UN caused deadly cholera in Haiti, covered it up, lawsuit says
investigations.nbcnews.com
investigations.nbcnews.com
The UN, like various police forces, the NSA, the military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan are all committed to very commendable ends, some obviously more successfully than others. Even if they do enjoy some level of legal immunity from direct responsibility, that privilege must come with a strong and unambiguous demand that all transgressions are investigated throughly, justice is served and lessons are applied to avoid future transgressions.
Even if the contamination was an unfortunate mistake, the cover-up (if the complainants are right) was a grave crime and no level of good-doing can excuse that.
When it renamed itself to "United Nations", here's how it got started :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Operation_in_the...
I've heard this UN operation described to me by some people who survived it.
1) black revolt. Small amounts of damage occur. Police generally have things under control. The police, ultimately reports to a colonial government, so the UN feels pressured to step in, and the colonial government gets paid off to let them step in.
2) the UN "judges fairly" that a white government can't be trusted to get things right, so they have to pull out. This despite the fact that the people on the ground are overwhelmingly (black) locals, and they already had significant amounts of local authority, with promises from the colonial government for expansion of that authority. The local colonial governor and army leadership refuse to give up control because of the shear stupidity of the UN's organisation (the UN didn't think it necessary to have the police force commanded on the same continent as it was operated, and didn't even bother to respond to requests for who to turn over control to), with support from the locals.
3) UN sends in racist "peacekeepers". Their first action : shoot whatever is black and holds a gun. That turned out to be the police force, "whoops, apologies". Several blue helmet basis were accused of organising group rapes of the locals (this accusation, by the way, keeps coming back in later UN operations. They are accused of doing this in Congo, Western Sahara, Sudan, Mali and several other places. The UN does not see this as a reason to stop sending in the very same troops, and to date there have been zero convictions, except of course in local jurisdictions)
4) UN withdraws (as if they somehow didn't know what would happen next).
5) situation : the police force has been partially massacred, and is obviously no longer defending the cities, and has a serious grudge against the government. The local population up in arms because their family members got shot for being black. The rebels, of course, also up in arms because of this, as they've lost family to the UN's guns just the same. This, of course, resulted in an attack on the cities by the rebels.
6) total devastation. Tens of thousands dead. Famine and disease reign for almost 2 decades. Needless to say, the UN did not see fit to help at this point.
TLDR: A country was having problems with people from the countryside taking up arms against the cities. The UN comes n, shoots up the local police force because they're black, and pulls out.
Needless to say, you will not find this operation on their site. They have fought tooth and nail not to be held responsible (against the locals), and for the soldiers involved to go free.
The country STILL has not fully recovered from the UN action in the 1960s. Needless to say, the UN goes blameless despite everyone, including the UN itself, agreeing that they hold responsibility for significant damage (they paid for a tiny amount of it).
This is the UN, plain and simple. They are evil profiteers who don't care about anything that isn't front and center in the news. They are an organisation dedicated to paying off foreign officials, hiring their children, ... to get favours, and they keep getting accused of gang-raping the locals wherever they go in Africa, in addition to a massacre every decade or so. Political correctness uber alles, and they can obviously not concern themselves with the consequences of their actions. They should have been held responsible and disbanded for this one action alone.
This is incorrect; the League of Nations became de-facto defunct during the war and was formally dissolved in 1946. The UN was founded in 1945, with a very different structure to the LN.
If the same people show up in the rolls for both, yeah, that claim might be substantiated, in this case.
Your example is arguably correct, but quite beside the point here.
I'm by no means well-informed on the specifics of the UN's peace-keeping in the Congo, but if you're going to link to the UN's role (and provide your own TL;DR), you might want to place that within the context of the Congo Crisis [1] itself. That might put a bit of nuance into the story you're telling.
And again, no Congo expert, but I'm highly skeptical that the UN intervention is the proximate cause for the Congo Crisis. You might want to start by looking at the role of Belgium, well-documented in the book King Leopold's Ghost [2]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Crisis [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Leopold's_Ghost
I don't think you are quite informed on the history of Congo and the various drivers for the socio-economic changes it went through in the last 150 years.
This is not to cover over the dark chapters in the UN's history, but it is far from "This is the UN, plain and simple".
Think of all the things that the security council has vetoed. In the old days, those things would have had a decent chance of being tried anyway, which in turn may have had the event escalate to something truly horrible as one of the great powers tries to save face. Things like the Cuban Missile Crisis would have happened again and again.
Why the hell should such an organisation be held blameless ? Seriously.
The UN should of course fix their procedures and try to do better next time, but punishing them merely creates disincentives for engaging in necessary actions. That's to say that specific individuals involved in the coverup shouldn't be punished, however.
Note that I say this as a person who hates the UN, believes the US should exit the UN, kick them out of NY, and give our security council seat to India (or perhaps a less dysfunctional large democracy).
