{"id":78498,"date":"2016-08-29T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-08-29T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=78498"},"modified":"2016-08-27T16:38:28","modified_gmt":"2016-08-27T15:38:28","slug":"the-u-n-s-cholera-admission-and-what-comes-next","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/08\/the-u-n-s-cholera-admission-and-what-comes-next\/","title":{"rendered":"The U.N.\u2019s Cholera Admission and What Comes Next"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Top<\/a>

Top members of Nepal\u2019s mission in Haiti walking past latrine pipes at Nepal\u2019s United Nations base in Mirebalais, Haiti, on Oct. 31, 2010. Credit Ramon Espinosa\/Associated Press<\/p><\/div>\n

19 Aug 2016 – <\/em>This week, a phrase came out of United Nations headquarters that I thought I would never hear. A spokesman for Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon referred to the organization\u2019s \u201cown involvement\u201d<\/a> in the 2010 outbreak of cholera in Haiti.<\/p>\n

It may not seem like much from the outside, but in the context of those different but deeply linked places \u2014 the often-disrespected Caribbean nation and the U.N. headquarters on the East River in Midtown Manhattan that has controlled so much of Haiti\u2019s recent history \u2014 the words were a tectonic shift.<\/p>\n

Scientists and researchers have repeatedly found, with overwhelming consensus, that U.N. peacekeepers introduced the disease to Haiti for the first time ever recorded by knowingly allowing their infected feces to slough into the Meille River, which locals used for drinking, bathing and washing \u2014 in violation of the U.N\u2019s own protocols and the most basic tenets of public health.<\/p>\n

Yet for six years, as thousands \u2014 if not tens of thousands<\/a> \u2014 of Haitians died painful, degrading deaths of dehydration from severe vomiting and diarrhea, the world\u2019s most important international humanitarian organization destroyed evidence, dissembled and, when all else failed, stonewalled. Ban even promoted the head of the peacekeeping mission in Haiti at the time of the outbreak and initial cover-up to become his own personal chief of staff.<\/p>\n

Anger and righteous disgust soared in Haiti. \u201cIt is with great sadness that I write this letter to remind you that human rights must be respected, whatever type of country you\u2019re from,\u201d Viengem\u00e9ne Ulisse, who was hospitalized for more than a week with cholera in 2011, wrote<\/a> the Security Council last year: one of 2,000 victims\u2019 letters collected by lawyers bringing a class-action suit against the U.N. in United States federal court.<\/p>\n

But on Thursday, shortly after the U.N. acknowledged its role in the outbreak to me for the first time, the Federal Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld a lower<\/a>-court ruling<\/a> that said the U.N. is immune from any kind of lawsuit under an international convention \u2014 even if it ignores other parts of that same convention saying it then has to provide some other way to resolve disputes, as it refused to do in this case. This seemed like good news for the U.N. The court could have ordered it to pay victims and their families $40 billion or more in restitution \u2014 equal to five years\u2019 worth of worldwide peacekeeping budgets.<\/p>\n

In that light, it was also a victory for one of the less-publicized players in this case: the United States government. Because the U.N. has refused to accept the legitimacy of the federal case, Justice Department lawyers have defended the organization instead in court. Judge Jos\u00e9 A. Cabranes cited the Obama administration\u2019s U.N.-friendly interpretation of the immunities convention as a significant factor in the three-judge panel\u2019s decision. Lawyers for the plaintiffs are still deciding whether to appeal to the Supreme Court.<\/p>\n

