After six years, the United Nations has finally admitted it deserves at least some blame for the death of thousands of Hatians in a 2010 cholera epidemic.
Despite the admission, the U.N. says it deserves no legal liability for the deaths, and will continue to avoid making reparations.
Haiti had successfully eliminated cholera roughly a century ago, despite its poverty. But that all changed in 2010, when the country was hit by a devastating earthquake that killed at least 100,000 people. Ten months later, thousands of people started to mysteriously come down with the disease, which mainly spreads via water tainted by the feces of victims. For the past six years, cholera has remained a persistent problem, killing over 9,000 Haitians and making hundreds of thousands more sick.
From the beginning, locals pointed the finger at a U.N. peacekeeper camp located along a tributary of the Artibonite River, where the first cases appeared. The camp in question was occupied by Nepalese peacekeepers, who allegedly followed poor sanitation practices that reintroduced cholera to the water supply.
The U.N. has spent years attempting to evade responsibility for the outbreak. Initially, the U.N. said it was “not important” to find the source of the outbreak, and it only agreed to investigate the matter after heavy outside pressure. The resulting report found there was strong evidence the U.N.’s peacekeepers were responsible. Even then the U.N. refused to accept blame.
Now, finally, the U.N. has admitted it was in the wrong.
“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,” U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq said in an email sent out earlier this week.
Don’t expect the U.N. to pay for its mistake any time soon, despite an ongoing class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of cholera victims. The U.N. maintains that as an international organization, it has total legal immunity from lawsuits, and can’t be held accountable for the actions of its peacekeepers.
“Our legal position on this issue has not changed,” Haq said in a Thursday press briefing. That raises the possibility that victimized Haitians will receive nothing for their suffering, other than the U.N.’s remarkably ineffectual help in stemming the spread of cholera. Despite years of work, cholera infection rates have generally increased rather than declined, and the U.N. has repeatedly failed to meet funding goals for various anti-cholera projects in the country.
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