Will the UN Ever Accept Responsibility for Haiti’s Devastating Cholera Epidemic?

What happens when a humanitarian organization meant to protect people instead causes them grave harm?
Will the UN Ever Accept Responsibility for Haiti’s Devastating Cholera Epidemic?
A boy bathes in a camp for individuals who have lost their homes in the Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake, in Cite Soleil, a historically impoverished area of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on Oct. 31, 2010. Spencer Platt/Getty Images
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What happens when a humanitarian organization meant to protect people instead causes them grave harm? That has long been the question where it comes to the U.N.’s peacekeeping operations. From sexual violence to looting, from deaths caused by drink-driving to property damage, a great many individuals have been harmed by peacekeepers, and the structures to provide protection and remedy range from threadbare to non-existent.

But it’s another thing altogether when the harm done is attributable not to individual peacekeepers, but to U.N. operations in general. Two of the gravest examples of this have occurred in recent years: the Haiti cholera epidemic, and the poisoning of Roma in displaced persons camps in Kosovo.

For years, there have been fights to secure justice for both sets of victims. But while Haiti’s struggle goes on, in the Kosovan case, it looks like a major breakthrough has been made.

Haitians wash clothes in a stream in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on Jan. 8, 2011. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Haitians wash clothes in a stream in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on Jan. 8, 2011. Mario Tama/Getty Images