UN makes first public admission of blame for Haiti cholera outbreak

Human rights group hail statement by international body
about ‘its own involvement’ in crisis which experts say still
has not received proper attention

Ed Pilkington in New York
Thursday 18 August 2016 19.00 BST

Human rights groups working with thousands of victims of cholera in Haiti have reacted with jubilation to the United Nation’s first tacit admission that it was to blame for the devastating outbreak of the disease that has claimed as many as 30,000 lives and infected more than two million people.

For the past six years, the world body has doggedly refused to address the issue of how its own peacekeepers, relocated from Nepal to Haiti in 2010 in the wake of a major earthquake, imported the deadly cholera bacterium with them. Studies have found that the UN troops could have been screened for the illness, and the disaster averted, for as little as $2,000 (then £1,400).

In a statement first reported by the New York Times, the office of the secretary-general of the UN, Ban Ki-moon, said that the organization had decided to step up its efforts to fight back cholera in one of the world’s poorest countries. “Over the past year the UN 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,” said Farhan Haq, Ban’s deputy spokesman.

The reference to the UN’s “involvement in the initial outbreak” was greeted as a breakthrough by groups working with cholera victims. “This is a groundbreaking first step towards justice,” said Beatrice Lindstrom of the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), which is pursuing a class-action lawsuit against the UN to try to force it to accept responsibility for the disaster and to pay compensation.

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