Subscribe to Workers Vanguard

View archives

	Workers Vanguard No. 1095	9 September 2016

Haiti

UN Admits Causing Cholera Epidemic

UN Troops Out!

Last month the United Nations finally acknowledged what scientists, journalists and Haitians themselves have known from the beginning: the ongoing cholera epidemic was caused by UN troops. Since the disease first appeared in Haiti six years ago following a catastrophic earthquake, it has killed over 10,000 Haitians and infected hundreds of thousands of others. Threatening unspeakable human costs, the infection rate continues to climb. Not included in the UN’s halfhearted admission was the extent of evasion, destruction of evidence and outright lies used by Haiti’s UN overlords to cover up the fact that they spread the scourge.

The UN occupation force in Haiti was initially put in place by the U.S. and other imperialist forces in 2004 following the coup they orchestrated against the bourgeois populist Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Known as the MINUSTAH “stabilization mission,” the role of these troops has always been to put down social protest and enforce repression against the beleaguered and impoverished Haitian masses. UN forces have repeatedly terrorized the vast Cité Soleil slum in Port-au-Prince, including in December 2006 when they massacred scores of residents who were demanding the return of Aristide and the withdrawal of foreign military forces. During the mass hunger riots in 2008, UN troops fired on crowds protesting rising food prices, killing several. We demand: All UN troops out now!

After the 2010 earthquake, MINUSTAH was bolstered by troops from Nepal, a country where cholera was rampant. The so-called “peacekeeping” troops, who were not medically screened, allowed untreated sewage from their camp to flow into a fresh water source, infecting locals en masse. UN officials then obstructed any investigation, prohibiting examination of UN soldiers and sanitation at the camp while falsely claiming that sealed septic tanks were emptied by a contractor. Various accounts from journalists of sewage spills and overflowing latrines going directly into a river used for drinking, bathing and washing were routinely dismissed as spurious. For their part, the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention abetted the UN’s cover-up, claiming that pinpointing the source of the outbreak was “not productive.”

So what caused the UN’s apparent about-face? In April, an internal UN report—commissioned back in 2010—substantiating the unsanitary conditions at the base was leaked to the media. This leak was followed by an August 8 report by a longtime UN advisor stating categorically that the epidemic “would not have broken out” if not for the UN’s role. Soon after, the deputy spokesman for Secretary General Ban Ki-moon issued a tepid confession in an email to the New York Times regarding the UN’s “involvement” in the cholera outbreak, promising a “new set of UN actions” to address the issue. Fat chance. Despite previous promises, the UN has implemented no major water or sanitation projects on the island since the epidemic began.

As though to underscore the cynicism of the whole affair, just a day after the long-awaited acknowledgment, a U.S. federal appeals court blocked a class-action lawsuit filed years ago on behalf of thousands of Haitian cholera victims. By affirming the UN’s immunity from being sued, the decision allows the UN to avoid having to pay $40 billion or more in damages to the families of those whose lives were destroyed by the disease. Defending the UN’s immunity were none other than lawyers from the U.S. Justice Department.

The UN is a den of imperialist thieves and their victims, which Washington routinely uses as a “humanitarian” front for its adventures and occupations abroad. In a 2008 diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks, former U.S. ambassador to Haiti Janet Sanderson called MINUSTAH “an indispensable tool in realizing core USG [U.S. government] policy interests,” namely, suppressing “resurgent populist and anti-market economy political forces.” It was to reinforce this bloody UN occupation force, as well as to prevent an exodus of poor Haitian migrants to the U.S., that Barack Obama sent 20,000 troops to the island in 2010.

Overseeing the White House’s response to the earthquake was Obama’s secretary of state at the time, Hillary Clinton. Under the guise of a “relief effort,” the incursion was designed to perpetuate U.S. imperialist domination over the region. Meanwhile, an interim recovery commission headed by Bill Clinton, then UN special envoy to Haiti, is notorious for having squandered millions of dollars of aid money, leaving Haiti in a shambles. Foreign investors benefited handsomely from the building of luxury hotels, while construction of housing projects for displaced residents was shoddy or simply abandoned.

The Clintons’ long history in Haiti, including via the Clinton Foundation, has earned them the justified wrath of Haitians. Several protests of Haitian expatriates at both the Clinton Foundation and Hillary’s headquarters in New York City—not to mention during this summer’s Democratic Convention—have accused the couple of defrauding the country to the benefit of wealthy donors and the Clintons’ cronies. Haitians remember when, as president in 1994, Bill Clinton deployed thousands of Marines to Haiti to quell growing turmoil. The popular Aristide—who had been ousted in a coup in 1991—was restored on the condition that he agree to a drastic austerity program, privatization of state-owned industry, massive layoffs in the public sector and the virtual abolition of import tariffs. Clinton’s trade policies, which he later flippantly called a “mistake,” devastated Haiti’s rice production and caused its economy to collapse.

Popular hostility to the U.S. and to UN occupying forces on the island has been ever-present in the last several years, no doubt deepened by the UN’s whitewashing of its role in the cholera epidemic. While outbreaks of cholera were prevalent in the 1800s before the invention of modern sanitation systems, the presence of the infectious disease today is yet another marker of the criminality and irrationality of the capitalist order. Cholera is one of the prime examples of diseases of the poor, preventable with basic public health measures like controlling sewage and purifying water. Moreover, even in advanced cases, the infection can be treated in over 99 percent of patients with timely medical attention and simple, cheap rehydration solution—a mixture of sugar, salts and water. But in the hideous backwardness of urban slums and remote villages of the Third World, safe water, waste disposal and medical care are largely out of reach.

A century ago, in a preface to his work Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), Russian revolutionary leader V.I. Lenin described imperialism as “a world system of colonial oppression and of the financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the population of the world by a handful of ‘advanced’ countries.” There is no clearer picture of this than in the poorest country of the Western Hemisphere, where two centuries of looting by the U.S. and France, not to mention repeated American invasions to install and prop up brutal tinpot dictatorships, have left the populace with a crumbling infrastructure and utterly exposed to the ravages of disease.

Haitian workers in the U.S., Canada and elsewhere can serve as a vital bridge linking the struggle for national and social emancipation in Haiti and the rest of the Caribbean with the fight for socialist revolution in the North American imperialist heartland. A workers revolution in the U.S. would extend massive aid programs to rebuild the countries in the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa and elsewhere that the imperialists have plundered and destroyed. Only through overturning the capitalist system and establishing a planned, collectivized economy on a world scale will the basis be laid for dealing with hunger and sickness through overcoming material scarcity.