In Haiti, the UN still has to clean up its act - Par Lidia Jean Kott, GlobalPost

Publié par siel sur 24 Août 2016, 09:35am

Catégories : #AYITI ROSE RAKET, #AYITI ACTUALITES

A Haitian with symptoms of cholera is transported in a wheelbarrow in the slums of cite-Soleil in Port-au-Prince on November 19, 2010 (Photo: Eduardo Munoz)

"Once you start lying about something at the beginning, once you start covering up what you’ve done, literally, I mean I watched the soldiers at that base dig up their pipes and literally cover up evidence, once you start doing that, it’s very hard to stop,” he explains. “Because then not only do you have to admit what you did in the first place, you then have to admit also, you’ve been lying about it for all these years."

TRAD :

" A partir du moment où vous avez commencé à mentir, que vous vous êtes mis à dissimuler vos actions, et c'est réellement ce qui s'est passé, je veux dire que j'ai observé les soldats de cette base, enfouir leurs tuyeaux de canalisation et littéralement cacher les faits; quand vous commencez par agir ainsi, il est extrêmement difficile de s'arrêter", a expliqué Jonathan M. Katz . "Parce que, non seulement vous devriez admettre la réalité de ce que vous avez fait dès le début, mais de plus vous vous retrouveriez dans l'obligation d'avouer également que vous avez menti pendant toutes ces années."

Last week, the United Nations acknowledged some responsibility for the cholera epidemic in Haiti that broke out six years ago, killing more than 9,000 people.

But the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that despite this admission the UN cannot be sued in U.S. courts. The victims and the families of the victims have 90 days to decide whether they would like to appeal the case up to the Supreme Court, and journalist Jonathan M. Katz says that may happen.

Katz, a longtime reporter on Haiti, says cholera wasn't reported in Haiti until UN peacekeepers from Nepal arrived. (Nepal had an active cholera epidemic at the time.)

These peacekeepers stayed at a UN base “that had terrible sanitation for years,” says Katz. “And people had known about that for years.”

He says that human waste from that base entered the drinking water of the surrounding Haitian population. And after that, says Katz, cholera spread like wildfire.

But the UN had been steadfastly denying this since the first case of cholera in Haiti was reported, in fall 2010. That, says Katz, is part of the problem.

"Once you start lying about something at the beginning, once you start covering up what you’ve done, literally, I mean I watched the soldiers at that base dig up their pipes and literally cover up evidence, once you start doing that, it’s very hard to stop,” he explains. “Because then not only do you have to admit what you did in the first place, you then have t

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In Haiti, the UN still has to clean up its act - Par Lidia Jean Kott, GlobalPost

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