Nepal is one of the oldest contributors to the United Nations Peacekeeping Forces. Today, it’s the fourth largest Troop Contributing Country to UN Peacekeeping missions. In the Caribbean island Haiti, they are the second largest contingent after Brazil. And 2010 has been a time of unexpected challenges and triumphs for the Nepali forces based there.
They were one of the first responders on the streets after the quake, but recently have been accused of being the source of a dangerous cholera outbreak sweeping across the country. Thrust into the global public psyche for it, it is useless to try and resist writing about them now.
Politics in the time of cholera
It was in mid-October, just after Dashain, when news came that Nepali Peacekeeping troops serving in MINUSTAH, the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti, had been accused of bringing cholera to the country. By November, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had reported that the cholera had South Asian strains. This served as campaign fodder in a highly contested election with 19 candidates originally vying for the presidency, many of whom played on the populist anti-MINUSTAH sentiments. It was not long before protests linking cholera and MINUSTAH echoed in Haiti’s streets in the lead-up to the elections held on November 28. On cue, the international media played the allegation in their reporting.
“...The anger is fueled by suspicions that a contingent of Nepalese soldiers brought cholera with them to Haiti,” the Associated Press (AP) reported on November 19. The Washington Post and Fox News were amongst those who picked up that news.
“They won’t be quoted saying so, but some of these experts concede that the Nepalese soldiers are the most likely suspects,” The New York Times wrote on November 20.
Almost exactly two months after the allegations were first made, it continues to persist. So where and how was it decided that the Nepali troops may indeed be responsible for causing the cholera outbreak that has taken more than 2,100 lives and infected tens of thousands more? There is the political inception, and the scientific guess.
The Mayor’s campaign
Cholera is no friend of the Nepali people. Nor is Mayor Laguerre Lochard of Mirebalais. Not anymore, at least. It was in early October that Cuban medical officers first reported cholera to be the cause of a girl’s death in Mirebalais. By mid-October, the country had announced a cholera outbreak. Lochard, who was running for the Senate seat in the elections, was the first to go on record accusing the MINUSTAH base and its Nepali peacekeeping forces in Mirebalais of being the source of the disease. By November, his allegations regarding the cholera outbreak had reached election-fever pitch.
Lochard was known to be friendly to the Nepali forces in Mirebalais. He would often attend their functions and maintain at least a cordial relationship with its commanders. But things changed after quake relief aid arrived.
After January’s earthquake, the US Army picked a field near Mirebalais to airdrop food and other aid materials. The Nepali troops were deployed to secure the site. According to a Nepali officer who was serving in Haiti around that time, Lochard approached the Nepali commander and asked that he be given control of managing and distributing everything.
The commander declined, citing protocol and mandate. However, to ensure good faith, Lochard was offered the keys to the storage until the time of distribution and told that distribution would be done in his presence and with his monitoring. Lochard was irritated, and the relationship quickly soured between the Mayor and his Nepali guests.
In the past, the Mayor was formally introduced to the incoming contingent of Nepali peacekeeping troops. When the current commander, Lt. Colonel Krishna Man Shrestha, arrived on October 8, around the same time as most of his troops, no formal event of such nature was held.
In November, the MINUSTAH Force commander and commanders from the Nepali contingent met with Lochard. The meeting required the Mayor’s Creole to be translated to French, which was then translated to English for the UN representatives. Lochard’s anger and free flowing vent against MINUSTAH was not lost in translation, according to a senior official present in the meeting.
When Lochard settled into a mood for conversation, Force Commander Major-General Luiz Guilherme Paul Cruz asked him what MINUSTAH could do. Lochard immediately asked how many Nepali soldiers were based at the Mirebalais camp; currently a little over 700. Then, surprisingly, the anti-MINUSTAH candidate concluded that he would not mind Nepali troops adding four additional check posts around Mirebalais. A check post manned fulltime by Nepali troops has been in the center of Mirebalais for sometime now. The new check posts were immediately set up.
On November 16, as cholera-related deaths steadily rose in Haiti, riots against MINUSTAH, encouraged by local radio stations and political parties, broke out in various towns and cities. In Cap-Haitian, a demonstrator was shot dead by Chilean peacekeeping force and the case is still under investigation.
In Hinche, the Nepali contingent’s base was attacked well into the night. In the afternoon, officers had to be evacuated by helicopter for medical emergency when stones pelted by demonstrators severely injured them: a head and another face were broken, and two Captains, who were commanding the riot control force, were severely injured in the leg. Still, the Nepali troops restrained from shooting at the demonstrators.
