Years after medical studies linked the 2010 cholera outbreak in Haiti to infected United Nations
peacekeepers, the organization’s auditors found that poor sanitation
practices remained unaddressed not only in its Haitian mission but also
in at least six others in Africa and the Middle East, a review of their
findings shows.
The
findings, in audits conducted by the United Nations Office of Internal
Oversight Services in 2014 and 2015, appear to reflect the
organization’s intent to avoid another public health crisis like
cholera.
But
the findings also provide some insight into how peacekeepers and their
supervisors may have been either unaware of or lax about the need to
enforce rigorous protocols for wastewater, sewage and hazardous waste
disposal at United Nations missions — despite the known risks and the
lessons learned from Haiti, where at least 10,000 people have died from
cholera and hundreds of thousands have been sickened.
The
United Nations acknowledged for the first time this week that it bore
some responsibility for the Haiti disaster, after having repeatedly
presented a public face of ignoring the incriminating evidence and
invoking its diplomatic immunity from legal action. The acknowledgment
came after the organization’s special adviser on the cholera epidemic,
in a confidential report seen by The New York Times, called such a
position morally indefensible.
The audits may illustrate a more systemic weakness of United Nations peacekeepers,
the blue-helmeted soldiers who are supposed to protect the vulnerable
and uphold high moral standards in the 16 missions they operate. They
are not supposed to be public health risks.
The
peacekeeping missions that were audited — in Haiti, the Darfur region
of Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ivory Coast, Lebanon,
Liberia and South Sudan — all practiced varying degrees of
“unsatisfactory” waste management.
“The
results are egregious and show that this is a massive problem across
U.N. missions around the world,” said Beatrice Lindstrom, a lawyer with
the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, a Boston-based
advocacy group that has been pressuring the United Nations for
accountability in the cholera crisis.
The audits, Ms. Lindstrom said, showed a pattern of unsanitary practices “that continued to be a problem, not only in Haiti.”
In
Liberia, for example, auditors of peacekeeping facilities found
untreated sewage in rainwater drains, inadequate plumbing, cracked
septic tanks and inadequately contained “gray water,” or waste from
sinks, bathtubs and washing machines. In Lebanon, they found failures to
maintain septic tanks and remove sludge, and the unacceptable mixing of
hazardous and organic wastes.
In
the Democratic Republic of Congo, they found insufficient septic tanks
and “soak pits,” which are porous chambers that allow wastewater to
slowly leach into the ground. In Darfur, they found partly treated
wastewater had been discharged into open fields and farms. In one
location, the Darfur audit said, “kitchen organic waste was dumped into
open pits exposing them to rodents and bugs and the growth of microbial
pathogens.”
Perhaps
most troubling were the findings in Haiti, which showed that more than
three years after the cholera outbreak, peacekeepers were pouring
inadequately treated sewage into public canals, ignoring laboratory
warnings about fecal contamination, failing to inspect water treatment
plants and septic tanks, and leaving some camps laden with garbage and
overflowing toilets.
Several
studies have traced the cholera outbreak to a contingent of Nepalese
peacekeepers in the Haitian mission whose fecal waste had leaked into a
river adjacent to their base. The bacterial strain of cholera in Haiti,
where the disease had not been seen for a century, was similar to the
strain in Nepal, where a cholera outbreak was underway.
The
audits have not been publicized by the United Nations, although they
are accessible on the Office of Internal Oversight Services’ website by
searching for “waste” on the Internal Audit Reports page.
The audit of the Haiti mission, however, was not accessible for months
after it had been completed, for reasons that remain unclear.
Ms.
Lindstrom and other lawyers for Haitian victims of the cholera
epidemic, who have been trying to sue the United Nations for
compensation, first learned of the Haiti mission audit this month when Fox News
reported it was on the oversight office’s website. But it took a
broader search of the website to find the audits of the other United
Nations missions.
It
is unclear from the audits, which are generally available online 30
days after they are completed, whether the sanitation problems they
enumerate have been addressed.
In
an emailed response on Thursday to requests for comment, the office of
the United Nations Departments of Peacekeeping Operations and Field
Support, which is responsible for the missions, said that all 13 of the
auditors’ “critical recommendations” had been met, as had 14 of their 19
“important recommendations.” It did not specify which problems
remained.
The
office also said that all of the waste management audits in the
missions had been undertaken after the Haiti cholera crisis began.
Similar audits are planned this year and next for the missions in the Central African Republic, Mali and Somalia.
Waste
management specialists who reviewed the audits said they found them
troubling but were not necessarily surprised. They acknowledged the
challenges of minimizing public health risks from poor sanitary
practices in some of the world’s most unstable places.
Daniele Lantagne,
a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Tufts University
who specializes in water treatment, said the audits showed that in some
places like Haiti, peacekeeping missions installed on-site sanitation
facilities but failed to maintain them, contributing to “breaks in the
system that could lead to transmission of disease.”
Ms.
Lantagne, who was a member of a panel of experts commissioned by the
United Nations to study the cholera outbreak, also tempered her
criticism.
“On-site
sanitation is hard. It requires a good system and ongoing maintenance,”
she said. “What you see in these reports is that in some places they
try to do something better, and in some places it’s not a simple problem
to solve.”
Source: The New York Times,
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