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On Oct. 4, 2011, Harvard students, as part
of a group of Canadian and U.S. human rights advocates, doctors,
public health experts, and journalists, released an extensively
researched white paper reviewing and evaluating the record of
the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (known by its
French acronym, MINUSTAH) and recommending the withdrawal of the
force from Haiti. Entitled “MINUSTAH: Keeping the peace, or
conspiring against it?”, the report comes at a time of
heightened scrutiny of MINUSTAH due to high profile human rights
abuses and widespread anti-MINUSTAH sentiment in Haiti. The UN
Security Council’s meeting to renew MINUSTAH’s mandate for the
next year is scheduled for Oct. 15, 2011.
The report, published by the HealthRoots Student Organization at the Harvard School of Public
Health, describes the historical and legal underpinnings of
MINUSTAH’s mandate and its political context, while thoroughly
reviewing its human rights record since the 2010 earthquake.
Human rights violations
perpetrated by the UN force include sexual violence, violent
responses to political protests, and the introduction of cholera
into Haiti, followed by the failure to accept responsibility or
offer adequate resources for cholera treatment, prevention, and
compensation to victims’ families.
Beyond these direct abuses,
MINUSTAH has also violated its mandate through failure to
protect the internally displaced from forced evictions and
gender-based violence, poor security coordination and lack of
communication with Haitian groups, and subversion of democratic
processes by failing to respond to significant irregularities
during the recent presidential elections.
Co-author Deepa Panchang noted,
“The white paper project emerged because our Haitian partners
were angry and frustrated with MINUSTAH’s widespread human
rights violations in Haiti, yet these violations were not being
documented in a systematic way and MINUSTAH was not being held
accountable for them. Our goal for the white paper was to
present an accessible and accurate report to influence
decision-making going forward.” Panchang is an alumna of the
Harvard School of Public Health.
The cholera epidemic has
been an entirely manmade and preventable disaster for Haiti,”
added co-author Rishi Rattan of Physicians for Haiti. “Especially
given the role of MINUSTAH in bringing this epidemic to Haiti,
the significant allocation of funding to MINUSTAH while the
cholera response remains underfunded is problematic, to say the
least.”
The white paper sheds light on
current human rights abuses being committed by MINUSTAH and
raises questions of how the UN can continue to justify the
increasingly high human cost of the mission.
“With the continuous stream
of human rights violations attributed to MINUSTAH, if the
international community is serious about helping Haiti they will
decide that respect for Haitian sovereignty and human rights is
incompatible with an extension of the force’s mandate,” said
co-author Kevin Edmonds, a doctoral candidate at the University
of Toronto.
The report is available on the website of the Institute for
Justice and Democracy in Haiti at
www.ijdh.org. |