I have heard for years from high-level United Nations officials that American resistance has played a major role in keeping the organization from coming clean about what happened in Haiti and settling with victims. There are a few reasons the Obama administration would do that. The president has frequently defended the United Nations, which on its better days represents the multilateral, diplomatic approach central to his foreign policy worldview \u2014 in contrast to the philosophies of George W. Bush or Donald Trump. Any U.S. president would also want to uphold the principle that troops operating on foreign soil can\u2019t be hauled into local courts, whether they\u2019re blue-helmeted Nepalese peacekeepers in Haiti or American soldiers in Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also a financial angle. Any restitution will ultimately have to come from member states. None is more invested than the United States, which supplies more than a quarter of the United Nations peacekeeping budget, an expenditure that Washington, perennial congressional grumbling notwithstanding, has generally considered well spent: It allows the United States to outsource many overseas military missions it would otherwise feel pressure to undertake itself. The Bush administration led the way in creating the U.N. Stabilization Mission in Haiti, or Minustah, putting together a blue-helmeted force to replace U.S. soldiers and Marines whom Bush sent to Haiti after a 2004 coup d\u2019\u00e9tat. If there is one thing the Obama administration and Republicans in Congress can agree on, it\u2019s that neither wants to pay the United Nations more than it is already obligated to.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s another way of looking at this. So far, the U.N.\u2019s absolute legal immunity has translated into a total lack of accountability as well. But as a deeply critical internal report<\/a> by a U.N. adviser, Philip Alston, which I obtained this week, made clear, hiding behind the veil of silence and deniability has allowed the cholera crisis \u2014 one of the peacekeeping mission\u2019s \u201cthree major sins,\u201d along with sexual assault by peacekeepers and a general refusal to accept accountability, Alston wrote \u2014 to metastasize into a threat to the organization.<\/p>\n

Philip Alston\u2019s Draft Report on the U.N. and the Haiti Cholera Outbreak –<\/a> <\/strong>A U.N. adviser criticizes the organization for its “morally unconscionable, legally indefensible, and politically self-defeating” response to the epidemic. <\/em><\/p>\n

This has been going on from the beginning of the crisis. In October 2010, when reports of unusual deaths in the countryside reached Haiti\u2019s capital, Port-au-Prince, rumors spread through Haiti that a U.N. peacekeeping base that was home to Nepalese soldiers was responsible. But instead of calling for a thorough investigation, Minustah denounced the rumors as spurious. A spokesman then sent out a news release making false claims about the quality of sanitation at the base.<\/p>\n

I was The Associated Press correspondent in Haiti at the time, so I went to the base and started looking around. I not only found a sanitation disaster<\/a> but also ran into U.N. military police secretly taking groundwater samples<\/a>. I then watched through the base\u2019s fence as the soldiers dug up leaking pipes and hastily drained an overflowing septic tank, dumping its contents across the street in an unlined pit.<\/p>\n

The U.N. knew its soldiers from Nepal had just arrived from a country with an active cholera outbreak, and knew they had not been screened for the disease. But Minustah officials spent months trying to convince journalists that the accusations about the base were false or too dangerous to investigate, or both. They were assisted by allies at the World Health Organization and the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who repeatedly told the public that finding the source of the epidemic was \u201cnot productive\u201d and \u201cnot important\u201d while declining to conduct investigations of their own. As deaths continued, young Haitians took to the streets, setting up flaming barricades and throwing rocks at U.N. soldiers, who fired back. Several protesters died.<\/p>\n

U.N. officials have spent the six years since then avoiding the issue by using evasive language and ignoring the findings of their own appointed scientists, who indicated that negligent sanitation at the organization\u2019s base introduced the South Asian strain of cholera into Haiti. Sometimes they have encouraged the incorrect perception that the outbreak was somehow a result of the magnitude-7.0 earthquake that struck a different part of the country more than nine months before the first cases appeared and was barely felt in the area where the cholera outbreak began. In other cases, Alston noted in his report, U.N. officials have changed the topic by accusing those asking about the organization\u2019s responsibility of playing \u201cthe blame game\u201d \u2014 while themselves shifting blame to the wider inadequacy of sanitation practices in Haiti or insisting that the whole matter be dropped because of \u201cthe need to move beyond the past.\u201d<\/p>\n

These talking points are familiar to anyone who has reported on the cholera epidemic. In April, I interviewed Atul Khare, the under secretary general who oversees all United Nations field missions worldwide and who stressed to me the organization\u2019s belief in accountability and environmental stewardship around the world. When I asked whether this meant there should be consequences for the United Nations after the outbreak, he hastened to clarify: \u201cI am talking about future actions. I cannot go back and change the past. That is impossible.\u201d<\/p>\n

