Armed Militia Grab the Famine Business

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MOGADISHU, Sep 7, 2011 (IPS) - Armed groups are withholding aid and preventing Somali famine refugees from leaving camps to ensure the continued supply of food by aid agencies that they are presently selling on the open market.

Since Mohamed Elmi, 69, and his family arrived at a camp for famine refugees in Mogadishu they have barely had enough to eat. Armed gunmen running the camp steal their food and prevent them from leaving to search for aid elsewhere, he says.

Elmi told IPS that this happens because aid agencies deliver food to the people running the camp for distribution and not to the famine victims themselves. And they are prevented from leaving because aid will no longer be delivered to the camps if they do.

"I don’t know who is running this, but we have said time and again that we are never, never given anything by the foremen running (the camp). Let them kill me if they want… We cannot leave here to find a better place," an emancipated Elmi told IPS. He asked IPS not to publish the name of his camp as he fears for his safety.

Tens of thousands of desperately hungry Somalis displaced from the drought-stricken south are not receiving the food aid meant for them. Gunmen have set up unathourised refugee camps in Mogadishu just to steal the food delivered by humanitarian agencies. It is believed the food is being sold on the local markets.

There are dozens of camps with thousands of families in the bullet-scarred Somali capital of Mogadishu. Not all are official camps. These are often run by men from the local clan militias who divert famine victims entering the city to the ‘camps’ they have set up in deserted buildings in Mogadishu.

This is what happened to Mahad Iyo, 54, who arrived in Mogadishu in search of aid in August.

Iyo said that he and other displaced people walked for days to reach Mogadishu. At the city’s entrances they were greeted by armed gangs and were directed to a disused government building. The building was filled with refugees who had constructed makeshift tents using sticks and old ragged cloth. "They want to use us for their own benefit," Iyo now says of the men who so eagerly offered him help when he first arrived. "We are not registered for the aid and neither are we given regular help. Food and other essentials are brought to the camp by the agencies but they are quickly taken away by the foremen," said Iyo.

He said he would prefer to leave the camp and go back to his village in southern Somalia where he would be "better off dead".

Mohamed Nur, a former clan militia leader, runs one of the many camps in Mogadishu and he agreed to speak to IPS to "set the record straight."

Nur admitted that he has no experience in relief work and that he was not appointed to run the camp by either government or aid agencies. He said he took on the responsibility himself "after seeing the influx of desperate fellow Somalis."

"Who will do this work if we don’t stand up to do it? The government is corrupt and the aid agencies don’t know our people better than we do. So we have set up this camp of 20,000 people, but the aid agencies never bring in enough food for the people," Nur told IPS. He was flanked by Kalashnikov- branding gunmen outside the camp of barely 2,000 people.

Nur said he doesn’t keep a register of camp residents or of the food deliveries as he and his "co- volunteers" have no time for "useless paperwork". He added that neither government nor the aid agencies require him to fill in any documentation.

Nur denied that he or others steal aid. But many people at Nur’s camp complained to IPS about the lack of assistance and food.

The head of the government’s Disaster Management Agency Abdullahi Mohamed Shirwa, which coordinates aid efforts to assist famine victims in Mogadishu, said the agency was "doing everything to deal with the issue and we are taking it seriously." He added that there were only isolated incidents of theft of food aid.

"When disasters of this magnitude take place aid efforts are often haphazard and it takes time to deal with such problems, but my agency is working hard to do everything to deal with the issue and we are taking it seriously," Shirwa told IPS.

IPS has learnt that some famine victims are leaving the government-run Badbaado Camp, which is situated on the outskirts of Mogadishu. Ten people were killed at the camp on Aug. 5 after armed men, allegedly from government’s military forces, tried to loot the aid being distributed to the camp residents. One aid worker told IPS that the population of the camp was now "at half, or less than half" its initial number of 4,000 families.

