Poor U.N. sanitation persisted long after Haiti cholera crisis

Years after medical studies linked the 2010 cholera outbreak in Haiti to infected U.N. peacekeepers, the organization’s auditors found that poor sanitation practices remained unaddressed not only in its Haitian mission but also in at least six others in Africa and the Middle East, a review of their findings shows.

The findings, in audits conducted by the U.N. Office of Internal Oversight Services in 2014 and 2015, appear to reflect the organization’s intent to avoid another crisis like cholera.

But the findings also provide some insight into how peacekeepers and their supervisors may have been either unaware of or lax about the need to enforce rigorous protocols for wastewater, sewage and hazardous waste disposal at U.N. missions — despite the known risks and the lessons learned from Haiti, where at least 10,000 people have died from cholera and hundreds of thousands have been sickened.

The United Nations acknowledged that it bore some responsibility for the Haiti disaster, after having presented a public face of ignoring the incriminating evidence and invoking its diplomatic immunity. The acknowledgment came after one of organization’s special advisers on human rights issues, Philip Alston, in a confidential report about the cholera epidemic seen by The New York Times, called such a position “morally unconscionable, legally indefensible and politically self-defeating.”

The audits may illustrate a more systemic weakness of U.N. peacekeepers, soldiers who are supposed to protect the vulnerable and uphold high moral standards.

The peacekeeping missions that were audited — in Haiti, the Darfur region of Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ivory Coast, Lebanon, Liberia and South Sudan — all practiced varying degrees of “unsatisfactory” waste management.