By Ezili Dantò
- “Generals, officers, soldiers: differing from him by whom I was preceded, the ex-general Toussaint L”Ouverture, I have been faithful to the promise which I made you when I took up arms against tyranny, and as long as I live I will keep my oath. Never shall a colonist or a European set foot on this territory with the title of master or proprietor. This resolution shall henceforth form the fundamental basis of our Constitution...” – Jean Jacques Dessalines (Janjak Desalin), Haiti’s founding father, Declaration of Independence, January 1, 1804
Bill Clinton – Slick Willy’s – recent and sudden admission that a UN soldier brought cholera to Haiti and the UN’s apparent strategic denial
- :::::::: Bill Clinton admits UN brought cholera to Haiti. Sidesteps UN accountability, blaming the disease on Haiti. Haiti raped again. It went from zero cholera cases to highest cholera rate in the world as the “charitable” foreign NGOs flourish behind guarded high gates. Poverty pimps living off the blood, gore and suffering. Lol, lol, lol — they laugh on. Almost every other week, there’s a report of a UN “peacekeeper” sodomizing Haiti boys. ::::::::
On March 7, 2012 Aljazeera uploaded a video where Al Jazeera’s Kristen Saloomey interviews one of the UN-commissioned scientists from the UN independent panel who investigated the source of the cholera outbreak. Their report was issued May 5, 2011. But one of the authors, Danielle Lantagne of the UN panel of experts, told Aljazeera that new information has since come to light. Lantagne said, “based on the summation of the circumstantial and scientific evidence, the most likely scenario is that someone associated with the UN-MINUSTAH facility was the person responsible.“
Also, on March 7, 2012, via twitter, independent journalist, Ansel Herz, reported that United Nations Special Envoy to Haiti, former U.S. President Bill Clinton, acknowledged the role U.N. peacekeepers played in importing the deadly outbreak of cholera to Haiti. Anzel Herz caught the Clinton admission on tape. Local Haiti journalists and radio was also abuzz with the news.
Clinton was asked after a hospital tour in Haiti if he agreed with a statement by U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., Susan Rice, about holding accountable those who brought cholera to Haiti
Citing Herz’s reporting, ABC news wrote that Bill Clinton said, “I don’t know that the person who introduced cholera in Haiti, the U.N. peacekeeper, or [U.N.] soldier from South Asia, was aware that he was carrying the virus”¦ it was the proximate cause of cholera. That is, he was carrying the cholera strain. It came from his waste stream into the waterways of Haiti, into the bodies of Haitians.”
UN Imported Cholera in Mirebalais: The hard reality of ill and discombobulated adults reduced to infancy
Ezili Dantò visiting cholera patients. Mirebalais, Haiti. August 11, 2011. Photo credits: Jean Ristil Jean Baptise, HLLN
The indignity of the illness is almost, if not more horrible, than the physical pain. Family members do not get their love ones’ bodies back from the morgue. The dead are buried in mass graves in special plastic cholera body bags. USAID ordered 200,000 body bags at the beginning of the outbreak, spending more monies with US firms providing these death bags than in providing purified clean drinking water or guaranteeing the UN troops disease carriers. (More photos on HLLN delegation visit.)
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Shifting blame off the UN, Clinton went on to say that, “what really caused it is that you don’t have a sanitation system, you don’t have a comprehensive water system”¦”
The ABC article, quotes U.N. spokesperson Kieran Dwyer sidestepping from the Clinton admission saying that “President Clinton”¦ emphasized the importance of focusing on improving Haiti’s sanitation system and the fact that the United Nations and others are working hard to do this.”
Since these reports surfaced certain foreign pundits, have jumped to proclaim essentially that progress is being made toward the Haiti cholera victim getting justice, applauding Bill Clinton for his admissions, not inquiring about the “new information” referred to by Danielle Lantagne of the UN panel of experts, or relied upon by Clinton. When and how did it become available? Doesn”t the Haitian public have a right to all the facts about this contagious disease infecting over 5% of the Haitian population?
It’s like watching an accident happen in slow motion.
Like when the earthquake happened and battle-worn Haitians knew the US-UN and their “charitable” industry would take the opportunity to keep the billions collected, let the poor die, while clearing the land the slave-making Western countries been coveting for centuries in Haiti (for adding more dependency, more foreign hotels, resorts, one or two hospitals and schools and such, not accountable to the island people of Haiti). The earthquake is an opportunity, like the imported UN-cholera to pass through tyrannical US privatization policies and profit-over-people cruelties beyond imagination that they’ve been unable to get through for decades since the first US occupation of Haiti (1915 to 1934).
The grasping institutions, left after the 19-year US first occupation to carry through neocolonialism in Haiti finally broke with demobilization of the Haitian army and popular election of Jean Bertrand Aristide in 1990.
A US-supported coup d’etat under Bush the father, took out Aristide months later. Former President Bill Clinton returned Aristide in 1994 to further stop the Lavalas popular movement, stop the flow of refugees, and most importantly to help re-image the Duvalierist thugs, thieves, local repugnant Oligarchs, suited tonton macoutes and neocolonial opportunists as “civil society” and/or impartial US trained “technocrats.”
On the second anniversary of the earthquake, commenting on the rape of Haiti since Bush-the-son completed his father’s return of the Duvalierist with the 2004 Bush regime change that took down the second term in office of President Aristide and deported him to Africa, Glen Ford from the Black Agenda Report, wrote:
“The horrific squandering of Haitian lives and earthquake relief and aid dollars by the occupying powers over the past two years are direct consequences of previous imperial crimes. ‘Since 2004, Haiti has been methodically stripped of its sovereignty, made into a protectorate of the United Nations,’ which is merely a front for the United States. ‘The earthquake of January 2010 was a natural phenomenon that happened to take place while a rape was in progress.'” (Haiti, Raped by the U.S. Since 2004, and Still Bleeding by Glen Ford, Black Agenda Report.)
Paul Farmer and Bill Clinton as UN Special Envoys to Haiti
With US key stakeholders like Paul Farmer and Bill Clinton as UN Special Envoys to Haiti (coming on board in 2009 shortly after the devastating Gonaives hurricanes and floods), another layer of US authority in Haiti was added that served the multiple purposes of: 1) putting a U.S. public face to the UN mission in Haiti, 2) using the international reputations of Farmer and Clinton to temper widespread Haiti criticism, claims against the UN peacekeepers for the sexual abuse of minors and public executions of unarmed civilians, 4) supplanting the spokesperson role of the Brazilian command in Haiti, as well as 5) hoodwinking the easily fooled, paid-to-lose-US-progressives. Add UN criminal negligence for importing the most virulent cholera bacteria to the Western Hemisphere into Haiti and the destruction of Haitian lives since 2004 has reached genocidal proportions.
As in the days of Western slavery on the Island and the first US occupation, Haitians are again disposable, prohibited the rights and obligations of self-defense and no rights the UN, US and their NGOs and private sectors will respect. White privilege, apartheid and racism reigns. The former slave-holding powers in the West and the UN Security Council that serves them are the biggest purveyors of impunity, violence, poverty, Clorox hunger, disease, human rights abuses, dictatorship, drug trafficking, human trafficking and apartheid in Haiti.
In just one year-and-a-half, more Haitians have been infected (526,000) with the deadly foreign bio-germ than were killed (30,000 to 100,000) under the combined thirty-year rule of Papa and Baby Doc Duvalier (1957 to 1986).
The largest political party has been excluded from the polls since the 2004 US regime change in Haiti. (Haiti, Raped by the U.S. Since 2004, and Still Bleeding.)
But hey, it’s like that old Kreyòl saying about Jews – se lan jwèt ou batize yon Jwif – it’s only in jest you’ll manage to convert a Jew. That’s dark Kreyòl humor about how hard it is to convert a Jew to Christianity – one has to make it a game, fool the person so that submersion in the waters of Christianity happens before the person really knows what’s going on. Meaning, in this context, Haitians would never so easily or consciously allow what’s happening today in Haiti, if it wasn’t hidden behind the abominable gleeful music of Michel (or is it Michael?) Martelly’s porn presidency and UN/Bill Clinton/Paul Farmer’s slick false international benevolence chords, strummed heavily in donor aid dollars, mixed with the heady cocktail of Washington’s approval.
Obama’s Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, the OAS and even CARICOM, decreed the court jester, Michel Martelly as Haiti’s true president. Lawlessness under an election facade, band music, celebrity adrenaline – no veil needed. The US Ambassador recently decreed Michel Martelly is Haitian to stop a Parliamentary commission investigating strong evidence of his alleged American citizenship.
“Li se Ayisyen, li pa Meriken” said the US Ambassador Merten, despite eyewitnesses testifying to seeing Martelly in the US passport line upon landing at the Haitian airport. Of course, one wonders where the Haiti electoral commission charged with vetting candidates was when Martelly was a running for office and why these Senators didn’t object then?
Then again, nothing has been Constitutional in Haiti since the US-UN occupation began in 2004.
This passport fury is mostly theater. Distracting from the pillage of Haiti oil, natural resources, wealth and lands that goes on unabated, the billions in donor dollars to international NGOs for Haiti relief and recovery, unaccounted for.
Guns rule behind Santa Clinton’s white hairs and skinny Paul Farmers’ all pervasive praying mantis NGOs. Haiti swarmed and stung to death, again and again. It’s the NGO republic of the world. Haiti’s reality is what they and their USAID NGOs say it is. Indigenous Haitians who refuse to be pimped-out by the right or left wing missionaries from abroad are simply stepped over, co-opted, marginalized or destroyed.
Meanwhile, distasteful Haitian men and ridiculous Haiti women laugh and party at the palace with bad-boy Sean Penn, raunchy socialite Kim Kardashian or on luxurious cruise ships at carnival in Au Cayes. More than 500,000 earthquake victims remain homeless, the national palace still, tilting over, left in disrepair. Garbage mix with earthquake rubble on the Port au Prince streets, Clorox hunger ravages empty stomachs, the rainy season overflow rivers contaminated with UN cholera, blows tents and tart shelters into mud, people still drinking UN feces-laced river and ground water, dying, dying.
Haiti went from having zero cholera cases to the highest cholera rate in the world as the “charitable” foreign NGOs flourish behind guarded high gates. Poverty pimps living off the blood, gore and suffering. Lol, lol, lol – they laugh on. Practically every other week, there’s an international report of UN peacekeepers molesting and raping Haiti boys.
More notably, there’s no Haiti Parliamentary commission outraged and investigating, attempting to prioritize or protect Haiti’s most valuable treasure – its women and children.
This wrenching travesty, crushing anguish and horrific darkness visited upon a defenseless and humble Haiti peasantry and abandoned city residents with no antibodies to combat such demonic imported and local carnage is led forth behind two UN-US spokesmen and their reputed worldwide “good works.”