"People are fleeing because they see that they are never going to get justice, or protection, or help from the government," the aid worker told IPS.

The government had condemned the killings at Badbaado camp and vowed to charge those involved, however, no one has been arrested as yet.

The United Nations estimates that almost 100,000 people arrived in Mogadishu this year after fleeing the devastating famine currently gripping southern Somalia. About 3.6 million people are in need of assistance in the war-ravaged country. The U.N. announced on Monday that the famine in Somalia has now spread to the Bay region of southern Somalia and 750,000 people face imminent starvation.

Despite Western Sanctions Against Syria, U.N. Quietly Extends Development Aid to Country

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Amid economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. and other Western democracies to pressure Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to end his brutal eleven-year reign, theUnited Nations has quietly agreed to extend its current development partnership agreement with the Assad government, which was set to expire this year.

The decision, made “in the light of recent developments,” according to a document obtained by Fox News, “will permit the United Nations organizations to better assist the country in addressing the impact of current events and their socio-economic consequences.” The renewal apparently lasts through 2012.

The U.N. move comes despite the fact that the leading U.N. agency in the country, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), announced in April that it was “deferring” a new, five-year country program for Syria, extending from 2012 to 2017, amid the rising turbulence in that country against the Assad dictatorship.

UNDP serves as the coordinator for all joint U.N. programs in Syria, as in most other developing countries. UNDP’s top representative in Syria, Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, is also the chief U.N. official in the country, known as the Resident Coordinator. In a message on the U.N. Syria website, Ahmed emphasizes that the U.N. is a “strong partner to the Syrian Government.”

News of the current U.N. program extension was tucked into a document presented to the 36-nation Executive Board that oversees operations of UNDP, the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) and the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS), at a semi-annual session in early July, extending current programs in both Syria and Egypt. (The U.S. is a member of the Executive Board, and so is the Assad regime’s biggest supporter, Iran.)

While it refers in its headings only to UNFPA, the text of the Executive Board document specifically affirms that the U.N. as a whole agreed with the Assad regime on the extension to what is known as the United Nations Development Assistance Framework, or UNDAF, for Syria, even as it also observes that Syria is “facing a challenge with the wave of unrest that has spread throughout the country.”

(According to UNDP’s spokesman, the UNDAF is “the strategic program framework that describes the collective response of the U.N. system to national development priorities.” But U.N. agencies in Syria also have a strong influence on the national programs they subsequently claim to respond to. As U.N. Coordinator Ahmed noted in a letter to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon last February the U.N. country team in Syria “worked closely with the Government on their 11th Five Year Plan, providing consultancy services, situation analysis and strategies, targets and support to develop policies, programs and projects.” )

Ultimately U.N. programs described in the UNDAF are usually executed by the national government under U.N. supervision and monitoring.

In other words, U.N. agencies influence both the government’s input and output.

Among other things, the UNFPA documents note that the Assad government “has introduced a comprehensive reform package” that “embraces various spheres” including youth employment, and says that the one-year extension will allow UNFPA, for one, to “create an enabling environment to empower youth and enable them to participate in decision-making and planning at central and local levels.”

Click here for the document.

That enabling environment has apparently not yet filtered down to the throngs of predominately youthful protesters who continue to brave often-savage repression at the hands of Syrian police and security squads.

As many as 1,600 protestors have reportedly been killed in Syria since the upheavals began, and some 26,000 have reportedly been arrested.

Most of UNFPA’s current programming, according to an agency spokesman, even while becoming more focused on emergency issues during the current crisis, focuses on maternity care and health, as well as contraceptive and “reproductive health care.”

Getting information on the full panoply of U.N. operations in Syria is also difficult, due both to the fragmented nature of U.N. funds, agencies and programs, and the often chaotic situation in Syria itself.

The World Food Program, for example, which operates more as an emergency relief agency, has three different programs in Syria offering assistance to just under 669,000 people.

In all cases, however, U.N. agencies work closely with Syrian government agencies, which can range from the health and education ministries to such entities as the Ministry of the Interior, which among its tasks includes control of security forces.

Asked directly by Fox News to confirm the most recent U.N. program extension in Syria, a spokesman for UNDP sidestepped the question, noting instead that “U.N. regular operations have slowed down significantly due to the situation on the ground,” as have UNDP operations.

Otherwise, he said, “U.N. agencies are providing humanitarian support in response to the crisis including providing health and child protection services, food and nutrition, hygiene kits and psychosocial support.” Additionally, “other joint activities with direct impact on the vulnerable and poor are continuing though at a much slower pace.”

Among those continuing activities are a joint UNDP and UNFPA program to “monitor the social aid fund of cash assistance to Syrians living below the poverty line,” and a six-agency effort to provide health and education services, food and jobs in six of the poorest villages in Syria.

The social aid fund in particular is not a small item. According to documents examined by Fox News, the “Social Welfare Fund” that UNDP monitored under the now-extended UNDAF was intended to dispense $192 million a year between 2008 and 2012.

And according to U.N. Coordinator Ahmed’s February report to his boss, the Secretary General, the entire UNDAF program that has now been extended had “weak monitoring and evaluation systems, which made comprehensive assessment of U.N. achievement in Syria very difficult.”

Click here for the report.

George Russell is executive editor of Fox News and can be found on Twitter @GeorgeRussell.

Sex, lies, and videotape at the U.N.

click here to view this at TURTLEBAY.FOREIGNPOLICY.COM

After weeks of internal deliberations, the United Nations recently held a pair of private viewings of a controversial new film, The Whistleblower, which explores U.N. complicity in sex crimes in Bosnia over the past two decades.

Based on real events and reviewed last month by Turtle Bay, the film recounts how U.N. peacekeepers became involved in the illegal sex trade in Bosnia in the late 1990s and the early 2000s. Top officials have been concerned that the film's imminent release -- it hits theaters in Los Angeles and New York on August 5 -- could harm the institution's international reputation. The U.N.'s new women's agency, headed by former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, arranged the latest screening this week in a U.N. office building in New York.

The horrific incidents depicted in the film occurred well before Secretary General Ban Ki-moonand his leadership team arrived at the United Nations. But Ban's tenure is also implicated in the story, if somewhat tangentially: One of the film's real-life heroines, Madeleine Rees, portrayed by the British actress Vanessa Redgrave, was forced out of the United Nations during his first term as Secretary General.

Rees has since filed a grievance with the U.N. internal disputes tribunal in Geneva. She cites her role in exposing U.N. involvement in sexual crimes in Bosnia, as well as the U.N.'s "collusion" in the rendition of six Algerian nationals to Guantanamo Bay, as among the reasons she may have lost her job. A decision on her case is expected any day, Rees and U.N. officials told Turtle Bay.

The U.N.'s top spokesman, Martin Nesirky, declined to comment on the case, saying it would be improper to discuss a case before the tribunal has rendered its judgment. Rupert Colville, a spokesman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, also declined to comment, citing legal constraints.

But Rees' application indicates that her superiors at the U.N. High Commissioner's Office had sanctioned Rees, who is gay, for promoting a potentially controversial conference on gay rights. "The catalyst for my removal and a stated ground by OHCHR [The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights], was the side event profiling human rights violations on grounds of sexual orientation," she wrote in her application.

Rees claimed that she had initial backing for the conference from Pillay, who "was very enthusiastic and said she would cosponsor [the event] and speak." But she said she was subsequently excoriated by Pillay's deputy, Kyung-wha Kang, after powerful U.N. members protested. Pillay and her top aides subsequently rallied behind Kang, she claimed.

Rees says she suspects she was being singled out because of the reputation she had earned for standing up for victims rights in Bosnia, where her efforts to press for a crack down on abuses by peacekeepers ran afoul of the U.N.'s political leadership.

She cites a conversation in which Kang warned that top U.N. peacekeeping officials had previously sought her removal from Bosnia. According to Rees, Kang said her history of confrontations with the top brass would make it difficult to consider her for any future field assignments. "If someone of such high rank said this -- it should be taken seriously," Rees claimed Kang told her.

Ban's spokesman, meanwhile, scolded Turtle Bay this week for its coverage of The Whistleblower, challenging our suggestion, offered somewhat tongue in cheek, that the U.N. would prefer people not see the film. He also objected to a line in the story indicating that this was not the kind of film Ban had in mind when he traveled to Hollywood last year to urge filmmakers to make movies that document the U.N.'s good works.

"You didn't ask at the time, but I can tell you now that neither assertion is true. Far from it," Nesirky said.

"We welcome the fact that the film highlights issues that are high on the agenda of the United Nations, including the fight against human trafficking and violence against women," Nesirky added in a statement prepared for Turtle Bay. "We also welcome all efforts to draw attention to such human rights violations."

In fact, the U.N. top leadership had not decided how to respond to the film when Turtle Baypublished its story on June 29. A confidential internal memo, dated July 7, from Ivan Simonovic, the U.N.'s top human rights official in New York, reveals that Ban's cabinet was divided over the wisdom of embracing the new film.

A number of U.N. officials, including Bachelet, Pillay, Catherine Bragg, the U.N. Assistant Secretary General for Emergency Relief Operations, and Radhika Coomaraswamy, the U.N. Special Representative for Children in Armed Conflict, argued in favor of confronting the film's harsh portrayal of the United Nations head on, according to the memo, which was leaked to Turtle Bay. Catherine Bragg, the assistant secretary general for emergency relief operations, recommended hosting a public screening of the film. Ban's top advisors, including Vijay Nambiar, also supported a proactive approach.

But the U.N.'s top lawyer Patricia O'Brien and the chief of the U.N. Department of Public information, Kiyotaka Akasaka, proposed ignoring the film. According to Simonovic's memo, Akasaka and O'Brien "thought that a proactive approach, and especially ASG [Assistant Secretary General] Bragg's proposal of a public screening of the movie at the U.N., to be followed by frank discussion, is counterproductive and would contribute to the film's impact. They preferred downplaying the film instead preparing answers on an if-asked basis."

Eventually, the United Nations split the difference, scheduling a discrete viewing for U.N. public relations and peacekeeping officials earlier this month. But Nesirky did not inform the press, saying he did not consider it a public "event," and refused a request from Turtle Bay to identify officials who organized or attended the screening.

"A group of officials in DPI [the Department of Public Information] and DPKO [the Department of Peacekeeping Operations] watched the film last week ahead of a possible screening at the United Nations that would include a panel discussion on the issues depicted in the film," Nesirky said. "We felt it was responsible to see first how the events and issues were portrayed. Those who watched the film were familiar with events in the movie; peacekeeping as well as efforts to stamp out misconduct by U.N. personnel, including sexual exploitation and abuse."[*see note below]

Tuesday's screening by Bachelet's agency marked another concession to the officials who were advising a proactive approach. It also happened to coincide with a screening organized by the U.N. press corps.

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*Nesirky announced in a press briefing before this article was published that the U.N. welcomed the U.N. press clubs' screening of the film and had decided "to organize a discussion or other events related to topics raised in the film" later this summer. However, the U.N. has not organized its own public screening. Turtle Bay regrets that in an earlier version it misspelled Ms. Kang's name and mistakenly identifed Patricia O'Brien as Catherine.

"Our Misery, Their Jobs"

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The Humanitarian Industry in Haiti

By DANIEL MOSS

Georges Marie is a proud and angry Haitian lawyer who lost her husband in the earthquake. As she mourned, the humanitarian industry exploded.

