21 Nov The UN and other scary institutions in Haiti

For a colleague’s birthday, three of us went out for a lady’s day. It consisted of relaxing – something we’re not used to doing. In fact, at one point, one of us said, “I feel like i’m moving in slow motion.” I laughed because, in fact, she was. We’re all quite used to running wildly from meeting to meeting to work to sometimes remembering to do things like eat or exercise (not both in the same day, usually).

As soon as we got back in the car, however, talk returned to the land of grad school. Had i looked at the State Department travel warnings for Haiti? Wasn’t i originally going to do my research in the Congo but was told not to because it’s too dangerous? And isn’t it ironic that Haiti now has a stricter travel restrictions than the Congo?

I am worried. Not so much for my safety or for my dissertation research – there will be plenty of material to work with if i don’t get funded or if i can’t get into the country. What concerns me more is the civil unrest – a fully and completely warranted civil unrest, that, with the elections coming up and with so much frustration over how the elections are being handled, especially with the exclusion of Fanmi Lavalas, the most popular political party in Haiti, i am wholly prepared for the possibility of further violence. What ever happened to the Maxine Waters-led US interest in fair elections or the letter presented to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by 45 members of Congress in October? It’s almost impossible to find anything about it using Google News, anymore – almost as if it’s been wiped from the record (is this normal – am i becoming suspicious in a conspiratorial kind of way – or am i really just that poor at doing Google News searches?).

But more importantly, as my birthday colleague pointed out: why didn’t the UN do or say anything about the accusations against the Nepalese peace keeping force or the state of the Nepalese MINUSTAH base? All they had to do was acknowledge the complaints and concerns and the evidence: Nepal had a cholera outbreak in October, and another in September, and then the Nepalese arrived in Haiti in October. An Al Jazeera newscast showed suspicious looking sludge pouring from around the latrines.

The UN’s response to all of this, for a full month, now, has been complete denial. Tests have been run before troops left Nepal and since they’ve arrived in Haiti. The suspicious sludge was from kitchens and showers, and it was simply routed near latrines to run into the river. “It couldn’t have been us!” they cried.

What was wrong with admitting that the evidence was rather telling and that they would investigate it further? It was poor PR on the part of the UN, if not downright rude. No one was looking for an immediate and definite admission of culpability, so much as a simple acknowledgement that they had a responsibility to investigate it thoroughly and openly.

And then, yesterday, this interesting tidbit came through Reuters: UN worries its troops caused cholera:

“If the U.N. had said from the beginning, ‘We’re going to look into this’ … I think that, in fact, would have been the best way in reducing public anger,” said Brian Concannon, director of the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti. “The way to contribute to public anger is to lie.”

Two things to consider:

1. Until last month, there had never been a single case of cholera confirmed
2. It’s easy to blame the victims

I’ll come back to these points in the coming days. In the meantime, I’ve been hard-pressed to understand why Haiti has been treated the way it has for so long…It’s been a desperate and difficult question that Noam Chomsky nearly answers in an email exchange with Joe Emersberger and Jeb Sprague of haitianalysis.com:

Q: A question comes up – even among people who go to talks put on by activists about Haiti. They ask “What is there in Haiti?” “Why does the US (or Canada) care so much about stifling basic reforms?” There aren’t massive oil reserves (or anything like that) in Haiti so they don’t get why rich countries would care to intervene in it at all. What do you think the best answer to that question is?

I’ve written about this a lot. Why was the US so intent on destroying northern Laos, so poor that peasants hardly even knew they were Laos? Or Indochina? Or Guatemala? Or Maurice Bishop in Grenada, the nutmeg capital of the world? The reasons are about the same, and are explained in the internal record. These are “viruses” that might “infect others” with the dangerous idea of pursuing similar paths to independent development. The smaller and weaker they are, the more dangerous they tend to be. If they can do it, why can’t we? Does the Godfather allow a small storekeeper to get away with not paying protection money?