Truth, in a time of universal deceit
When Haitians give the coming retribution, I’d like to be alive when that justice day arrives.
To paraphrase George Orwell, in this time before justice comes, in this time when Haitians like me with passports but little institutional power and no financial support, in this “time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
The truth is that in this most difficult of Avatar times for Haiti, a celebrated Harvard doctor (the ultimate Jake Sully of our times) and a Yale lawyer known in his US administration for authoring “plausible deniability” – like “I did not sleep with that woman” helped to bring back US Duvalierist agents to power, helped to cover the pillage of Haiti’s natural resources irrespective of environmental harms behind UN/international guns, continues his Arkansas cronies’ greed with unfair trades. Tossed in a bio-germ that’s killing in genocidal waves in Haiti, all, off course, under a Barack Obama and UN veil.
These insects invading Haiti are reprobates, racist and narcissistic, analogous to the rich and high-born serial killers conducting their depravity at private clubs – gated compounds left alone by police because of the pathology of power, respect for old money and Ivy League reputations.
Their shameless reign is called Western civilization, hope for Haiti and the ultimate in technology-transfer and US democracy when its nothing if not high classed criminals disemboweling their defenseless preys in Haiti with everyone’s eyes wide open. Refusing to see. (Avatar Haiti part 2; Did Harvard scientists cover-up UN source of Haiti cholera? and Going Shopping in Haiti.)
US and Bill Clinton’s credibility
After the news about Clinton’s admission that a UN soldiers was responsible for bringing cholera to Haiti appeared, a woman with good conscience, wrote on my Facebook page:
“Why is Clinton’s admission news when Cuban medical services in Haiti made this same determination months ago?”
I add, the Clinton admission popped up right after the UN Security Council visited Haiti and notably after Ambassador Susan Rice, the U.S. Permanent Representative to the UN, made a similar statement, sort of foreshadowing Clinton’s admission.
What’s going on? What non-public information is Clinton relying on, that’s not in the UN investigative report, which now identifies the particular “person who introduced cholera in Haiti, the U.N. peacekeeper, or [U.N.] soldier from South Asia was carrying the cholera strain. It came from his waste stream into the waterways of Haiti, into the bodies of Haitians?”
Recall that Bill Clinton is a Rhode scholar, a Yale graduate, a former US president and a member of Mensa. Nothing he does is not thoroughly thought-out with multiple contingencies foreseen and planned for. Nothing. Expect that there are several escape routes being mapped out and prepared by the wrongdoers in Haiti and it’s definitely not for the benefit of Haiti cholera victims.
The question indeed is why would he, a UN official – the Special UN envoy to Haiti, suddenly, more than a year-and-a-half after the UN cholera outbreak and 10-months after the UN “independent” panel came out with their official findings, go to Haiti and make a seemingly haphazard public statement that it was a UN soldiers who likely brought the deadly cholera bacteria to Haiti, unleashing the outbreak? It’s not like Clinton has to answer a reporter’s questions. He’s managed not to address the UN liability for over a year now.
Just days before his statement, U.S. Permanent Representative to the UN, Susan Rice, called on the UN to take responsibility for the outbreak, urging it to “redouble its efforts to prevent any further incidents of this kind and to ensure that those responsible are held accountable.”
Those who are actually applauding either Susan Rice or Bill Clinton recent statements willingly fail to factor in the obvious fact that this UN occupation is a cover for the illegal US occupation of Haiti.
Said pundits’ credulity willingly help delay Haiti’s recovery of its sovereignty and willingly ignore the fact that nothing the UN does is not first approved by the US. That’s a period, no comma.
As Susan Rice herself said in an official statement before the World Affairs Council of Oregon,”(t)he truth is: the UN Security Council can”t even issue a press release without America’s blessing.”
Need I say more? OK, perhaps the entire Susan Rice statement is worth quoting. Susan Rice, the U.S. Permanent Representativeto the United Nations, stated, inter alia, that:
“Some Americans believe the UN infringes on American sovereignty. Frankly, I am baffled by this concern. The fact is: the UN can”t tax us. It can”t override U.S. law. The UN can”t order our soldiers into battle. It can”t take away our Second Amendment rights. The UN can”t impose social norms on us. And it doesn”t begin to have any much-hyped fleet of secret black helicopters. The truth is: the UN Security Council can”t even issue a press release without America’s blessing. The UN depends entirely on its member states, not the other way around. When the UN stumbles, it’s usually because its members stumble”because big powers duck tough issues in the Security Council or spoilers grandstand in the General Assembly. As one of my predecessors, the late Richard Holbrooke, was fond of saying, “Blaming the UN when things go wrong is like blaming Madison Square Garden when the Knicks play badly.”” –Remarks by Ambassador Susan E. Rice, U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, at the World Affairs Council of Oregon, Portland, Oregon, February 11, 2011.
Self-styled foreign experts or even native Haitians who applaud Clinton’s “admission” are hurting effective recovery. They willingly ignore there’s mostly no benevolence, no unselfish motives in US governmental actions towards the poor Haiti majority. None. Period, no comma.
“The United States has flexed every superpower muscle to prolong Haiti’s agony.”