She watched with concern as Port au Prince's narrow streets became clogged with white Landrovers, each stamped with an aid agency logo on the driver's door. It still rankles her when the humanitarian aid workers dine and dance in a four-star restaurant overlooking the Place Boyer, a public square now strung with tarps, home to some of the million-plus people still displaced after the 2010 earthquake.

Some aid organizations, Georges Marie said, don't pay the taxes required to operate in Haiti — although to be fair it's quite possible that the under-resourced Haitian state has never asked. Others don't fulfill local hiring mandates, placing foreigners in positions that Haitians could fill — although, to be fair, many development agencies try hard to hire locally but are thwarted by a fierce brain drain. Quebec, said Georges Marie, offers Cuban-trained Haitian doctors a plane ticket to Canada and a license to practice there. La industrie de misere, she called it — "our misery, their jobs," she said.

My language skills are rotten, but not so bad as to miss her criticism of humanitarian consultants for not speaking Kreyol and relying on their underpaid, multilingual Haitian drivers for translation. As an international development professional, I'd had some low moments coming to terms with an occasionally bizarre industry. But nowhere else have I looked so long and hard in the mirror than when on assignment in Haiti.

Marie has a new job. She is taking a post with the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC). Led by Bill Clinton and outgoing Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive, the IHRC is seen by many as an unelected parallel government, invented by nervous donors to keep their aid money safe from corruption. For many Haitians, including Georges Marie, the IHRC is a poster child for the hijacking of Haiti's sovereignty. Won't the job burn you up inside? I asked. I need the money, she responded. Why not work in President-elect Michael Martelly's administration? She shook her head. I have a family to feed.

Alfredo Mena, a Dominican-born Interamerican Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) representative to Haiti, estimates that there are 9,000 NGOs in Haiti. And they are all welcome to contribute to Haiti's development, he said. But IICA and others have worked hard with the Haitian Ministry of Agriculture to craft a national plan for food security, a guidebook for agricultural development. Each cooperating development organization should study this and ensure their projects contribute to the plan's successful implementation. Many don't.

Contradictions and complexities abound within the aid industry, causing it to struggle to make headway in a sputtering reconstruction process. The good news is that, unlike a few years ago, there is near unanimity on the need for a strong Haitian state to direct the aid flows. The bad news is that state capacity is wanting — and no one is quite sure how to build it. How do aid agencies act responsibly in the interim with few functional public institutions to coordinate the aid?

A View of Development from the Street

Over a colonial breakfast of croissants and baguettes, I chatted with Georges Marie's neighbor, Iderle Charles*. "Haiti's civil society and government capacity are weak," she said. "My sense is that the aid industry is making this problem worse." She lived in exile in Mexico City throughout the Duvalier dictatorships, agitating for Haitian democracy from afar.

We discussed MINUSTAH, the 10,000 strong United Nations security force brought in after President Aristide was deposed in 2004 that still patrols Haiti's streets today. Not one Haitian I met could define its mission or jurisdiction. Although public security is nominally a state responsibility, I rarely saw Haitian police during my time there. I watched a platoon of M-16 bearing Rwandan soldiers maneuver their armored vehicle through a crowded fruit market. Peacekeeping in Haiti is a plum post; it might earn them a promotion back home. For Haiti's under-resourced cops, it is demoralizing that foreign troops are better equipped, better paid and are treading on their beat.

Despite the UN's critical global role, its bloated Haitian operations are perverse and give it a bad name. A tour of duty in Haiti, I was told, is an excellent way to advance upwards in the UN bureaucracy. Haitians I met with questioned how another UN program evaluation of another micro-credit project conducted by yet another foreigner resolves their daily suffering.

"But," Iderle said, "it doesn't get us far to pin the blame on the aid industry. I think that they are mostly people of good will. It's the Haitian government's responsibility to coordinate their efforts and ensure that they help strengthen a national plan for democracy and development. The state needs to ensure that the aid industry follows rules." It wasn't lost on either of us that the credibility of the newly elected Haitian president is already tainted. Martelly takes office amid allegations of widespread electoral fraud.

