How the U.N. caused Haiti's Cholera crisis -- and Won't Be Held Responsible [View all]

[dixiegrrrrl]

The organization is functionally above the law -- and victims of Haiti's cholera outbreak aren't the only ones paying the price.

Snip....

As award-winning journalist Jonathan Katz established in a bombshell chapter of his recent book, The Big Truck That Went By,
a base for Nepalese U.N. peacekeepers next to the Artibonite River was the origin of the cholera epidemic that swept through Haiti in October of 2010.
There had been no reported cases of cholera in Haiti for a century; now, the disease is endemic, and it is projected to kill as many as 1,000 people a year until it is eradicated, according to Brian Concannon, director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti and a lawyer representing Haitian claimants against the U.N.
Former president Bill Clinton, the U.N.'s special envoy for Haiti, has admitted that U.N. peacekeepers were responsible for the outbreak.
But Katz, the AP's Haiti correspondent in the years after the country's devastating 2010 earthquake, was at the receiving end of a bungled U.N. cover-up of the epidemic's cause. The World Body actively discouraged and even impeded journalists and public health investigators attempting to trace the causes of the pestilence. The U.N. never admitted responsibility, even as a U.N. commissioned-report left little room for doubt (the entire saga is recounted in Katz's chapter, which should be read in full).

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/02/how-the-un-caused-haitis-cholera-crisis-and-wont-be-held-responsible/273526/