Haiti's cholera epidemic is the worst in the world

Just checking… is the UN still denying responsibility for bringing cholera to Haiti? It's been long observed that Haiti was a "totally naive environment" before the UN Nepalese troops arrived to occupy Haiti's breadbasket, the Artibonite. There is abundant "Confirmation of the Origin of the Haiti Cholera Disaster: UN Nepalese Troops."

Haiti's cholera epidemic is now the worst in the world, having claimed over $7,040 victims and infecting over 523,000 more.

Even U.N. Special Envoy Bill Clinton has said the U.N. brought cholera to Haiti, but the UN is denying its role in the devastating cholera outbreak.

Until now, the UN has not officially replied to the complaint, saying it is still “being studied,” and continues to deny responsibility. Just last week, the UN Secretary General’s spokesman said that “it was not possible to be conclusive about how cholera was introduced into Haiti.”
— Haïti Liberté, Vol. 5, No. 39, 4/11/2012

What a conundrum! How does the UN explain that a "UN Panel was able to quickly use the simpler MLVA method in their analysis of the 2009 specimen, occurring a year earlier in Nepal than the epidemic in Haiti. Of this laboratory work they wrote, "a careful analysis of the MLVA results and the ctxB gene indicated that the strains isolated in Haiti (during 2010) and Nepal during 2009 were a perfect match ^(1)."

If the cholera lawsuit filed by the Institute for Justice and Democracy (IJDH) ever gets assessed in a courtroom, it should be a slam dunk, right? Here's the thing that is puzzling about this lawsuit; that have skeptics asking: are they for real?

How can the very same people who are closely associated with the U.N. claim to be representing the U.N.'s Haitian victims? The IJDH is represented by Dr. Evan Lyon who works for Partners in Health in Haiti, which was founded by U.N. Deputy Special Envoy to Haiti Paul Farmer. Attorney Brian Concannon, the IJDH Director, would theoretically be the one who put Paul Farmer on the Board of Directors of the IJDH, where Paul Farmer still serves.

Meanwhile, it's clear from this July 14, 2011 interview on Democracy Now! that Paul Farmer is a U.N. employee and represents it's interests. Farmer, has gone on the record to deny U.N. responsibility for bringing cholera to Haiti and blames conditions in Haiti for the pandemic.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, you were one of the first people—you were quoted by AP—saying that the cholera after the earthquake was brought in by the Nepali—the Nepalese peacekeeping force, the U.N. force. How did that happen?

DR. PAUL FARMER: How did it happen that I was rash enough to say that?

AMY GOODMAN: No, how did it happen that they did it?

DR. PAUL FARMER: Well, of course, it was completely unwitting. I mean, no one—no one ever intends to bring a disease into a population that had been free of it. And I really, in a way, wish I hadn’t even gotten involved in the discussion, in a way.

If the attorney(s) claiming to represent cholera victims have Paul Farmer on their Board of Directors, shouldn't they recuse themselves? There is a clear conflict of interest here, which should disqualify them from representing the victims of the cholera epidemic. They should turn over their resources to lawyers who will act as "officers of the court" -- who see their duty as representing "the truth, including avoiding dishonesty or evasion."

It's outrageous that Farmer, a physician, who is sworn to "first do no harm" is also backing a "vaccine" for potential victims. If Farmer really cared about making a positive difference in the lives of Haitians (and no one can deny that Farmer has shown that side of himself in the past), he would still be fighting for a sustainable solution -- clean drinking water and water infrastructure. Cholera is a waterborne disease. The parallel that can be drawn here: it's like administering a vaccine to people in anticipation of an outbreak of salmonella and other foodborne illnesses.

Farmer, is a close associate and friend of U.N. Envoy Bill Clinton, who has been using Haiti as a disaster capitalism hub for himself and his ultra-rich friends -- like Warren Buffet of Clayton Homes and Katrina disaster formaldehyde trailers infamy. Clinton paid Clayton Homes a million dollars for bringing formaldehyde laced trailers to Haiti's school children -- that's something else we can all agree on Esquire Magazine.

The Clinton Global Initiative are co-sponsoring "cholera insurance" for Haiti's market women. What should we term that little enterprise -- windfall or rainfall profits? The Clinton's propensity for being implicated in scandals and corruption is as rampant as it ever was.

Haiti Liberté writes that the IJDH speaks for "The petitioners [who] also call on the UN to take constructive action to prevent cholera’s spread and to formally accept responsibility for importing cholera into Haiti" -- if that is so, then why is the IJDH not filing a class action lawsuit on behalf of all 523,000+ victims of the imported cholera scourge and their families? The IJDH -- the face of the "complainants" -- has instead chosen to represent just 5,000 of the "cholera survivors or close family members of someone killed by the disease."

Ezili Dantò terms the folks behind the cholera lawsuit: "paid to lose tenured progressives" because clearly they are "crisis handling" this "embarrassing" situation for their bosses and close associates at the "United Nations" -- the goal is to make it all go away.

