WHEN UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon invoked diplomatic immunity last week for peacekeepers who unwittingly caused the cholera outbreak that killed nearly 8,000 Haitians, his decision looked cold-hearted. Many in Haiti and in the humanitarian community are indignant that the United Nations will face no consequences for failing to properly test soldiers from Nepal who assisted in earthquake relief efforts in 2010. The incident seems like a sign of arrogance and ineptitude on the UN’s part.
But sympathy for Haitians should not mask the necessity of the secretary-general’s decision. It was right as a legal matter — and as a moral one, too.
Comments
Your take on the overall importance of diplomatic immunity around something like an epidemic makes sense, particularly the point you make about protecting those who are putting their lives on the line for "dangerous situations." However, the UN's presence in Haiti is at best controversial. The country of Haiti has been quite stable for the past several years. The situation that brought the UN to Haiti in the first place in 2004 quickly dissipated, but the UN's presence has remained. The cholera epidemic began because the UN did not properly equip its base in Mirebalais, Haiti with a closed sanitation system that would have prevented the contamination of the Artibonite River with cholera-laced feces in the first place. Similarly, the UN has had little to do with building up Haiti's infrastructure in general, something that the UN is supposedly known for in other countries where peacekeeping forces exist. Finally, as in many other places, several UN troops in Haiti have been implicated in sex trafficking, sexual assault and rape, among other egregious crimes. The UN's failure to take responsibility for its role in the cholera epidemic, its lack of accountability over what good it is actually contributing to Haiti and the diplomatic immunity used to protect UN troops from horrific crimes all add up to a larger question: is the good the UN is doing in Haiti outweighing the bad? You seem to think yes, but you also seem to be quite unfamiliar with the controversies surrounding the UN in Haiti, with both the very real lack of sanitation at the UN base in Mirebalais and the litany of inaction and crimes committed by the UN in a nation so needy and vulnerable.
The Secretary General's decision may be legal, but to call it 'moral' is incomprehensible. The Nepalis negligence was not in their being infected with Cholera, but in their careless disregard for the construction and maintenance of their camp. While the world remains aghast at the massacre of Srebrenica, for which the UN and the Dutch were deemed accountable, it casts a careless eye at a comparable level of death and destruction meted out by a so-called 'peace keeping force' that failed to take precautions for their human waste.
Assertion of immunity is more palatableif coupled with a billion or so $$ as a voluntary PILOP (payment in lieu of prosecution)