U.N. owes debt for Haiti’s cholera epidemic
Since its creation more than 200 years ago, Haiti has lived under a cloud of misfortune, struggling with poverty, environmental catastrophe, the relentless assault of hurricanes, horrendously corrupt governments and disease of almost every description.
Somehow it escaped cholera, until the United Nations introduced it in 2010, in a cruel stroke of irony. Since then, nearly 10,000Haitians have died fromit, 800,000 have been stricken by it and 200 aweek continue to fall victim to it.
The epidemic began with the arrival of a Nepalese peacekeeping unit that carried the deadly disease from home and introduced it into Haiti’s nearly nonexistent sanitary sewer system.
For the next six years, U.N. officials denied any culpability, even as the number of victims grew and evidence of responsibility mounted.
Last December, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon finally acknowledged the U.N.’s role in spreading cholera in Haiti.
“On behalf of the United Nations, Iwant to say very clearly: we apologize to the Haitian people. We simply did not do enough with regard to the cholera outbreak and its spread in Haiti. We are profoundly sorry for our role,” Ban said. “For the sake of the Haitian people, but also for the sake of the United Nations itself, we have a moral responsibility to act. Andwe have a collective responsibility to deliver.”
Yet Haiti’s never-ending book of woes continues to unfold. For now, the U.N. refuses to dip into its general fund to pay the $400-million tab needed to fight the cholera war.
Instead, it has established a trust fund to be financed by donations— a plan based more on hope than reality. Only a handful of member nations have stepped up. The world’s prevailing message to U.N. leadership is: “You broke it. You fix it.” As a result, the trust fund is hundreds of millions of dollars short and the cholera crisis continues. Back-to-back U.S. administrations— Obama and Trump— also have refused to contribute to the fund and are opposed to the U.N.’s acceptance of responsibility. Besides, American policymakers argue, our nation has contributed $4.2 billion to Haiti since the 2010 earthquake.
Human rights advocates and legal experts accuse the U.S. of sidestepping its responsibility since itwas our country that pushed the United Nations to bring in the peacekeepers, the cholera carriers.
And looming on the horizon is the almost certain deportation of thousands of Haitians living in the U.S. on temporary visas issued after the 2010 earthquake.
Among the advocates for amore aggressive U.N. role in the cholera fight is a group of five Nobel Peace Prize recipients who see funding the trust fund as the organization’s moral debt to Haiti. Moreover, they argue, many Haitians opposed the introduction of peacekeepers, seeing their arrival as an assault on the nation’s sovereignty. That the peacekeepers brought the cholera bug with them compounds the indignity.
The U.N. has no shortage of challenges: masses ofwar-driven refugees, aching poverty across continents, natural disasters and epidemics. So in someways, Haiti is just another in a long line of the needy.
But this obligation is different. The institution created to foster peace and rescue stricken nations played a central role in creating the cholera crisis in Haiti. That makes the U.N.’s obligation to fix it even more imperative.
If the United-Nations fails this test of relevance, it fails them all.
Editorials are the opinion of the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board and written by one of its members or a designee. The Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Rosemary O’Hara, Andrew Abramson, Elana Simms, Gary Stein and Editor-in-Chief Howard Saltz.