MINUSTAH In Haiti: Keeping the Peace, or Conspiring Against It?

LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN, 24 Oct 2011

Harvard School of Public Health – TRANSCEND Media Service

Harvard Group Publishes White Paper Reviewing  Human Rights Abuses Perpetrated by the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti; Calls for  MINUSTAH withdrawal. 

On Octo­ber 4th, 2011, Har­vard stu­dents as part of a group of Cana­dian and US 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. The white paper release comes at a time of height­ened scrutiny of MINUSTAH due to high pro­file human rights abuses and wide­spread anti‐MINUSTAH sen­ti­ment in Haiti. The United Nations Secu­rity Council’s meet­ing to renew MINUSTAH’s man­date for the next year is sched­uled for Octo­ber 15th, 2011.

The white paper 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 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.

Espe­cially given the role of MINUSTAH in bring­ing this epi­demic to Haiti, the sig­nif­i­cant allo­ca­tion of fund­ing toMINUSTAH while the cholera response remains under­funded is prob­lem­atic to say the least,” co‐author Rishi Rat­tan of Physi­cians for Haiti added.

With this in mind, the white paper seeks to shed light on the cur­rent human rights abuses occur­ring at the hands of MINUSTAH and spark crit­i­cal debate about whether the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity 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.

Download the MINUSTAH White Paper

Go to Original – harvard.edu

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