Inner City Press: Investigative Reporting from the United Nations

UN Preens on Climate While Dodging on Bringing Cholera to Haiti, Count the Cost

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, January 15 -- The UN promotes itself on some issues while trying to sweep others under the rug. Today the UN in New York hosts a press conference about the "Investors Summit on Climate Change." It features Bloomberg New Energy Finance, UN climate official Christiana Figueres -- and Thomas DiNapoli, Comptroller, New York State.

Swept under the rug, for example, is the UN's responsibility for bringing cholera to Haiti and killing over 8,000 Haitians. On January 13 Inner City Press asked UN spokesperson Martin Nesirky to at least respond to US Rep. John Conyers and 65 other members of Congress urging the UN to take legal responsibility. Nesirky declined, saying the UN's position is the same: the claims (of killed Haitians) are "not receivable." Video here.

So what does a public official like Comptroller DiNapoli think of this? The UN hopes he *doesn't* think, only basks in the UN's more public aura. What does Mayor Bill De Blasio think? Or NYC Comptroller Scott Stringer? Or Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams? We will be having more on this. But for today: the Bloomberg-heavy climate fest with cholera covered-up, and a simultaneous UN genocide event with Rwanda dodged and Sri Lanka covered up, we find dubious.

On the fourth anniversary of the earthquake in Haiti, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon issued a 312-word statement to UN staff there. He began, appropriately, with "grief" - but nowhere in the statement did he mention the word "cholera," much less that the UN is nearly universally viewed as having brought cholera to Haiti, through a deployment of peacekeepers from Nepal coupled with lax UN sanitation practices.

In New York, the UN dodged the claims and questions from Inner City Press about if it has standing claims commissions anywhere -- the answer is no -- and if it even now screens for cholera before deployment -- the answer is still no. Most recently, the UN has refused to accept service of legal papers in the class action lawsuit filed against it. And see below:
When asked inside the UN about bringing cholera to Haiti, spokespeople for UN Peacekeeper have for months been telling the Press "we have nothing more to say," or more recently, "that is not a yet or no question."

So in November 2013 Inner City Press went two blocks from the UN to a panel discussion with UN Peacekeeping and the US State Department, to see if there might be a more candid answer.

The guest was supposed to be UN Peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous, who inside the UN refuses to answer Press questions. (Video here, UK coverage here.) But he was replaced, apparently at the last minute, by his deputy Edmond Mulet, once the head of the UN's mission in Haiti, MINUSTAH.

When Mulet and the US State Department's Victoria Holt were asked about cholera in Haiti, only Mulet answered. (Holt answered another question about zero tolerance for sexual abuse, but said nothing about the US-trained 391st Battalion of the Congolese Army being implicated in 135 rapes in Minova.)

Mulet essentially blamed the cholera death on Haiti itself, noting the "same strain" -- that would be, from Nepal, brought along with the peacekeepers from there by the UN -- spread to the Dominican Republic but didn't kill anyone.

Mulet said it spread to Cuba too, but the government there was more organized. But no follow-up was allowed on the main point: it was the UN peacekeepers' negligent santitation practices that put their fecal material in the river and introduced cholera to Haiti. Have any improvements been made since?

The venue was the Museum of Tolerance; the host was UNA-USA. The mood was how to make the UN attractive to Americans, or really, how to best present the UN to Americans. That's why Mulet's blame-the-Haitians line doesn't work: nearly anyone who hears what happens thinks the UN should apologize, and try to help the families of those killed. And that is something that UNA-USA is going to have to deal with. Watch this site.

Footnote: Mulet did tell some interesting stories, about peacekeepers in Western Sahara having to use powder to fend off snakes; he also said that the first of Ladsous' drones -- he called them UUAV, unarmed -- will fly above Eastern Congo in ten days' time. Watch this site.

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