Cholera is a disgusting disease. It’s hard to find one more disgusting than it. A cholera victim, untreated, literally shits their intestines out. That’s blunt, gross, but there’s not any other way to put it. When it arrived in Europe for the first time (I recommend Gillan D’arcy Wood’s Tambora for an account about this), this is how people died. The wealthy would show up to parties hale and healthy and would be dead by the end of the third course, shitting their brains out.
It is also not native to the Caribbean.
In the Artibonite River Valley of Haiti there is a UN base. Stationed at this UN base were UN peacekeepers drawn from Nepal. They rotated in during October of 2010, 10 months after the devastating earthquake all but flattened the capital city and killed up 1 to 315,000 Haitians, one out of every 40 Haitians alive in the country at the time.
Cholera is both native and endemic to Nepal.
In late 2010, people living near the base, along the river, began dying of cholera. Cholera, remember, makes one shit themselves silly. Shit will end up in the rivers, where Haitians draw water for washing, cooking, bathing. The disease is transmitted in this fashion—and amongst caregivers caring for and cleaning their bedridden charges. These people had no real exposure to cholera unlike the Nepalese, and began to die in the hundreds to the thousands. Numerous scientific studies (here is an example of one) later traced the outbreak to the UN facility.
The UN denied it was their fault. They blamed climate conditions (after all, Tambora’s climate shock could have caused the first global pandemic), the earthquake, anything. But not themselves, or the Nepalese soldiers who bought the cholera strain to Haiti with them.
Ten thousand people—or more, as this is considered an undercount—died. Over 800,000 more were sickened.
The UN finally has admitted that they bear responsibility.
Researchers say cholera was first detected in Haiti's central Artibonite Valley and cite evidence that it was introduced to the country's biggest river from a U.N. base where Nepalese troops were deployed as part of a peacekeeping operation which has been in the country since 2004. Cholera is endemic in Nepal.
The United Nations has never accepted responsibility and has answered lawsuits on behalf of victims in U.S. courts by claiming diplomatic immunity. Haq's statement Thursday came a step closer to an admission of at least some responsibility and was welcomed by lawyers for the victims.
But US Courts have rejected a lawsuit that would get the victims of what the UN bought to Haiti---and then lied about---some justice.
A United States federal appeals panel has upheld the argument that the United Nations cannot be sued in American courts, dealing a setback in a class-action lawsuit brought on behalf of thousands of cholera victims in Haiti.
The ruling by the three-judge panel in New York was released on Thursday, a day after a spokesman for Secretary General Ban Ki-moon acknowledged for the first time that the United Nations played a role in the outbreak, which killed thousands of people.
In the decision for the panel, Judge José A. Cabranes of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit wrote that the United Nations did not lose its legal immunity even if it failed to give the plaintiffs a chance to seek a settlement, as required by an international convention.
Sigh.
Jonathan Katz has covered this story since 2010, when he found himself as the only US journalist on the scene when the earthquake flattened Port-au-Prince. He wrote a book about his experience, a book that is incredibly searing and depressing, but it absolutely is a must read. His articles (this one is a good one, especially since I’m trained as a human geographer) on cholera in Haiti are why I and many others even know anything about this.
Of all the world organizations and treaties and agreements, I have to say that there is none more disappointing than the United Nations. We were such idealists at the end of World War II, and I accept that its creation came from a place that we would never do to each other what we did to each other between 1939 and 1945. But with peacekeeper scandal after peacekeeper scandal all over the world in recent years, including the what we now know is the biggest cholera epidemic in modern times, an epidemic that is still ongoing, it’s tough to see this organization as anything useful.
It needs serious reform so that it can serve the communities and people it is supposed to serve.
The UN says it will take responsibility. Sure, we’ll see.
The UN base in Haiti that was ground zero for cholera? Still unsanitary.
1. I am well aware of the controversy around the death toll of the 2010 Port-au-Prince earthquake. No need for a “Well, Actually.” Thanks.