Meanwhile, the U.N. is continuing to cower behind the amoral, unjust and indefensible mantle of "plausible deniability."

With these kinds of friends... Haiti does not need enemies.

It was the Bush regime that sponsored the Haiti coup in 2004 that brought in the U.S. puppet Boca Raton regime of Gerard Latortue responsible for these U.N. "peacekeepers" entering Haiti to practice their brutal form of "humanitarianism." The TOURISTAH have been in Haiti for almost eight years now getting their generous "hazard pay" of $6,000 a month -- with a budget of $832 million a year, MINUSTAH is paid well for their rapacious occupation of Haiti.

Bring a class action lawsuit on behalf of all the victims of U.N. cholera against the United States! The U.S. cannot continue to operate with impunity in the world, particularly against small nations, which have no standing army, weapons or means to defend themselves from the most powerful nation(s) of the world.

The U.N. is primarily a military force, which is deployed all over the world to protect and secure the interests of the 1 percent, albeit NATO seems to have taken up a lot of the U.N.'s duties of late. So do take heed closet racists in Brazil, you're mercenary services as head of MINUSTAH may no longer be required. Occupying Haiti at the behest of the U.N.'s "Big Powers" sure hasn't brought Brazil the permanent seat on the Security Council they were seeking -- thus far.

The U.S. is a signatories to international human rights treaties. Due respect to Human Rights Watch for calling out the United States on their continuing hypocrisy -- it's about time:

The failure of the US to join with other nations in taking on international human rights legal obligations has undercut its international leadership on key issues, limiting its influence, its stature, and its credibility in promoting respect for human rights around the world.

_________________
1. Cravioto A. (Chair), Lanata CF, Lantagne DS, Nair GB. Final Report of the Independent Panel of Experts on the Cholera Outbreak in Haiti. United Nations, April, 2011.

Haiti: Island of the Blamed

The Economist's online blog has addressed the cholera lawsuit filed against the UN by The Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH) in a blog.

Should Haitians be grateful for this belated attention to the disastrous outbreak? -- that a major U.S. publication, The Economist has seen fit to address this most inconsequential of issues -- the untimely death of thousands of Haitians?

Well, it's not such an afterthought as they would make it. The reason the issue merits The Economist's intention at all is because they calculate the death of thousands in terms of the millions of dollars such a lawsuit represents. The Economist clearly regrets the UN's impending economic loss. So it is no wonder that the writer (P.B.?) titles the blog - "The UN in Haiti - Damned if you do." The meaning is clear: the "damned" are not the over 500,000 Haitians infected by cholera, the over 800,000 The Lancet predicts will be infected, nor the (conservatively) almost 7,000 recorded dead.

The Economist admits there may be culpability on the part of the UN. It's unclear whether such clarity would be forthcoming if the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) did not exist. They have the UN's back -- though they make it clear they don't want to be downstream from that rear end.

The experts “found that it was not possible to determine conclusively how cholera was introduced,” said Kieran Dwyer, a spokesperson for the UN’s peacekeeping operations. “On the scientific evidence, we don’t know if it was the UN troops or not.”

A close read of the panel’s report, however, suggests otherwise. The experts pinpointed the origin of the outbreak to the Meille River, a tributary of the region’s main water source, near a peacekeeping base where sanitation conditions “were not sufficient to prevent faecal contamination” of the river. They noted that the battalion was deployed from Nepal shortly after endemic cholera had flared up in the Kathmandu Valley, and that asymptomatic soldiers, who can still carry cholera, were not tested. They cited epidemiological studies showing genetic similarities between Haiti’s strain of cholera and the South Asian strain endemic in Nepal. And they dismissed every other alternate theory on the origins of cholera in Haiti.

-- The UN in Haiti - Damned if you do by P.B | The Economist (blog)

More deaths in Haiti from the "peacekeeping" mission of MINUSTAH than casualties of "war" suffered by the U.S. and its allies in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

The UN damned and Haitians -- blamed. How sad that some would marginalize the poor and disenfranchised. They consider them to be just so much garbage that must be swept out of parks and public squares.

What are the elements that make a disaster worst and favor the spread of a pandemic, the UN experts know -- they've conducted the studies and they've done the surveys (pdf):

"The sheer scope of the socio-economic impacts of natural disasters is at last slowly bringing about a shift in approach away from disaster relief and toward disaster prevention, with risk reduction increasingly considered as a priority development tool in its own right. There is a growing realization
in the international community that risk reduction, disaster relief and sustainable development are closely related. Vulnerability to disasters is linked to poverty, and vice versa."

