Another Peacekeeping Mission for Haiti? Let's Remember the Last One

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

July 19, 2021: The Haitian government has not yet asked the UN Security Council for a new peacekeeping mission. But many are speculating that the request could be forthcoming.

Scores of news articles have noted that the MINUSTAH mission—which was operational in Haiti from June 2004 to October 2017 and cost US$7 billion in Member State funds—was marred by scandal and held in low regard by the Haitian people. The idea of a new peacekeeping mission, wrote a Washington Post columnist in a representative comment, “is decidedly problematic, given that last time UN peacekeepers were stationed in Haiti, they were accused of sexual assaults and they inadvertently created a cholera epidemic that killed thousands of people.”

The Code Blue Campaign is not alone among experts on the UN and its peacekeeping operations who regard the MINUSTAH mission as a miserable failure, less a protection force in alliance with the Haitian people than a foreign intervention marked by callous disregard for the local population. The very concept of UN peacekeeping was forever tarnished by the MINUSTAH debacle. When Haiti needed the international community's assistance, the UN responded with military and civilian personnel who unleashed sexual offenses and a deadly pathogen on the impoverished nation's beleaguered population. 

The Code Blue Campaign advocates for fundamental reforms that would align UN peacekeeping missions with the noble principles set forth in the United Nations’ founding documents. Member States will need to enact far-reaching changes to ensure that the horrors of MINUSTAH will never be repeated, in any peacekeeping mission.

From late 2004 to mid-2007, a ring of at least 134 peacekeepers from Sri Lanka sexually assaulted at least nine Haitian boys and girls, according to a confidential inquiry by the UN conducted in conjunction with the Sri Lankan Army. “The sexual acts described by the nine victims are simply too many to be presented exhaustively,” the UN report said.

No one involved was sent to prison.

In 2011, five peacekeepers from Uruguay, including a commanding officer, gang-raped a Haitian teenage boy and filmed the assault on a cellphone. Uruguayan military courts found them guilty of the relatively minor charge of “private violence.”

Three Pakistanis attached to the U.N.’s police units in Haiti were accused of raping a developmentally disabled 13-year-old boy in the Haitian city of Gonaïves. In 2012, they were brought before a Pakistani court martial, but only one was sentenced—to a single year in prison.

An academic study by Sabine Lee, a history professor at the University of Birmingham, and Susan Bartels, a clinician-scientist at Queen’s University in Ontario, found that MINUSTAH peacekeepers fathered hundreds of children during the 13-year mission.

“Girls as young as 11 were sexually abused and impregnated” by peacekeepers, the study found. Women were “left in misery” to raise the children on their own. “They put a few coins in your hands to drop a baby in you,” one Haitian woman told a researcher.

But sexual exploitation and abuse committed by UN peacekeepers is only a part of the story. In 2010, MINUSTAH peacekeepers introduced cholera into Haiti, resulting in 820,000 cases and nearly 10,000 deaths.

In 2011, a UN-appointed panel concluded that infected sewage from a UN camp in the upper Artibonite River valley was the source of the cholera outbreak. In 2013, the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH) filed a class-action lawsuit against the UN on behalf of five cholera victims, who were seeking redress for themselves and other affected Haitians. The case was dismissed when the US courts ruled that the UN was immune from such legal action.

In his new memoir, former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the cholera outbreak “forever destroyed the United Nations’ reputation in Haiti.”

Mr. Ban should direct some of the blame for the UN’s reputational damage to himself. Instead of accepting responsibility for the UN’s culpability, Mr. Ban, then Secretary-General, outlined a US$400 million proposal to fight cholera and compensate the victims. But at this moment, the total amount raised for the Haiti Cholera Multi-Partner Trust Fund is less than US$22 million.

In 2020, a group of 13 independent UN human rights experts lambasted current Secretary-General António Guterres for his part in ignoring the UN’s pledge to help victims of the cholera outbreak. The UN has “failed to pay any compensation and its subsequent underfunded aid effort has amounted to little more than a spate of symbolic development projects,” they said.

Another peacekeeping mission for Haiti? No, the UN has a moral imperative to undertake another crucial mission first: justice for tens of thousands of MINUSTAH’s victims.

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(UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe)