victims of cholera in Haiti have reacted with jubilation to the United Nation’s first tacit admission that it was to blame for the devastating outbreak of the disease that has claimed as many as 30,000 lives and infected more than two million people.
For the past six years, the world body has doggedly refused to address the issue of how its own peacekeepers, relocated from Nepal to Haiti in 2010 in the wake of a major earthquake, imported the deadly cholera bacterium with them. Studies have found that the UN troops could have been screened for the illness, and the disaster averted, for as little as $2,000 (then £1,400).
In a statement first reported by the New York Times, the office of the secretary-general of the UN, Ban Ki-moon, said that the organization had decided to step up its efforts to fight back cholera in one of the world’s poorest countries. “Over the past year the UN has become convinced that it needs to do much more regarding its own involvement in the initial outbreak and the suffering of those affected by cholera,” said Farhan Haq, Ban’s deputy spokesman.
The reference to the UN’s “involvement in the initial outbreak” was greeted as a breakthrough by groups working with cholera victims. “This is a groundbreaking first step towards justice,” said Beatrice Lindstrom of the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), which is pursuing a class-action lawsuit against the UN to try to force it to accept responsibility for the disaster and to pay compensation.
The world body has consistently refused any claim for compensation, claiming it is immune from legal action.
Lindstrom added that the real test of the UN’s intentions was what comes next. “The UN must follow this announcement with action, including issuing a public apology, establishing a plan to provide compensation to the victims who have lost so much, and ensuring that cholera is eliminated in Haiti through robust investment in water and sanitation infrastructure. We will keep fighting until it does.”
The UN’s top diplomat appears to have been bounced into making a clearer recognition of responsibility than ever before by the advent of a new draft report from one of its own special advisers looking into how the UN handled the crisis. According to the New York Times, the draft report states directly that the cholera epidemic would not have happened without the actions of the world organization.
The author of the report, Philip Alston, the UN’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, was one of five experts working for the UN who earlier this year wrote a heavily critical letter to Ban in which the secretary-general’s resistance to accepting any responsibility was torn apart. The five special rapporteurs accused the UN chief executive, in essence, of stripping hundreds of thousands of Haitians of their right to justice.
In his statement, the UN’s deputy spokesman said: “The UN has been heavily engaged in cholera eradication since the 2010 outbreak.” But that claim conflicts with the testimony of health experts who say that the world organization has consistently dropped the ball over the cholera epidemic.
Dr Renaud Piarroux, a pediatrician who was among the first to sound the alarm over the outbreak of cholera, recently visited the country and reported that the incidence of the disease and the lack of any infrastructure to deal with its spread were still alarming.
Piarroux’s report concludes that Haiti’s cholera epidemic is by far the largest the world has faced in recent decades, and yet there has been no concerted effort to eradicate it by the UN or any other international body. “That the current response is not up to the challenge is an understatement,” writes Piarroux, whose work in exposing the UN’s role in bringing cholera to Haiti and the world body’s efforts to cover up its complicity is profiled in the book Deadly River by Ralph Frerichs.
The French epidemiologist goes on to say that “neither local politicians nor the international community seem to have taken the measure of the seriousness of the situation”.
