Peacekeeping Gone Awry

Source: CNN.com

In her talk, Dr, Emilie Calvello expressed consternation about the multiple NGOs that flooded Haiti in the wake of the earthquake and the lack of partnership and cooperation with the local Haitian healthcare providers. She particularly emphasized that the willingness to help was not enough—we must help in the right way. This includes understanding the cultural perspectives of the Haitians as well as engaging their abilities to improve the crisis at hand.

This week, we saw how even in a disaster situation, we must view those we aid as “co-producers” of health, no matter how strong the impulse is to see them as helpless and suffering. In the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti and the resulting destruction of public infrastructure, an epidemic of cholera has swept the nation with an equally dangerous wave of chaos. Now, reports have emerged that Haitians are violently protesting against UN peacekeepers. At first glance, this seems ludicrous. How can people protest against the malicious spread of bacteria? What good could come from fighting the “peacekeepers” that are there to help?

With a critical eye, however, it is clear that this cholera epidemic has only served to open the floodgates for the tension and mistrust that had festered between the Haitian population and the foreign occupiers. The situation is complex. The spread of cholera is a public health crisis, but we must realize that all diseases are socially, culturally, and politically grounded. Many Haitians from the slums, mistakenly but understandably, view the cholera treatment centers as hotspots for spreading the disease. Upcoming elections in Haiti are suspected to be the motivations for the cholera-related riots. It is almost overwhelming to comprehend and assess it all. Nevertheless, it is a necessary exercise, as disaster response has spiraled into a nationwide epidemic and now to political unrest. From this compounding crisis, we see the increasing urgency of appropriate international interventions, lest we face the unintended consequences of our supposed altruism.

In the year 2015

Remind me of those millennium development goals again? The UN has laid out a 5-year timeline to achieve the following:

Now seems to be a good time to remember them. We have 5 years, and the clock is ticking.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon wrote in his report on MDGs, Keeping The Promise,  “Our world possesses the knowledge and resources to achieve the MDGs.” Falling short of them “would be an unacceptable failure, moral and practical.”

Is it truly possible to achieve these between 2010 and 2015? Call me cynical, but I tend to view the words “eradicate” and “universal” with some degree of skepticism. Optimists, please weigh in if you have thoughts.

The Rohingya Report

This weekend I was talking to a good friend who works on the Hill, and she asked me if I’d heard about Physicians for Human Rights’ “Rohingya Report,” published in March 2010.  The report, Stateless and Starving, documents the atrocities committed by the Bangladeshi government against Burmese Rohingya refugees. It was written by Richard Sollom, Director of Research and Investigations for PHR and Parveen Pamar, an emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s, in collaboration with the Center for Public Health and Human Rights at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Of course, humanitarian workers and organizations such as MSF have been on the ground in Bangladesh long before PHR released its report, but Stateless and Starving has generated steam in the U.S. and brought to light some of the shock and horror: the “dire conditions” listed in the executive summary include acute malnutrition, forced internment, arbitrary arrest, and Bangladeshi hate propaganda and violence against the refugees.