The Big Truck That Went By

Worst Logic of the Year, Cholera Division

Nigel Fisher, United Nations Resident & Humanitarian Coordinator, January 2012:

“As you know, more than 6,700* Haitians have succumbed to the cholera epidemic so far and almost 500,000* have been infected. If we can take any encouragement, it is that: National cholera response and alert systems are now in place in a country that had no such infrastructure before the cholera outbreak….”

The reason Haiti had no national cholera response and alert system in place was that there was no cholera. In fact there had never been a laboratory-confirmed case of cholera in Haiti, ever, until it appeared in October 2010, almost certainly introduced by United Nations peacekeepers from Nepal.

Please no one set up a national bubonic plague response system.

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* As of April 2012, the official death toll is 7,091 and case load over 534,000.

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UPDATE 5/13/12: 

Fisher made a more important statement earlier this month in an interview posted by the UN News Centre:

“As humanitarian actors facing cholera, what we are doing is sort of patchwork, band-aid work on a fundamental problem. The fundamental problem is when cholera broke in Haiti there was no experience of it and the conditions were ripe for it to spread quickly.*”

Instead, he called for:

“… a massive investment in everything, from food hygiene to water and sanitation to education. It’s long-term and we are working out the details of that.”

Those comments were cited in an editorial which ran in this morning’s Sunday New York Times, which did something Fisher still will not — put them in context of the direct responsibility Fisher’s own organization has for creating the mess in the first place:

“The United Nations bears heavy responsibility for the outbreak: its own peacekeepers introduced the disease through sewage leaks at one their encampments.”

The Times editorial cites a CDC estimate that putting in adequate water and sanitation systems will cost $800 million to $1 billion. That would exceed the Haitian government’s one-year revenues, but is commensurate with the UN peacekeeping mission’s annual budget.

Stay tuned.

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Fisher quote h/t @HaitiJustice

Clinton’s Statement on the Political Situation in Haiti

Some people are having trouble finding Bill Clinton’s statement calling for the quick ratification of Haiti’s new prime minister, which came hours before the new prime minister was ratified. So I’ve pasted the text below.

The new prime minister, Laurent Lamothe, is an old friend of President Martelly who set aside his business providing telecom services to African governments to join the interim reconstruction panel after the 2011 election. Martelly later put him in his cabinet, then nominated him to replace previous Prime Minister Garry Conille after the latter abruptly resigned in February.

Lamothe’s nomination was held up for months. Then, a few hours after Clinton’s  statement, Lamothe was approved by parliament, and then installed by presidential decree the next day. 

Clinton has a lot of potential roles to play in this story: He was the co-chair of the reconstruction panel (along with the prime minister) that Lamothe joined; and the ex-PM, Conille, had been his former chief of staff at the UN Office of the Special Envoy for Haiti. Whether his call to “establish a functional government within the week” (see below) helped speed the process along, reflected an outcome he knew was coming or was totally coincidental is a matter for debate. Feel free to have it in the comments below.

Here’s the text:

REVISED: Statement by President Bill Clinton on the Current Political Situation in Haiti

May 03, 2012 | New York, NY | Bill Clinton | Statements

I call on the Haitian Parliament and the Martelly administration to expedite the ratification process of the Prime Minister, and establish a functional government within the week.

I believe that the Haitian people deserve better from their leaders. The current political crisis disrupted progress towards a more prosperous Haiti for too long. While I am pleased by much of what has been achieved since President Martelly took office, Haiti’s rebuilding efforts have been delayed far too many times. Haiti must have a government with strong and transparent leadership working alongside a parliament that understands its economic, political and social challenges.

Haiti’s leaders have a responsibility to put the Haitian people first, above political differences and self interests, and to show the world that Haiti is on the right path to ensure democracy, and the rule of law, fight corruption, and restore confidence in the Haitian institutions so that donor funds can flow again and attract new investment. I stand ready to continue to assist President Martelly, Prime Minister Designate Lamothe, the parliament and Haiti’s friends in the international community to achieve this provided Haiti’s leaders act now in the best interests of the Haitian people.

Today in Haiti

So today the president of Haiti was hospitalized in Miami with a pulmonary embolism — a blood clot in the lung. (AP story.)

While he was away, armed paramilitaries who consider themselves the restored Haitian Army stormed parliament to forestall action against them by the police and/or, according to the Miami Herald, demand the quick ratification of Prime Minister-designate Laurent Lamothe.

Also according to the Herald, people with the president’s condition are often advised not to fly on airplanes until they have been stabilized.

Maybe I’ve been spending too much time writing of late, but all that reads like prologue to me.