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In Haiti today we have the internal fight between the Haiti robbers of the peoples’ democracy – the lawless Martelly/Duvalier click, currently ruling solo, without Bill Clinton’s chosen Haiti Prime Minister – Gary Conille, who resigned. The Martelly newcomers are pushing to wrestle more trickle down pennies away from the equally repugnant internationally-imposed, Washington/UN-US Haiti technocrats. This tussle is evidenced most publicly with the issue raging in Parliament about the legitimacy of the Martelly presidency – if he is in fact a US or an Italian citizen. More particularly the question seemed centered on whether Michel Martelly ever used a US passport. Dual citizenship is not recognize in Haiti. (Haiti president denies dual citizenship.)
While the US plays its power game at the UN – through the Bill Clinton and Susan Rice statements on cholera and accountability – nowhere in any of these tussles between thieves of Haiti’s democracy, sovereignty and dignity are the best interests of the Haitian people or simple justice a factor.
Bill Clinton isn’t some hero in Haiti, nor is experimental-vaccine-pusher, Paul Farmer. (See, Paul Farmer, a total sell-out: Uses Haiti to sell Ineffective Cholera Vaccines.)
Bill Clinton is the UN envoy to Haiti, the Obama-appointed co-chair of the US earthquake relief fund, the effective head of the Haiti Reconstruction Commission at the UN in charge of donor country funds and how to use the monies for Haiti reconstruction. He is not separate from the UN or US officials running Haiti. No Associated Press or other embedded media spin will successfully separate Clinton from the officials responsible for the UN-MINUSTAH presence in Haiti no matter how many times they lead with titles such as, “Clinton Urges Officials to Stem Cholera in Haiti.”
Over 7,000 Haitians have been killed with cholera since October 2010. Where was Susan Rice and her Obama/Clinton State Department as the peasants’ meager harvest was destroyed by the cholera outbreak?
UN Ambassador Susan Rice, like Bill Clinton are well versed in the US role in causing famine in Haiti.
Was the US – “a big power”, as she says – “ducking the tough issues” of the US regime change purveyors’ responsibility for bringing in the UN soldiers that brought cholera to Haiti?
Did Rice ask USAID to stop dumping Monsanto hybrid super seeds on Haiti’s farmers, stop unfair trade, provide some long term help for Haiti’s domestic agriculture? Are Rice, Farmer, Hillary and Bill Clinton or Obama urging repeal of the Bumper Amendment or a stop to tied-aid in Haiti. Is this thinking even on the table at the UN Security Council led by the US via Ambassador Susan Rice or at USAID led by Bill Clinton’s wife? (See, The U.S. is known for its policy of returning development assistance money back to itself.)
Why is the US distancing itself from its UN mission responsibilities in Haiti?
Wasn’t it Colin Powell, Condi Rice and the George W. Bush US administration that helped bring a Chapter VII, UN peace enforcement mission to Haiti in 2004? Then finagled to have a career UN employee living in Florida, USA – Gerarld Latortue – sign for the government of Haiti the Status of Force Agreement (SOFA) authorizing the UN-MINUSTAH mission and handing it sweeping, across-the-board immunity for all wrongdoing in Haiti? Was any of this lawful?
Why is there a UN Chapter 7 peace enforcement mission in Haiti for 8 years – a country not at war, without a peace agreement to enforce and with less violence than most countries in the Western Hemisphere? (See the UN’s own Global Study on Homicide at page 93. )
Shouldn’t both Susan Rice and Bill Clinton’s recent Haiti statements – seemingly pointing to the UN and urging the UN to take responsibility for bringing cholera to Haiti – also be subject to Rice’s insights as expressed before the World Affairs Council of Oregon. That is, the US, the controlling “big power authority” over the UN is ultimately responsible for the Haiti’s consequences of the UN mission. No? Why not? Didn’t Ambassador Rice say that “(b)laming the UN when things go wrong is like blaming Madison Square Garden when the Knicks play badly.”
So why did they make these statements? Who are they trying to confuse, set-up or cater to? The paid-to-lose-Haiti-Jake-Sully-progressives perhaps and embedded corporate media? Only they seem to believe the UN, – that is, the US government which in fact runs the UN Haiti mission- is capable of a modicum of conscience in Black Haiti without massive public outrage and/or a US federal court order as was the case for Blacks in America struggling against Jim crow apartheid in the 1960s.
Why did Clinton suddenly say the a UN soldier brought cholera to Haiti and caused the outbreak but Haiti lacked infrastructure anyways so cholera was predictable? Before then, Clinton had left it to Paul Farmer, his deputy, to harangue on and on about “cholera was waiting to happen” to Haiti. (Paul Farmer relieves himself on Haiti’s dying cholera victims; Paul Farmer, a total sell-out: Uses Haiti to sell Ineffective Cholera Vaccines; Paul Farmer is not a God but the face of the UN/USAID/World Bank; A message to Paul Farmer, the Senate, Dobbins & Francois.)
It requires an evil mind to truly absorb what the immoral and malevolent creatures auctioning Haiti and feeding off the blood of others would find logical and morally conceivable. Peasant Haitians well versed in beating back the elite’s rabid rage and with a firm knowledge of “Kandyo, the malfini and the mongoose,” fear there are probably more sinister possibilities but here are a few to think about.
Maybe Bill Clinton is admitting UN liability the better to sell his cholera insurance to Haiti impoverished market women? Or, most likely Bill Clinton is garnering some plausible deniability, or some shadow of impartiality for when a real Haiti law suits names him, a high ranking UN official and another layer of US authority after US regime change, as a defendant in the cholera case. After all, I choose to believe there is some truth to Rice’s observation that the UN can”t override U.S. law. (Haiti, Cholera and the United Nations: Negligence and the Rule of Law.)