Aid Agencies' Expanded Mission: Building Government

It is now commonplace for aid agencies to claim that part of their mission is to strengthen Haiti's public institutions. It's part of their discourse, Iderle said. Paul Farmer, the UN's deputy special envoy to Haiti and founder of Partners in Health, is insistent on this point. In remarks to the Congressional Black Caucus, Farmer said, "How can there be public health and public education without a stronger government at the national and local levels?" Philippe Bellerive of the USAID WINNER program in Haiti told me, "We never act alone, we work hand in hand with the Ministry of Agriculture." That's a big step forward. There was a recent time when beating up on the corrupt government was sport, when development agencies were seen as Haiti's savior and the government simply an obstacle.

But the earthquake damage is so vast that fewer and fewer development groups claim they can rebuild on their own. Housing construction, for example, begs for a strong government role, even the politically unpopular use of eminent domain. Zoning, land titling and assigning public lands are essential. The World Bank and others are waiting for a cue from government on how to proceed.

The desire to involve the public sector is not matched by those institutions' day-to-day capacity to coordinate and deliver services. Faced with this glaring public gap and the development agencies' eagerness, is there a productive role for foreign NGOs in strengthening Haiti's weak institutions? NGOs and bi- and multilateral development agencies are arguably better suited to implement infrastructure and income generation projects. It's one thing to support a new irrigation system — although more complex politically than the average development expert might have you think — and quite another to boost the morale and skills of a public agronomist corps. Mucking around in strengthening public institutions is delicate stuff.

USAID seeks to pursue both objectives. As they introduce technology packages to modernize agriculture, they similarly seek to upgrade management systems — including public sector support to farmers. USAID agronomists claim to be agents of change, introducing modern techniques even when farmers may be resistant. "At times they are stubborn and it's true that we are strict," Bellerive said. "We won't agree to support their old farming methods that don't work and leave them hungry."

Questions also arise regarding the effectiveness and appropriateness of foreign training programs. For example, although trainers may have useful knowledge to impart, when you follow the money, it may be that a considerable percentage stays with the foreign training institution. Is an underpaid Haitian agronomist working for the Ministry of Agriculture best served by receiving training sessions from a U.S. technician earning many times his salary with experience in vastly different circumstances? Does training from well-equipped MINUSTAH forces prepare a Haitian National Police agent for Port-au-Prince conditions? These teaching and learning moments are likely to be fraught with cultural miscues.

If development agencies are going to enter the business of strengthening public institutions, we need common sense guidelines to orient a healthy engagement: narrow the gap between foreign aid worker pay and what their public sector counterparts earn; abide by or help create public development plans, whether on the municipal or ministerial level; ensure that Haitian public workers take the lead in each step of private initiatives; ensure that a significant portion of development agency funds are administered by Haitians (a potential deal breaker); put conflict of interests on the table — for example, disclose ties to agribusiness; don't treat capacity building as technology transfer but rather a conversation — no information dumps and no PowerPoint; and lose the Landrover — take public transportation and get to know some locals.

Past and current poor practices have no doubt caused significant damage. But Haiti's reconstruction will take decades, meaning there's plenty of time to get it right. Any relationship — though some of the donor-directed work underway might not properly be called a relationship — has rough patches and power imbalances. If dysfunction is honestly called out, a healthy dynamic just might emerge.

That honest reflection is the critical first step, and adopting new guidelines for respectful local engagement must quickly follow. Haiti's public sector would be helped dramatically by such development industry reform.

Editor's note: all sources in the story with asterisks had their names changed to protect their identities.

Daniel Moss is an international development and human rights consultant. He wrote this article while on assignment in Haiti for American Jewish World Service.

This article was orignally published by CIP America's Program.