Cholera: Back to the Source

I took a road trip to the Haitian countryside yesterday to visit my old friends at Annapurna Camp, the U.N. installation of Nepalese soldiers that I’ve reported was the probable source of the country’s horrible (and still ongoing) cholera epidemic. It had been nearly a year and a half since my first visits there in those early days of the outbreak, and as long as I’m here working on the book, I figured it would be good to check in again. Touch base, if you will.

Things there have changed in a major way. First off: It’s not Annapurna Camp anymore. Here’s the gate in 2010:

And now:

You’ll notice that the Nepalese have moved out, and a Uruguayan contingent has moved in. (A funny choice of replacement considering the other recent UN controversy in Haiti, but that aside.) From over the wall I could see that what used to be an expansive lawn near the entrance gate was now filled with more tank-like armored personnel carriers than I could count. This could be because protesters have often targeted the base since rumors and information about the cholera link spread, but I don’t know one way or the other.

Behind the base of course flows the famous river more conclusively identified by a team led by French epidemiologist Renaud Piarroux and the U.N. panel of experts as the source of the cholera epidemic. But that’s changed too. In 2010, the river ran directly behind the base:

Now the part that had been directly abutting the narrow ridge has been moved several meters away by the construction of landfill and some low-level levees. (This happened about a month ago, the people washing clothes in the river said):

Meantime, the narrow ridge where on the morning of October 27, 2010, I ran into a group of U.N. investigators clandestinely taking samples of the sewage leaking from behind the base (at that time and for long after, the U.N. was flatly denying that contamination would have even been a possibility) is now gone. My guess would be that this was done at the same time that the river was moved back, but hard to say.

Across the street, atop a hill abutting another section of river there in the village of Meille, were the dump pits where the U.N.’s hired Haitian contractor used to dump the waste from that and other Nepalese bases. Villagers said that these pits used to overflow, sometimes toward their homes and sometimes toward the river:

The section is now much harder to visit, as it is now surrounded by a long loop of military-grade concertina wire:

Why was this easily accessible when the pits were full of overflowing excrement, but the area is sealed off today? In any case, we were let inside by a villager who still uses the space to graze his goats. He, and the others living down the hill, said that life has improved greatly ever since the dumping stopped. Simply put, the village doesn’t smell like an open sewer anymore.

The good news, in other words, is that the U.N. is keeping a much tidier base in Meille than it did when cholera erupted. Hopefully while they were bulldozing and sealing off the area, they kept some good records about how it used to look. Whether such promised improvements have been made to other U.N. installations in Haiti and around the world remains to be seen.

There was one last change up the road. After leaving the base, I went looking for the home of the first young Haitian man to die in the hospital from cholera. Many of his relatives were still around, but the house was not. Faced with a disease they had never seen before, with fear mounting in the early days of the epidemic, they had burnt that house to the ground.

**

I found out when I got back to Port-au-Prince that the New York Times had just written an extensive tick-tock of cholera and U.N.’s likely role in introducing the epidemic to Haiti. Deborah Sontag’s story fills in some of the gaps in the year and a half since the U.N.-cholera connection was first reported. It’s worth checking out:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/world/americas/haitis-cholera-outraced-the-experts-and-tainted-the-un.html

Under the SOFA

Reuters reports that “two U.N. peacekeepers from Pakistan have been sentenced to a year in prison for raping a 14-year-old Haitian boy.” That wire says, and I have no information otherwise, that this is the first time U.N. soldiers have been tried and sentenced in Haiti.

That doesn’t mean that they were tried in a Haitian court, of course*. That would be, by all accounts, a violation of the Status of Forces Agreement, or SOFA, which grants the foreign soldiers operating in Haiti immunity from local prosecution. 

(*A Pakistani military tribunal came to Haiti, and operated independently of both MINUSTAH and Haitian authority. The BBC reports the now ex-soldiers will serve their sentences back home.)

But does it suggest some wiggle room about where and how U.N. soldiers all over the world — Democratic Republic of Congo, the Balkans, what have you — could be held accountable for their actions?

That big question is unclear. On the one hand, this trial was actually visible to some portion of the Haitian people and press in a way that, say, whatever happened to the battalion expelled to Sri Lanka in 2007 on accusations of paying for sex with minors was not. On the other, it essentially remained an internal Pakistani matter from start to finish, with at least some Haitian press relying on such sources as Sen. Youri Latortue for information about what was going on.

The more immediate question of course is what this might mean for that other famous case, when total diplomatic immunity met a total lack of bacteriological immunity in the Artibonite. I couldn’t begin to guess, but I doubt I’m the only one wondering. Some far-flung but key newspapers have picked up this story as well.

(h/t on story to @HaitiMemory)