22 November 2010. A World to Win News Service. As cholera deaths rise, Haitians are angrier than ever. They have good reason.
Protests have targeted the government and especially the main pillar of public order, the UN troops who have occupied the country since 1993.
A series of violent protests began 15 November in the country's second largest city, Cap-Haitien in the north, where the the disease struck almost overnight and quickly killed hundreds of people. According to the Agence Haitienne de Presse, thousands of residents came into the streets. Demonstrators blockaded roads with coffins, along with burning tyres, large rocks and debris. When they attacked two UN troop bases with rocks and bottles, they were met with automatic weapons fire, killing at least two protesters.
UN troops and Haitian police shot volleys of tear gas into a university faculty, and some of the canisters fell into the adjoining tent camps. The independent journalism Web site in Haiti Mediahacker.org recounts that the troops ignored families' pleas to stop firing. In response to claims by the authorities and foreign-based media that the protesters were young gang members, it reported that "all elements of society are participating."
The demonstrations after that were not violent, and there were no reported attacks on NGO health workers who operate out of a single encampment in a sports stadium in the centre of the city. But these personnel were ordered confined to their living quarters. All emergency work and supplies ceased for almost a week.
Over the next few days fighting also took place in Grande Riviere du Nord, Limbe and especially the town of Hinche in the central plateau region, where demonstrators burned down two police substations and UN troops wounded 15 people. Everywhere calls went up for the withdrawal of the the Minustah (UN Mission for the Stabilization of Haiti).
On 18 November demonstrations scheduled in the capital on the anniversary of the Haitian slave revolution's decisive battle with the French colonial army also turned into a clash with police and soldiers from the UN. At protests the next day, people chanted "Minustah and cholera are twins" and carried signs saying "Minustah = Kolera".
Whether or not the UN troops are the source of the epidemic, the way these officials and other authorities have handled the situation has proven that they are a plague on the people.
Although a cholera epidemic has been spreading around the world over the last decades, Haiti has not seen a single case for a very long time, if ever. This means that unlike South Asia, no one in Haiti has acquired any natural immunity to the disease. Before it broke out in October UN officials refused to pay attention to complaints from people living along the Artibonite River that sewage from a UN camp was fouling their drinking water. (Jonathan Katz, Associated Press, 19 November 2010) When cholera hit, shortly after a contingent of troops was transferred in from Nepal, officials refused to look into the local people's suspicions that the infection came from UN latrines. It was along this river's banks that the cholera storm started and gathered much of its early deadly force.
Since the start of the epidemic each statement from the UN Mission has turned out to be a lie or misleading. The camp's sewage system which they claimed was safely sealed and recently checked for compliance with U.S. and international UN sanitation standards was revealed to be a stinking cesspool. It overflowed into a nearby stream, filling it with what an Associated Press journalist said looked and smelled like excrement. It was not until he came on the scene, five weeks into the health crisis, that anything was done to fix it.
The claim that the soldiers couldn't have been the carriers of the disease because none were sick was exposed as scientific rubbish – experts say that three-quarters of contagious people never show symptoms. The claimed environmental testing of the camp for cholera was botched. For a month it was claimed that the soldiers had tested negative for the disease, then it came out that they have still not been tested. It seems that Minustah considers its mission to maintain political stability more important than the survival of ordinary Haitians.
The same pattern repeated itself with the deaths of three demonstrators during the third week in November. At first UN mission officials said that they had been killed by stones from other demonstrators and then that Haitian police had shot them, before finally conceding that they were brought down by UN automatic weapons fire. (Haiti Liberte)
For a great many Haitians, suffering brought by the UN is old news. There have been constant reports of UN troops killing demonstrators and especially acting with murderous brutality against youth in the Port-au-Prince shanty towns. Three years ago an entire contingent of 114 "Blue Helmets" was sent home for sexually abusing women and girls.
