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NY Times, August 18 2016
U.N. Admits Role in Cholera Epidemic in Haiti
By JONATHAN M. KATZ
For the first time since a cholera epidemic believed to be imported by
United Nations peacekeepers began killing thousands of Haitians nearly
six years ago, the office of Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has
acknowledged that the United Nations played a role in the initial
outbreak and that a “significant new set of U.N. actions” will be needed
to respond to the crisis.
The deputy spokesman for the secretary general, Farhan Haq, said in an
email this week that “over the past year, the U.N. 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.” He
added that a “new response will be presented publicly within the next
two months, once it has been fully elaborated, agreed with the Haitian
authorities and discussed with member states.”
The statement comes on the heels of a confidential report sent to Mr.
Ban by a longtime United Nations adviser on Aug. 8. Written by Philip
Alston, a New York University law professor who serves as one of a few
dozen experts, known as special rapporteurs, who advise the organization
on human rights issues, the draft language stated plainly that the
epidemic “would not have broken out but for the actions of the United
Nations.”
The secretary general’s acknowledgment, by contrast, stopped short of
saying that the United Nations specifically caused the epidemic. Nor
does it indicate a change in the organization’s legal position that it
is absolutely immune from legal actions, including a federal lawsuit
brought in the United States on behalf of cholera victims seeking
billions in damages stemming from the Haiti crisis.
But it represents a significant shift after more than five years of
high-level denial of any involvement or responsibility of the United
Nations in the outbreak, which has killed at least 10,000 people and
sickened hundreds of thousands. Cholera victims suffer from dehydration
caused by severe diarrhea or vomiting.
Special rapporteurs’ reports are technically independent guidance, which
the United Nations can accept or reject. United Nations officials have
until the end of this week to respond to the report, which will then go
through revisions, but the statement suggests a new receptivity to its
criticism.
In the 19-page report, obtained from an official who had access to it,
Mr. Alston took issue with the United Nations’ public handling of the
outbreak, which was first documented in mid-October 2010, shortly after
people living along the Meille River began dying from the disease.
The first victims lived near a base housing 454 United Nations
peacekeepers freshly arrived from Nepal, where a cholera outbreak was
underway, and waste from the base often leaked into the river. Numerous
scientists have since argued that the base was the only plausible source
of the outbreak — whose real death toll, one study found, could be much
higher than the official numbers state — but United Nations officials
have consistently insisted that its origins remain up for debate.
Mr. Alston wrote that the United Nations’ Haiti cholera policy “is
morally unconscionable, legally indefensible and politically
self-defeating.” He added, “It is also entirely unnecessary.” The
organization’s continuing denial and refusal to make reparations to the
victims, he argued, “upholds a double standard according to which the
U.N. insists that member states respect human rights, while rejecting
any such responsibility for itself.”
He said, “It provides highly combustible fuel for those who claim that
U.N. peacekeeping operations trample on the rights of those being
protected, and it undermines both the U.N.’s overall credibility and the
integrity of the Office of the Secretary-General.”
Mr. Alston went beyond criticizing the Department of Peacekeeping
Operations to blame the entire United Nations system. “As the magnitude
of the disaster became known, key international officials carefully
avoided acknowledging that the outbreak had resulted from discharges
from the camp,” he noted.
His most severe criticism was reserved for the organization’s Office of
Legal Affairs, whose advice, he wrote, “has been permitted to override
all of the other considerations that militate so powerfully in favor of
seeking a constructive and just solution.” Its interpretations, he said,
have “trumped the rule of law.”
Mr. Alston also argued in his report that, as The New York Times has
reported, the United Nations’ cholera eradication program has failed.
Infection rates have been rising every year in Haiti since 2014, as the
organization struggles to raise the $2.27 billion it says is needed to
eradicate the disease from member states. No major water or sanitation
projects have been completed in Haiti; two pilot wastewater processing
plants built there in the wake of the epidemic quickly closed because of
a lack of donor funds.
In a separate internal report released days ago after being withheld for
nearly a year, United Nations auditors said a quarter of the sites run
by the peacekeepers with the organization’s Stabilization Mission in
Haiti, or Minustah, that they had visited were still discharging their
waste into public canals as late as 2014, four years after the epidemic
began.
“Victims are living in fear because the disease is still out there,”
Mario Joseph, a prominent Haitian human rights lawyer representing
cholera victims, told demonstrators in Port-au-Prince last month. He
added, “If the Nepalese contingent returns to defecate in the water
again, they will get the disease again, only worse.”
In 2011, when families of 5,000 Haitian cholera victims petitioned the
United Nations for redress, its Office of Legal Affairs simply declared
their claims “not receivable.” (Mr. Alston called that argument “wholly
unconvincing in legal terms.”)
Those families and others then sued the United Nations, including Mr.
Ban and the former Minustah chief Edmond Mulet, in federal court in New
York. (In November, Mr. Ban promoted Mr. Mulet to be his chief of
staff.) The United Nations refused to appear in court, claiming
diplomatic immunity under its charter, leaving Justice Department
lawyers to defend it instead. That case is now pending a decision from
the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York.
The redress demanded by families of the 10,000 people killed and 800,000
affected would reach $40 billion, Mr. Alston wrote — and that figure
does not take into account “those certain to die and be infected in the
years ahead.”
“Since this is almost five times the total annual budget for
peacekeeping worldwide, it is a figure that is understandably seen as
prohibitive and unrealistic,” he said. Still, he argued: “The figure of
$40 billion should stand as a warning of the consequences that could
follow if national courts become convinced that the abdication policy is
not just unconscionable but also legally unjustified. The best way to
avoid that happening is for the United Nations to offer an appropriate
remedy.”
Mr. Alston, who declined to comment for this article, will present the
final report at the opening of the General Assembly in September, when
presidents, prime ministers and monarchs from nearly every country
gather at United Nations headquarters in New York.
Mr. Haq said the secretary general’s office “wanted to take this
opportunity to welcome this vital report,” which he added “will be a
valuable contribution to the U.N. as we work towards a significant new
set of U.N. actions.”
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