Or, is this a slick way to lessen or perhaps try to discount the acknowledged UN unsanitary conditions at the Mirebalais camp. Push the blame off the UN brass by pointing to a single Nepalese soldier infected with cholera who defecated in the river, whose “waste stream(ed) into the waterways of Haiti, into the bodies of Haitians?” – Wouldn’t put it pass them…
Or, maybe Clinton chose to admit UN liability as a set up to continue his worthless strings of world apologies – like the ones he made for lack of action under his administration during the Rwanda genocide, or his empty apology for the US destroying Haiti’s food sovereignty, domestic agriculture while USAID, which is under the authority of his wife at the State Department, pushes forth the same destructive unfair trade policies, still dumping US subsidized goods and even bringing in Monsanto hybrid seeds after the earthquake?
Or, maybe its because his deputy UN envoy, Paul Farmer, racking up on useless cholera vaccines and the paid-to-lose-progressives whose board he’s on are about to sell out, auction off, the Haitian people’s cholera case with some counterproductive UN mea culpa settlement as worthless as former President Bill Clinton’s cumulative admissions? No shocker whatsoever.
The Haiti Reconstruction Commission is known in Washington circles as the “Bill and Hillary fund.” Its collected nearly 2.3 billion dollars, deposited at the World Bank, and presided over pretty much by Bill Clinton without any UN oversight. Normally, UN monies go into the UNDB. But this is strictly a US financial pillaging with the UN as servant to Washington, paying its dues for initially protesting the Iraq war. Swapping, monstrously auctioning off Haiti lives, so Washington will keep the UN a viable organization and their career diplomats in a job. Since 2004, the US has built the largest US embassy in the Western Hemisphere in tiny Haiti.
Poverty pimps masturbating on Black pain
Haiti crisis and suffering is but a bottomless ATM for the narcissistic vampires cashing in on the poverty, imported diseases, manufactured conflicts, blood and sweatshop labor in Haiti. USAID ordered 200,000 body bags at the start of the outbreak in 2010 rather than spend that money on the simple cure – Haiti-run public sanitation infrastructure and clean water. (For example, see Haiti’s Zili Dlo: Free clean water for everyone; the Zili Dlo photo report.)
In 2009 when Clinton first became UN Special Envoy to Haiti, he attended a donors conference in Washington that resulted in pledges of $324 million for Haiti to help the Gonaives hurricane and flood victims. No one knows for sure how that money was spent. We do know the people of Gonaives are still living in mud from the 2008 back-to-back hurricanes.
The “humanitarian” cloak and racist narrative about the white saviors of Haiti, the Jake Sullys come to civilize the incompetent Blacks, allows it. Surprise is willful ignorance.
Larouze fe banda toutan solèy pa leve.
HLLN legal position
It’s our legal position at Ezili’s HLLN that the UN is not a superstate that’s above the law. It cannot admit (as it did in the “independent” panel report) that it brought cholera to Haiti through its Nepalese soldiers; that cholera was spread through its negligent oversight of waste disposal at the Mirebalais barracks, but then say it’s not responsible for the injuries because Haiti’s water was polluted already.
As I’ve written elsewhere that’s like saying “I shot the policeman but I’m not responsible for his death. He only died because he wasn’t wearing a bullet-proof vest.” One does not need a law degree to see the ridiculousness of this UN defense repeated by Mensa member, Bill Clinton recently, and Paul Farmer and the UN Special Representative for Ban Ki Moon since the beginning of the outbreak.
As Ezili’s HLLN has said from the beginning, this is a simple tort case. The tort involve is a wrong that violates international law and treaties. The wrongdoing of the UN in Haiti is a wrong of mutual concern to all the nations of the world. The defined, universal and international prohibition against the spread of a contagious disease are expressed in international accords. The UN failed to adhere to their own declarations on human rights. The UN must take Haiti infrastructure as it found it and not poison it. Haitians have the right to be free from a contagious disease imported on the Island by UN soldiers and spread through their multiple negligent sanitary practices and failures to properly dispose contaminated human waste. Period, no comma.
Haiti’s people did not have a single case of cholera before the UN negligence, if ever. The UN reps are perfectly aware that it was not Haiti pollution – an indigenous Haiti bacteria – that caused the cholera outbreak, but a UN South Asian pollutant.
A whole genome study shows the Nepal cholera strain is the exact strain in Haiti. UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, UN Deputy envoy Paul Farmer, UN Special Envoy Bill Clinton, the Nepalese Commander, the UN Special Representative all, highly literate people, know better than to blame Haiti for the cholera outbreak. The great authority wielded by these powerful people gave undo credence to their absurd defense, caused irreparably further damage to Haiti, delayed the recovery, is fraudulent concealment, caused more deaths, more Haiti suffering, more Haiti defamation, more Haiti economic loss, more cruel and degrading treatment. (See also, Ezili’s HLLN denounces massacres of Haiti Vodouist, holds UN responsible.)
The wrongdoers, pretending to be civil, have stood idly by watching expulsions, for instance, of Haiti athletes from world competitions; the death of Haiti deportees from cholera, the expulsion of innocent Haitians from Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Bahamas and increase sufferings of Haitians throughout the world because the US/UN allowed the fault for the cholera outbreak to be squarely placed on Haiti. This lack of accountability violates the right to safety, health, life and dignity of Haitians. (HLLN urges President Obama, stop deportations to quake and cholera-ravage Haiti.)