Even before that, an investigation published in the internationally reputed medical journal The Lancet (2 September 2006) charged that "police, paramilitaries [armed bands linked to the now-dissolved army], and foreign soldiers were implicated" in the wave of rapes and murders that plagued the people since the U.S.-sponsored coup that overthrew elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. In the 8,000 murders that took place in the capital in this 22-month period, "almost half of the identified perpetrators were government forces or outside political actors." In a survey of Port-au-Prince inhabitants, "14 percent of the interviewees did accuse foreign soldiers, including those in UN uniform, of threatening them with sexual or physical violence, including death."
This is not something particular to any one contingent of UN soldiers from any particular country. Brutalizing the people is inherent in their mission. The U.S. has repeatedly sent tens of thousands of troops into Haiti for almost a century, including when Aristide was overthrown and most recently after the earthquake last January, and they are ready to step in again when needed. But now Washington has brought in the UN as the main armed force to police the Haitian people. No wonder that for countries like Nepal providing troops to UN missions is a form of counterinsurgency training.
What evidence has there ever been that the UN troops have come as part of an international effort to help the people? Only about a third of the total amount pledged for reconstruction aid after the earthquake has actually shown up. So far the U.S. has not delivered a single penny of its promised reconstruction funds (well into the current crisis, after this fact became a scandal, it promised to soon release a tenth of the money). Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Finland and the Caribbean Development Bank have also been shown to be liars. (Associated Press, 11 November 2010) But as Haitians point out, there's no hesitancy to spend 51 million dollars a month to pay for the 12,000 UN soldiers and police.
Appeals for emergency aid have gone all but totally unheeded as the disease has spread from the Artibonite River basin to all of the country's regions and deaths and the need for treatment, supplies and facilities is rapidly mounting. The countries sending troops have only bothered to send five or six million of the 210 million dollars UN medical people say is immediately necessary. It is certain that the worst is yet to come. A 21 November press release from Doctors without Borders pointed to the stark contradiction between the "huge presence of international groups" and the "inadequate" response to the emergency: "We have been trying to fight a fire with a glass of water."
It is literally water that is being given out by the glassful when a fire hose is needed. If people are promptly given enough clean drinking water with salts and sugar in it, very few, if any, will die. Haitians have already seen cholera take away almost 1,500 of their loved ones for no reason that could every be justified.
The director of the Pan-American Health Organisation pointed out that it may never be possible to pinpoint the source of the infection, and anyway, that is a secondary question. "You have cases of cholera showing up in countries around the world every year, including here in the United States. Some are acquired, some are imported. What is important is that the disease does not spread if there are adequate health public conditions."
The simple lack of disinfectant and pipes to carry clean water in and sewage out is enough to explain the cholera epidemic. Standing between the people who ache to work and save lives and the laying of those pipes and other infrastructure is a capitalist profit system and an imperialist world order where a handful of countries fatten further off the rest of the world.
The U.S. has dominated and bled the country for a century. Now rules it more nakedly than ever, even though its hand sometimes comes out of the sleeve of a UN uniform. Nowhere is this more obvious than in its response to the Haitian health emergency, where its main concern seems to be that the unrest might trouble the presidential and parliamentary elections scheduled for 28 November. The American ambassador has said that the U.S. can "work with" any of the 19 presidential candidates. Banned from the elections is the party of someone the U.S. decided it couldn't "work with", former President Aristide whom the U.S. had kidnapped and shipped off to Africa. Haitians expect that the UN forces organizing and supervising these elections will act according to the same standards they have maintained so far. In the last two elections only about ten percent of potential voters saw any point in casting ballots.
One of the first priorities of the "international community" after the earthquake was to rebuild the main prison in the capital, which now houses 2,000 inmates (few have ever seen a judge). So far about 13 inmates have already died of cholera and all of the rest may be in danger. The situation has been even more horrendous at the prison in the Artibonite region where the epidemic first broke out. This is symbolic of the whole country, with the UN troops as the guards trying to maintain order and the people desperate to break free of that same world order.
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