The United Nations has also pointed to its efforts to eradicate the disease in Haiti in the context of its other development projects there. In June, Jan Eliasson, the deputy secretary general, assured me via email that the organization was honoring its \u201cfundamental responsibility to the Haitian people and to the Haitian nation \u2026 to improve education, housing and health care, as well as programs aimed at securing sanitation and clean water.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alston blasted that logic in his report, noting that for all its talk, the United Nations has raised just 18 percent of the funds needed for even a relatively modest $2.2 billion cholera eradication program in Haiti. There have been some vaccination programs and emergency assistance, but no significant water or sanitation systems \u2014 the things that have kept cholera from ravaging wealthy countries since the late 19th century \u2014 have been built. \u201cThe United Nations consistently calls upon states to acknowledge wrongdoing, to ensure meaningful processes for the vindication of claims and to provide victims with redress,\u201d Alston wrote. \u201cYet in the Haiti case, the victims are told that a handful of broadly focused development projects should provide sufficient redress.\u201d He later added: \u201cProject-based initiatives should not be seen as a substitute for personal compensation.\u201d<\/p>\n

And yet even as the United Nations refused to accept the legitimacy of the lawsuit against it, Ban and other U.N. officials have used the legal action as a pretext not to answer questions about the epidemic.<\/p>\n

So, keeping all that in mind, for a vast international bureaucracy where any stray word in any one of its five official languages could represent the difference between war and peace, those two words \u2014 \u201cown involvement\u201d \u2014 are monumental. They are, my contacts inside the organization tell me, the product of years of battles between forces fighting to protect the organization from all liability on one hand and others who believe it is the U.N.\u2019s mission to fight for human rights, even behind the glass facade of its New York headquarters.<\/p>\n

The question is whether, absent a court or some other outside power, the United Nations and its members \u2014 particularly the United States \u2014 will choose on their own to spend the money and put in the effort to make things right again. So far they haven\u2019t. The stonewalling has destroyed what was left of the United Nations\u2019 reputation in Haiti, and has done the organization few favors in the rest of the world. Meanwhile, people in Haiti continue to die from cholera, infection rates continue to rise, and the damage to the country\u2019s economy, social structures and reputation goes unrepaired.<\/p>\n

In the report\u2019s final line, Alston called specifically on the United States government to \u201cactively support a resolution to this ongoing crisis that respects the rights of the victims of this tragedy and best serves the reputational and other interests of the United Nations.\u201d<\/p>\n

That those actions will be presented only after being agreed to with the Haitian authorities could delay matters further: Haiti doesn\u2019t currently have an elected president, because of delays in a shambolic, unfinished election largely funded, so far, by the United States.<\/p>\n

But there is another deadline approaching too. This September, presidents, prime ministers and monarchs from nearly every nation will converge on the U.N. for the opening of the General Assembly \u2014 the U.N.\u2019s biggest annual event, and the last of Ban\u2019s decade-long tenure as secretary-general.<\/p>\n

When Ban\u2019s office received Alston\u2019s report, the secretary-general was traveling in South America, attending events around the opening of the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. On Friday, Ban called on member states to boost funding for Haiti<\/a> and said, via a spokesman, that he was \u201cactively working to develop a package that would provide material assistance and support to those Haitians most directly affected by cholera.\u201d He also repeated a vague comment he made in 2014 about a \u201cmoral responsibility\u201d on the part of the U.N. for Haiti\u2019s cholera epidemic. But he didn\u2019t offer any concrete details.<\/p>\n

With Ban\u2019s term winding down, and his mind on his legacy<\/a>, does the subtle shift in his office\u2019s language suggest a real reckoning is coming? Alston hopes so, for the sake not only of the Haitian people, but the whole of the United Nations as well. \u201cA festering sore,\u201d he says in his report, \u201cis much worse than a wound that is healed.\u201d<\/p>\n

______________________________<\/p>\n

Jonathan M. Katz is a freelance journalist and the author of<\/em> The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster. He previously wrote for the magazine about the Dominican Republic\u2019s deportation of people of Haitian descent<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 nytimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Scientists and researchers have repeatedly found, with overwhelming consensus, that U.N. peacekeepers introduced the disease to Haiti for the first time ever recorded by knowingly allowing their infected feces to slough into the Meille River, which locals used for drinking, bathing and washing \u2014 in violation of the U.N\u2019s own protocols and the most basic tenets of public health.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-latin-america-and-the-caribbean"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78498\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}