The UN, as the forming organization of the 2005 International Health Convention against the spread of contagious diseases cannot defend itself by essentially claiming it only lowered its standards to that used by the natives MINUSTAH arrived to provide human rights to, nor can it claim organizational immunity for the private action related to its soldiers personal hygiene and health.
The magnitude of this harm requires extraordinary relief not covered by the UN’s six month statutes of limitation for bringing personal injury claims to its non-existent and never formed Claims Commission.
Besides, the clearly partisan UN is not a neutral party for too many reasons to exhaust in further detail in this essay. The Claims Commission provide for in SOFA for personal injury cases, even if it were set up, would be suspect and essentially amount to a denial of adequate legal redress and fair and impartial adjudication for the Haiti cholera victims.
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Human rights lawyer, Ezili Dantò, of the Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network, leaves the Richard C. Lee United States Courthouse in downtown New Haven, Conn. during a break in the sentencing hearing for Douglas Perlitz on Tuesday December 21, 2010. Photo: Christian Abraham / Connecticut Post
I was in Federal District Court in New Haven, advocating for the abused Haiti children in December 2010, when Judge Arterton sentencing US pedophile and Haiti charity worker, Douglas Perlitz to nearly twenty years prison and ten years probation, said:
“If one digs a well to supply water to those who have never had water, and then that person poisons the water, was building that well a good deed?” — (Judge Arterton statement at the sentencing of Haiti charity worker Douglas Perlitz)
Retribution, recovery and justice would find a beginning for Haitians if and when Haiti’s cholera case against US-UN and their high ranking reps and special envoys is successfully brought before a Federal US District Court judge like a US Judge Arterton. It’s possible.
| Ezili Dantò Jazzoetry – Ayiti:Tankou Isit/So Much like here ******************************************************* The meaning of charitable giving was long ago personified by Haiti’s Pierre Toussaint. Farmer, Clinton, USAID’s NGO executives, none can top the example of Haiti’s icon of benevolence and selflessness, not possible. Pierre Toussaint was born into Western enslavement in Haiti. Pierre Toussaint, the most venerated Black Catholic in the world was a Haitian who helped found the first orphanage in New York city for homeless boys, back when Black folks were still enslaved in the United States. At the height of slavery in the US, Pierre Toussaint used his own monies to take care of his silly widowed “master.” He was a philanthropist who EARNED, through his own labor, the money he did his charitable works with. He was piety incarnate. He was humble, loving, patient, kind, generous, self-sacrificing. He lived the Gospel of Christ. (Justice for Haiti prevailed: Perlitz going away for a long time.) |
 Human rights lawyer, writer and performance poet, Ezili Dantò, President of the Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network, talks to the media. Sharing the real meaning of giving as personified in the works of Haiti famous philanthropist, Catholic charitable works icon, the venerable Pierre Toussaint. Ezili Dantò explains how US charity worker Doug Perlitz named his school after the saintly Pierre Toussaint – but like many others in the NGO industry in Haiti, failed to honor the importance of existing and historic Haiti examples of courage, honor and the good Samaritan. Photo taken while outside the Richard C. Lee United States Courthouse in downtown New Haven, Conn. during a recess in the sentencing hearing for Perlitz on December 21, 2010. Photo Credit: Christian Abraham / Connecticut Post. |
I would not wish these writings to be the only chance we get to state the Haiti case on behalf of the cholera victims.
It’s like watching an accident happen in slow motion.
Kindly take the road less traveled. Help Ezili’s HLLN, a Haiti-led, Haiti-capacity building organizations – the very first to publicly advocate for the cholera victims and push for recognition of UN culpability. Help us bring the Haiti cholera case to court to give voice to the voiceless and make a real, lasting and important difference.
We cannot get this done without support from conscious folks around the world, who understand this simple statement, made by an indigenous group in Australia:
“If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” — Lily Watson
If you’d like to help with our clean water project and with HLLN’s filings against the UN in Federal District Court in New York, please write us at erzilidanto@yahoo.
Volunteer or donate to support Ezili Dantò/HLLN work : standing on truth living without fear.
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Haitians broke their own chains in combat. Our liberty wasn’t a charitable gift from the white settlers. Free Haitians – Ayisyen – still live. Rebels for liberty. Living in a hostile New World Mediterranean. For centuries, attacked and invaded from one generation to the next. Forced to battle for our independence over and over again. Proudly not becoming what the Ancestors’ fought against.
Throughout the centuries, evil often found a way to survive. (See petition demanding France pay back the $22 billion Independence Debt.)
Don’t permit the wrongdoers, not this time, to re-image or project responsibility for their foul and filth onto the Haiti cholera victims.
Ezili Dantò
Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network (HLLN)
March, 2012
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BACKGROUND INFORMATION
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1 Year in Jail for UN Rapists of 14-Year Old, Ban Has Nothing to Say
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Dady Chery: Did Harvard scientists cover-up UN source of Haiti cholera?
““The only reason it took so long to discover that Haiti’s cholera came from Nepal is because scientists had until now not bothered to compare the cholera from Haiti to cholera from Nepal.”
“Without exaggerating, one might say, for example, that the cholera study by Harvard was analogous to using the most sensitive instruments and best-trained scientists to test for Fukushima radiation everywhere in the globe except Japan, reporting that the meltdowns had probably happened somewhere in Asia, and then proposing that a commission from the nuclear-power companies finish the investigation.”