Is this even allowed? Why would a doctor with hepatitis be allowed to operate?
The UN did not adequately manage the waste products from their own mission. This camp in Mirablais dumped their waste into the nearest waterway. The CDC has confirmed that this was the source of the cholera epidemic.[0] When soldiers at the camp began showing cholera symptoms, the UN continued to pump sewage into the river.
By contrast, considering the presence of pipes pouring sewage
from the MINUSTAH camp to the stream, the rapid dissemination
of the disease in Meille and downstream, and the probable
contamination of prisoners by the stream water, we believe that
Meille River acted as the vector of cholera during the first
days of the epidemic by carrying sufficient concentrations of
the bacterium to induce cholera in persons who drank it.
[0] http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/17/7/11-0059_article.htm#di...
[1] http://www.lethaitilive.org/news-english/2012/1/3/two-years-...
That said, these guys I imagine we're there for free, so...
"(Cholera) has now spread to Venezuela, Cuba and the Dominican Republic, and has now killed more than 8,500 people."
If we're thinking about this pragmatically, the world attention paid to Haiti during the flood saved far more than that number of people, even those not directly hit by the earthquake and instead were living with diseases that are prevalent in the third world.
We can split hairs over the effectiveness of the UN or international intervention, but before we start the ranting to the tone of hackernews isolationist/libertarian politics, keep in mind that Haiti is such a mess that we're still talking in terms of the broad good. Anyone that criticizes the role of the UN in this instance is a vulture looking to profit off of a natural disaster in a corrupt nation.
If nothing else, this can discourage lies in the future.
This is what has been alleged in the lawsuit. This has not been proven, otherwise, the article would be very different.
Also, this is an accident in the classic definition. Do you seriously think the UN workers went in to one of the poorest, most corrupt countries in the world after disease and sickness were rampant and deliberately introduced cholera?
Even the UN's own subcommittee on Cholera agreed.
> Do you seriously think the UN workers went in to one of the poorest, most corrupt countries in the world after disease and sickness were rampant and deliberately introduced cholera?
I don't recall saying that. Let me check - nope never said that. So why are you asking me this?
What I said was they covered it up - which is bad enough. No need for you go make things up about the UN.
I'm not sure that is plausible. At the start of the epidemic investigation on Oct 19, dissemination into communities on the Artibonite delta had already happened.
So because they may have saved more than 8500 lives in the same time frame we should ignore this? The issue at hand is not whether the UN has or has not done good in Haiti. The issue is that they reintroduced a disease which had been eradicated in this region hundreds of years ago due to their own negligence. They then lied about it and tried to impede the investigation.
Actually, it kind of is. Haiti is a special case. It's so corrupt that the US stopped giving them money. We (the USA) were giving them 1.5 billion dollars and stopped because we knew that barely any of that money was getting to people that needed it. Which is to say that things are desperate and the world needs to act quickly when a bad thing happens there.
> The issue is that they reintroduced a disease which had been eradicated in this region hundreds of years ago due to their own negligence. They then lied about it and tried to impede the investigation.
This is alleged from a lawsuit from a very corrupt country. Stop talking about this like it's a kid that knocked over a glass of milk and won't admit it.
Here's a history of it: http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstructio...
And of cholera: http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstructio...
That includes first aid by laymen at the roadside and of course extends to international organisations.
But in those cases, any attempt to cover up problems would likely reduce the protection (because it's not in good faith anymore)
Then what happens: no UN to save anything.
Because they can be. Power is its own justification.
Also, they generally have immunity from repercussions of laws they make, laws they execute, or laws they rule upon.
Edit: I don't fully agree that the UN is "immune to everything". There are problems with accountability, but I think it does a lot of good in the world.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations#Legal_basis_of_e...
/tinfoil hat
It's an argument for letting people live their lives.
The USA had to do a second coup to get their 'beloved' President Aristide out of power. (the second one with the help of Canadian troops, no less).
Canada and then the UN were the follow through. The real reason? They were not compliant with foreign investment interests. (Arguments at corruption or vote rigging are so flaccid and transparent that I won't even bother.) Also I should mention that young men streaming across the Dominican border armed by the USA don't count as a popular uprising.
Take Gildan activewear as an example. They have uppity garment workers in Montreal, so they create excess production facilities in Honduras. Then the Hondurans get uppity and they create excess production facilities in Haiti (the cheapest place in the western hemisphere for wages).
(You don't live in a capitalist society if capital can move freely and people can't. That's international serfdom.)
So what happened when Fanmi Lavalas started making Haitians uppity?
You hit them with a stick. And of course you hit the serfs who are the most vulnerable, it's cheaper that way and serves as an example to others.
As you may or may not know, Nepal's government is one of the most corrupt piece of shit in the world. The higher ups probably took most of the money and spent hardly any on the soldiers being sent there.
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