-- Disaster Preparedness and Mitigation UNESCO’s role

by United Nations' Educational, Scientific & Cultural Organization (UNESCO)

The UN should have tested those Nepalese soldiers, who came back from an outbreak in Katmandu, Nepal last year and evidently contaminated the Meille river with fecal matter from a leaky latrine. Since they did not, and since they continue to deny their responsibility for the cholera outbreak, one could conclude that - the UN is not in Haiti to mitigate the impact of the January 12, 2010 earthquake. It's evident from their deeds and words that the UN is in Haiti for political reasons. The protection of the people of Haiti is not of "interest" to them. The people's deaths, while inconvenient, does not pose a significant concern for the "international community" when measured against the goals of the occupation.

The place was ripe for a pandemic and the very international entity tasked with preventing such a thing shipped in a bunch of people from disparate lands and backgrounds with diseases that are not endemic to the area, and (predictably) caused the spread of a disastrous pandemic.

The UN is in Haiti to carry out the agenda of the U.S. The U.S. wishes to suppress and destroy the most popular political party, Lavalas. The Lavalas party was founded on the theory of Liberation theology. It's very dangerous to advocate a Christian belief in social, economic and political justice -- you'll be crucified.

Haitians are blamed and called "ungrateful" for seeking redress for all the injustices they've suffered at the hands of the American empire and its nation state partners who form the proxy occupying force, deployed to keep real democracy from developing a foothold in Haiti.

One is forced to conclude that there's no way to do an injustice to Haitians -- no matter that the UN military occupation has committed massacres, murders, rapes (women, children, young men... what fate has befallen the stolen goats?), and other crimes against humanity since the beginning of the occupation in 2004. Haitians are blasted for their temerity in demanding accountability and justice... even when scientific studies/medical evidence, video/audio testimonials exist, which provide abundant proof of the numerous indignities and injustices Haitians have been subjected to.

The UN has a budget of over $800,000,000 in Haiti -- this is a profitable occupation for their member states... a chance to make a substantial profit and at the same time pander to empire's wishes. In Brazil's instance (they've lead the occupation from the start), it's a bid to be invited to join as a permanent member of the UN Security Council.

Has a single dollar of this UN occupation been spent to find a sustainable solution to the cholera outbreak? The solution seems too obvious; send the troops home and provide sustainable clean water infrastructure. However, this would mean that the Clinton Foundation would not make a profit from "cholera insurance," the pharmaceuticals could not make millions from selling a "cholera vaccine" and countless NGOs would not make a living from providing social services (socialized medicine? How ironic!) for a preventable and curable water-bourne disease.

The UN has spent resources to assure that they have clean water in their self-contained tribal compounds. There would be no lawsuit if the UN had made an effort to mitigate the effects of the cholera infection -- if they had, the outbreak would not be the worst in the world. Instead, Edmond Mulet said the Mirebalais Nepalese base had disposed their waste in a manner that was not only up to international standards, but to EPA standards, a baseless lie.

It's ironic that this occupation is being lead by Brazil. This time the descendants of the indigenous natives of South America and Black Africans who make up the military force are playing the role of the settlers, cowboys... of the European immigrants. Do they know that Francisco de Miranda and Simon Bolivar came to Haiti for help in mounting the South American revolutions that liberated four countries from colonial occupation? Haiti made just one stipulation for providing help - Bolivar must also free the slaves. There's a statue of Simon Bolivar in the Haitian capital -- it survived the earthquake, as did all the statues in the capital. But did Bolivar deserve that honor? It's doubtful. Bolivar turned his back on Haiti. Bolivar, very crudely, did not invite Haiti to the Congress of Panama. The good news is that Brazil has announced they are leaving and ending their leadership of the UN occupation of Haiti. It can't happen too soon for Haiti's sake.

MLK said: "the arc of history bends toward justice... and injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere. Those are not platitudes. They ring true today. There is hope for a better future. There is hope in the Occupy movement - which is why the police have acted like stormtroopers to protect the interests of empire.

On a lighter note, it's heart warming that worldwide people are rallying to protest social-economic inequities, injustice and political corruption. Hopefully, it signals the beginning of a new way of sharing ideas and building concensus -- horizontal leadership, general assemblies and people over profit.

There is also hope in the announcement that the US occupation of Iraq may be ending soon -- haven't heard how many "advisors" will stay. The U.S. decided to leave because the Iraqis would not give them immunity from prosecution. The circumstances are similar to those in Haiti -- the other regime change.

Haitian should not be bound by the SOFA agreement, which purports to give the UN immunity -- or is it impunity? It's so hard to distinguish the difference. Wasn't this document first signed by the Bush installed puppet government of Gerard LaTortue? As a so-called "interim" president, Latortue did not have the constitutional right to commit Haiti to such a contract. The other sticky matter is that Haiti's first democratically elected government was removed in U.S. backed coups in 1991 and 2004. Can a country like Haiti where the "international community" wields so much socio-economic and political power be said to be sovereign and independent, especially in light of the outside interference by those who plotted the coups? It's a question of legitimacy. Haiti should not be held to agreements made under an illegal occupation.