U.N.-Sponsored Report on Haiti’s Cholera Outbreak Points to U.N. Itself as Culprit

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By George Russell

Published May 05, 2011 | FoxNews.com

A United Nations-sponsored report into the causes of a deadly cholera outbreak that ravaged Haiti in the wake of its disastrous 2010 earthquake has discovered a culprit -- the U.N. itself.

The 32-page report, prepared by an independent panel of medical experts at the behest of U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, clearly states that the source of the epidemic was most likely a camp for U.N. peacekeepers in Haiti, whose human waste was dumped by independent contractors into an unsecured pit that was susceptible to flooding in heavy rainfall.

That conclusion, the report notes, mirrors “a commonly held belief in Haiti” virtually from the moment the outbreak began.

But the report buries that central finding under a welter of circumstances that caused investigators to conclude that the outbreak, which is ongoing, “was not the fault of, or deliberate action of, a group or individual.”

The cholera epidemic, which is still ongoing, has killed some 4,500 Haitians through severediarrhea and dehydration since its outbreak in October 2010. There had been no previous cholera outbreak in Haiti for nearly a century. The report confirms that the specific cholera bacteria involved in the Haitian epidemic are a variant first detected in Bangladesh in 2002, which is even more toxic than other cholera strains found in South Asia.

As the report also notes, military contingents from Bangladesh and Nepal were among members of the United Nations Stabilization Force in Haiti (known by its French-language acronym of MINUSTAH) stationed at U.N. peacekeeping camp Mirebalais, close to the initial outbreak. An additional contingent of 60 Bangladesh police officers was also stationed at Mirebalais between September and October 2010.

None of the U.N. personnel were recorded as cholera cases, but the bacteria, which is usually spread through water, can exist in small numbers in the human digestive tract until it hits a rapid-breeding environment.

According to the report, the MINUSTAH camp at Mirebalais was just such an environment. Water piping around the main toilet and showering area of the camp was “haphazard,” with “significant potential for cross-contamination through leakage from broken pipes and poor pipe connections.” Some of the pipes ran over a drainage ditch that fed into a tributary of the Artibonite River, Haiti’s largest, which subsequently became the main artery of the water-borne epidemic.

In addition, sewage from the camp, along with two other MINUSTAH facilities, was trucked by a contractor to an open and unfenced septic pit, in an area that was susceptible to flooding and overflow in wet weather that enters the same river tributary system.

Click here to view the full report

As the report notes, “there is significant human activity -- including washing, bathing, drinking, and recreation,” along the tributary system, while the Artibonite River itself is “extensively used for irrigation and agricultural purposes” through a canal system.

The experts reported that by the time they made an inspection of the Mirebalais area, long after the epidemic began, “the battalion stationed at the Mirebalais MINUSTAH facility had made substantial improvements in the sanitary conditions.” But even so, “conditions were not optimal and additional work was needed” to prevent further contamination.

The expert report knocks down any notion that the “explosive” cholera outbreak came from a natural environmental source, or an indigenous Haitian mutation of the deadly bacteria. But it argues that local factors played an important role: “The introduction of this cholera strain as a result of environmental contamination with feces could not have been the source of such an outbreak without simultaneous water and sanitation and health care system deficiencies.”

The combination of factors led the experts to their no-fault conclusion. And in any case, they argue, “the source of cholera in Haiti is no longer relevant to controlling the outbreak.” In general, they propose new hygiene precautions for future U.N. missions, and a big investment in safe pipes and drinking-water facilities in Haiti.

The U.N. predicts that an additional 400,000 people in Haiti may contract cholera this year as a result of the outbreak. Other estimates have run twice as high.

Meantime, at the U.N., spokesman Martin Nesirky says that Secretary General Ban will consider the report carefully. Nesirky said the U.N. chief will convene a task force to study the findings and recommendations to ensure they are dealt with promptly.

George Russell is executive editor of Fox News