Haiti rioters attack UN troops over cholera outbreak

Anti-UN riots spread to several Haitian cities today as protesters blaming foreign peacekeepers for a deadly outbreak of cholera exchanged gunfire with soldiers.

The protests left at least two people dead. A demonstrator was shot dead by a UN peacekeeper in Quartier Morin, near Haiti’s second-largest city of Cap-Haitien.

Haiti Senate President Kelly Bastien said that a second demonstrator was shot and killed in Cap-Haitien itself.

The 12,000-member UN force said that at least six of its personnel were wounded in protests at Hinche in the central plateau.

The protests apparently began in Cap-Haitien yesterday and within hours had paralysed much of the northern port city.

As the day went on, other protests broke out in surrounding towns and the central plateau.

A police station was burned in Cap-Haitien and rocks thrown at peacekeeping bases. A small protest was also reported in the north-western city of Gonaives, but UN police said it ended peacefully.

The UN Stabilisation Mission in Haiti, or MINUSTAH, dismissed the protests as politically motivated, linking them to the fast-approaching November 28 presidential elections.

The UN’s World Health Organisation said that efforts should focus on controlling the disease, not determining where it came from.

A spokesman said “at some time we will do further investigation but it’s not a priority right now.”

The UN said local rumours that Nepalese troops were to blame for the outbreak was “misinformation.”

The cholera backlash plays upon some Haitians’ long-standing resentment of the 12,000-member UN military mission, which has been the dominant security force in Haiti since 2004. It is also rooted both in fear of a disease previously unknown to Haiti and internationally shared suspicion that the UN base could have been a source of the infection that has now left nearly 1,000 dead.

Cholera had never before been documented in Haiti before it broke out about three weeks ago.

Suspicions quickly surrounded a Nepalese base located on the Artibonite River system, where the outbreak started. The soldiers arrived there in October following outbreaks in their home country and about a week before Haiti’s epidemic was discovered.

Transmitted by faeces, the disease can be all but prevented if people have access to safe drinking water and regularly wash their hands.

President Rene Preval addressed the nation on Sunday to dispel myths and educate people on good sanitation and hygiene.

But sanitary conditions do not exist in much of Haiti, and more than 14,600 people have been hospitalised as the disease has spread across the countryside and to nearly all the country’s major population centres, including the capital, Port-au-Prince.

Doctors Without Borders and other medical aid groups have expressed concern that the outbreak could eventually affect hundreds of thousands of people.

In the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, health officials banned used clothing from being sold in outdoor markets along the shared border as a precautionary measure to stop the disease’s spread.