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Bill Clinton, UN Envoy, Admits Peacekeepers as Source of Haiti Cholera
The United Nations Special Envoy for Haiti, former U.S. President Bill Clinton, offered the strongest statements to date acknowledging the role U.N. peacekeepers are believed to have played in the deadly outbreak of cholera in quake-ravaged Haiti.
During a tour of a hospital there this week, Clinton was pressed on the U.N.’s role in an outbreak that has killed more than 7,000 Haitians — a politically-charged topic for more than a year now, with the U.N. repeatedly refusing to accept responsibility for the outbreak despite mounting scientific evidence that international peacekeepers were the most likely culprits.
“I don’t know that the person who introduced cholera in Haiti, the U.N. peacekeeper, or [U.N.] soldier from South Asia, was aware that he was carrying the virus,” Clinton said, adding that “it was the proximate cause of cholera. That is, he was carrying the cholera strain. It came from his waste stream into the waterways of Haiti, into the bodies of Haitians.”
Clinton went on to say that he believes what “really caused” the outbreak was the country’s dismal sanitary conditions. “Unless we know that he knew or that they knew, the people that sent him, that he was carrying that virus and therefore that he could cause the amount of death and misery and sickness, I think it’s better to focus on fixing it.”
Clinton’s comments came in response to a question from Ansel Herz, a freelance journalist working on behalf of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
In a statement to ABC News, U.N. spokesperson Kieran Dwyer said, “In relation to former President Clinton’s reported remarks to the press this week in Haiti, we note that he emphasized the importance of focusing on improving Haiti’s sanitation system and the fact that the United Nations and others are working hard to do this.” Dwyer added that in 2011, over three million people received water supplies, water treatment products, water filtering systems and sanitation materials from United Nations agencies and its humanitarian partners.
In January, ABC News reported on compelling scientific evidence suggesting a United Nations peacekeeper from Nepal carried the virulent strain of cholera to a remote village in October 2010, and dumping of raw sewage from the UN encampment sent the disease into a key water supply for Haitians. In addition to killing 7,000 people, more than 500,000 Haitians have been infected in Haiti.
READ: UN Peacekeepers Caused Cholera Epidemic in Haiti, Report Says
Leading researchers from Harvard Medical School and elsewhere told ABC News that they felt confident they had traced the strain back to Nepal, and that they believe it was carried to Haiti by Nepalese soldiers who came to Haiti to serve as U.N. peacekeepers after the earthquake that ravaged the country on Jan. 12, 2010. Haiti had never seen a case of cholera until the arrival of the peacekeepers, who allegedly failed to maintain sanitary conditions at their base.
“What scares me is that the strain from South Asia has been recognized as more virulent, more capable of causing severe disease, and more transmissible,” said John Mekalanos, who chairs the Department of Microbiology and Immunobiology at Harvard Medical School. “These strains are nasty. So far there has been no secondary outbreak. But Haiti now represents a foothold for a particularly dangerous variety of this deadly disease.”
READ: Scientists Say UN Soldiers Brought Deadly Superbug to Americas
The U.N. had previously repeatedly said there exists no conclusive evidence fingering peacekeepers for the outbreak. The international organization has already faced hostility from Haitians who believe peacekeeping troops have abused local residents without consequence. They now face legal action from relatives of victims who have petitioned the U.N. for restitution. And the cholera charge could further hamper the U.N.’s ability to work effectively there, two years after the country was hobbled by the earthquake.
Over the summer, Assistant Secretary General Anthony Banbury told ABC News that the U.N. sincerely wanted to know if it played a part in the outbreak, but independent efforts to answer that question had not succeeded. He said the disease could have just as easily been carried by a backpacker or civilian aid worker.
Banbury said the U.N., through both its peacekeeping mission and its civilian organizations “are working very hard … to combat the spread of the disease and bring assistance to the people. And that’s what’s important now.”
“The scientists say it can’t be determined for certainty where it came from,” Banbury said. “So we don’t know if it was the U.N. troops or not. That’s the bottom line.”
Mark Weisbrot, Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research called Clinton’s comments an important first step toward accountability.
“President Clinton’s acknowledgement, as a U.N. official, should bring us one step closer to the U.N. taking responsibility for what it has done, and fixing it.” Weisbrot said.
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Clinton Urges Officials to Stem Cholera in Haiti
Former U.S. President Bill Clinton said Wednesday that a U.N. peacekeeper was responsible for bringing cholera to Haiti but may not have known that he was doing so, and efforts need to focus on stemming the outbreak.
Clinton was asked after a hospital tour if he agreed with a statement by U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., Susan Rice, about holding accountable those who brought cholera to Haiti. Studies have suggested that peacekeepers from Nepal likely introduced the disease to Haiti for the first time, months after the January 2010 earthquake.
“First of all, the United Nations has spent a great deal of money in Haiti,” Clinton told reporters. “Secondly, I don’t know that the person who introduced cholera in Haiti, the U.N. peacekeeper, or soldier from South Asia, was aware that he was carrying the virus.”
Clinton added: “It was the proximate cause of cholera. That is, he was carrying the cholera strain. It came from his waste stream into the waterways of Haiti, into the bodies of Haitians.”
But Clinton added that what “really caused” the cholera outbreak was the country’s lack of proper sanitation.
“Unless we know that he knew or that they knew, the people that sent him, that he was carrying that virus and therefore that he could cause the amount of death and misery and sickness, I think it’s better to focus on fixing it,” Clinton said.
