Cholera ‘Forever Destroyed’ U.N.’s Image in Haiti, Ban Ki-moon Says
“This disaster forever destroyed the United Nations’ reputation in Haiti,” Mr. Ban wrote in the guide. “I am sickened that the country has not fully recovered.”
“Resolved: Uniting Nations in a Divided World,” Mr. Ban’s memoir, was revealed this month by Columbia University Press and devotes a chapter to Haiti and the U.N.’s work in that nation, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest. Freed from the constraints of office, Mr. Ban went additional than he had whereas secretary common in describing what, in his view, had been the issues he confronted with Haiti.
A victims’ compensation fund established by Mr. Ban close to the tip of his time period, financed by voluntary contributions from member states, had less than $20 million as of Sunday, a sliver of the $400 million he had sought. Several diplomats advised Mr. Ban their governments “do not want to pay U.N. debts stemming from our own negligence,” Mr. Ban stated in the guide.
Recalling his personal traumatic go to to Haiti per week after the quake struck in January 2010, with huge elements of Port-au-Prince, the capital, in ruins, together with the presidential palace, Mr. Ban dwelled on what he described as Mr. Préval’s seeming incapacity to manage.
“He had not even sent a message of hope to the Haitian people, and I strongly urged him to do so,” Mr. Ban recalled. “But he seemed so shaken that he didn’t know what to do. In fact, he was terrified. He was panicked.”
Mr. Préval, whose presidency ended in 2011, died in 2017.
Mr. Ban acknowledged that the 8,500 United Nations peacekeepers who had been deployed in Haiti starting in 2004 to regulate felony gangs “were not beloved by the Haitians, who often thought the peacekeepers stirred up violence instead of quelling it.”
The poor notion of the peacekeepers, he stated, worsened after the quake, when Haitians noticed how the peacekeepers weren’t aiding with rescues and repairs. In truth, Mr. Ban stated, the peacekeepers had been “assigned to patrol the increasingly dangerous tent camps for crime and assault, problems that grew as time wore on and many Haitians grew angrier and more frustrated.”
