December 20, 2011
Yesterday, the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) released a statement calling on MINUSTAH to take responsibility for the cholera outbreak in Haiti that has already killed over 7,000. In the release, CEPR co-director Mark Weisbrot says, “This is a case of criminal negligence, and the UN, if it is to continue to be worthy of the respect of people around the world, must own up to the fact that it caused this problem.” Today, Weisbrot writes in The Guardian (UK):
If an international agency brought a deadly disease to New York City that killed more people than the 9/11 attacks, what would be the consequences? Could they simply brush it off and have nobody hold them accountable for the damages? The answer is obviously “no,” and the same would be true for most of the countries in this hemisphere. But so far, it looks like they can get away with it in Haiti.
For some reason the “international community” thinks that it can get away with anything in Haiti. More than 7,000 Haitians have been killed since October of 2010 by the deadly cholera bacteria that UN troops brought to Haiti. More than 500,000 have been infected, and the disease – which Haiti has not had in more than a century – is now endemic to the country and will be killing people there for many years to come.
Last week, UN officials once again denied responsibility for the disaster, and even lied publicly about the available scientific research – some of which was included in the UN’s own report on the epidemic. On Thursday Nigel Fisher, the UN’s Deputy Special Representative for MINUSTAH said, “The cholera strain we have in Haiti is the same as the one they have in Latin America and Africa. They all derive from Bangladesh in the 1960s so they are all an Asian strain.
“But the UN’s own report stated definitively that this was not true: “Overall, this basic bacteriological information indicates the Haitian isolates were similar to the Vibrio cholerae strains currently circulating in South Asia and parts of Africa, and not to strains isolated in the Gulf of Mexico [or] those found in other parts of Latin America …”
So according to the UN’s own research, Fisher was lying. The UN’s denials of its responsibility for introducing cholera in Haiti are analogous to the dishonesty of “climate change deniers.” The evidence for the origin of the epidemic is overwhelming.
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