Clinton, the U.N. Special Envoy to Haiti, made the remarks after he toured a brand-new public teaching hospital in the Central Plateau that was built by the Boston-based Partners in Health. PIH Co-founder Paul Farmer, a public health expert who serves as Clinton’s deputy at the U.N., hosted Clinton as the two toured the hospital, a fish farm and a smaller hospital to study ways solar energy can power remote facilities.
An international panel appointed by the United Nations produced a report that blamed the outbreak on a “confluence of circumstances” that included bad sanitation.
The cholera outbreak prompted a Haitian law firm and its international partner to file a complaint against the United Nations last year on behalf of the victims, which is under review by the world body’s legal office.
Cholera has killed more than 7,000 people and sickened more than 526,000 others since it was introduced to Haiti in 2010, according to Haitian health officials.
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Bill Clinton acknowledges UN’s role in deadly Haitian cholera outbreak
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As Cholera Season Bears Down On Haiti, Vaccination Program Stalls
by Richard Knox | Source – NPR , March 13, 2012 (See also, The uses of Haiti’s poor children: Guinea pigs for cholera vaccines ; Oral Cholera Vaccines Cannot Control Haiti Cholera: Rebuttal to an Article in Scientific American ; Pioneering Cholera Scientist Gives Thumbs Down to Oral Vaccines Promoted for Haiti .)
John Poole/NPRThousands of doses of cholera vaccine sit in a refrigerated trailer in a United Nations compound in Saint-Marc, Haiti. Vaccination was supposed to begin last week, but bureaucratic problems have delayed the start. April is the beginning of Haiti’s rainy season, which will likely intensify Haiti’s cholera outbreak.
The vaccine — $417,000 worth of it — is stacked high in refrigerated containers to protect it from the Haitian heat.
Hundreds of health workers are trained and ready to give the vaccine. They’re armed with programmed smartphones and tablet computers to keep track of who has been vaccinated and who needs a second dose.
And 100,000 eager Haitians, from the teeming slums of Port-au-Prince to tiny hamlets in Haiti’s rice bowl, have signed up to get the vaccine.
But everything is on hold. A long-planned project to find out whether vaccination is feasible in the midst of an ongoing cholera outbreak in Haiti has been stymied — temporarily, its proponents insist — by the kind of glitch that bedevils many projects in Haiti, large and small.
Vaccination was supposed to begin this week in two carefully selected target populations.
One is in a densely packed slum called Cite de Dieu along Port-au-Prince’s waterfront, where raw sewage snakes its way from countless gutters into a garbage-clogged canal and into the sea.
The other target area is in a rice-growing area bordering the Artibonite River about 50 miles north of the capital. This was the initial epicenter of Haiti’s cholera outbreak in October 2010.
But the campaign was abruptly halted when a Port-au-Prince radio station reported that the impending vaccination effort was actually a “medical experiment on the Haitian people” — a potentially incendiary charge.
The Haitian Ministry of Health scrambled to counter that report, which apparently arose from a mix-up that occurred during last year’s change of government.
The previous government opposed cholera vaccination. It would distract from cholera treatment, officials said, and might spark dangerous resentments because there is only enough cholera vaccine in the world to protect 2 percent of the Haitian population.
But the government of Haiti’s new president, Michel Martelly, supports a cholera-vaccination demonstration project. His health ministry gave the go-ahead in December.
The problem is, the two sponsoring medical groups — Partners in Health and GHESKIO — submitted their proposals last year to the previous government at a time when the World Health Organization hadn’t yet certified the vaccine they were going to use.
That government judged the vaccine to be “experimental” because it lacked WHO’s imprimatur. So it referred the proposals to the National Ethics Committee. There they sat, apparently ignored, until the recent radio report woke everyone up.
The committee has called for revised proposals, which were submitted Monday. It usually requires four weeks to review and decide, but proponents hope that can be accelerated.
The rush is for meteorological reasons. Haiti’s heaviest rains start in April. Those rains send the contaminated Artibonite over its banks and into villages in the low-lying river delta.
The rainy season also floods the low-lying slums of Port-au-Prince, sometimes carrying sewage into people’s crowded homes.
Haiti’s biggest spike of cholera cases and deaths occurred last May.
Since Haiti’s cholera outbreak began in October 2010, it has sickened more than 500,000 people and killed more than 7,000. Before then, there had never been a recorded cholera outbreak in Haiti.
All evidence suggests the disease was introduced accidentally by United Nations peacekeeping forces from Nepal, a cholera-endemic country, when a latrine spilled sewage into a tributary of the Artibonite, 60 miles upstream from the rice-growing villages. President Bill Clinton, now the U.N.’s special envoy to Haiti, acknowledged that was the “proximate cause” of cholera in Haiti during a visit here last week.
Villagers in the Artibonite delta are well aware of the cholera risk, and anxious to get the vaccine.
Last Saturday, Alexi Rochnel pulled out blue vaccination cards for himself, his wife and his children. They live in a rice-growing village that pulls its drinking water from the Artibonite River.
“Lately we have been facing this cholera disease that we didn’t have before, so it’s good to be vaccinated,” Rochnel says. A year ago, during Haiti’s rainy season, his wife fell ill with cholera. “It was very bad,” he says, but she survived with hospital care.
Jonathan Lascher of Partners in Health says the organization is confident the vaccination campaign will go ahead later this month. So are officials at GHESKIO in Port-au-Prince.
If they succeed in showing that cholera vaccination is feasible, the next debate will be whether and how it can be scaled up to a much bigger proportion of the population in time for next year’s rainy season.
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