A scientific guess
Politics aside, a lot of scientific research on the origin of the cholera has been done since the outbreak. Most recently, and reliably, the New England Journal of Medicine published a comprehensive report titled The Origin of the Haitian Cholera Outbreak Strain on December 9. The report concludes that the Haitian epidemic is “probably the result of the introduction, through human activity, of a V. cholerae strain from a distant geographic source.”
It also reasserts CDC’s initial “South Asian” link. The report explains: “Both single-nucleotide variations and the presence and structure of hypervariable chromosomal elements indicate that there is a close relationship between the Haitian isolates and variant V. cholerae El Tor O1 strains isolated in Bangladesh in 2002 and 2008.”
Still, tests based on samples taken from the septic tank as well as the river in and around the Nepali base immediately after the outbreak all came out negative on cholera. And while the outbreak of the disease was in Mirebalais, it is in Saint-Marc, southwest of Mirebalais, where the disease took its first massive toll.
Blaming a single country of origin is a tricky game in this age of international mobility, and in a country where peacekeeping contributors from South Asia include India, Nepal Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.
According to the CDC’s website “it can take anywhere from a few hours to 5 days for symptoms to appear after infection. Symptoms typically appear in 2-3 days.” There are more than 1,200 Nepali peacekeeping troops in Haiti, who have been regularly reporting for duty. Even two months after the outbreak itself, none of them have shown symptoms of cholera.
It is a shame the role of the Nepali Peacekeeping Forces in Haiti after the earthquake and during the elections have been overshadowed and publicly defined by the cholera allegations that remains unproven thus far.
Port-au-Prince, when the Earth shook
January 12, 2010. It was by chance that those who remained to help the city get back on its feet did not fall with the city itself. The Weekly Sunset Meeting held at the MINUSTAH Force Commander’s office with all the chiefs of MINUSTAH’s military branches had been cancelled that week because the force commander was on leave in Miami with his family. The meeting could have happened with the acting Force Commander, Gen. Ricardo Toro, but he had been called for a meeting at the American Embassy.
Since that evening’s meeting was cancelled in advance, Colonel Ratindra Khatri, Chief Military Personnel Officer of MINUSTAH Force HQ and the Nepali National Contingent Commander in Haiti at the time, advised the Nepali battalion in Port-au-Prince to host a planned anniversary event that evening. Being the seniormost Nepali officer in Haiti, Col. Khatri himself was the event’s chief guest.
“It was 4:53 PM and I had just entered the Nepali barrack and driven past the temple,” Col. Khatri recalled. “My jeep shook violently and I just slammed the brakes and stayed inside until the shaking stopped.” A magnitude of 7 Richter-scaleearthquake had just hit the city.
In anticipation of the chief guest’s 5 pm arrival, all of the Nepali forces there had gathered in formation on the open ground to welcome him. When the quake began, most of them hit the floor flat.
Col. Khatri turned around to see what had happened: as if the city itself was evaporating into thin air, Port-au-Prince was enveloped in a thick brown cloud of dust slowly rising towards the late-afternoon sky.
Across the city, Acting Force Commander Maj. Gen Toro had just gotten in his car to leave for his meeting at the US Embassy. The quake began before he could drive, and through the windshield, he watched Christopher Hotel, the MINUSTAH headquarters in Haiti at that time, collapse with unaccounted number of UN staff still inside.
Over at the Nepali camps, nobody seemed injured. Even the cyber café that was rarely free was empty that day. It was the only infrastructure in the camp that collapsed.
Col. Khatri immediately mobilized the troops in about a dozen vehicles to get a sense of the city’s state. Less than two miles out of the barrack, the devastation was inescapable and vehicle mobility impossible. The mission intuitively changed to rescuing civilian casualties from the rubbles and bringing them back. The big tent set up for the festivities became a makeshift treatment center.
When radios came back online, officers were informed about the collapse of Christopher Hotel. Officers in the Nepal camp decided that the road to the hotel had to be cleared.
Dusk had set in by the time Chile’s engineering corp, with 100 Nepali troops, began inching towards the hotel. By midnight, the convoy had reached the site, and casualties who could be rescued were immediately taken to the Argentinean hospital. More than 250 people were rescued alive there that night, and the only Nepali casualty was the colonel who had severely fractured his leg. But the chief of MINUSTAH, his PA, and MINUSTAH’s police chief, the force commander’s military assistant, PA and clerk were among the 103 UN staff who died there. Gen. Toro’s wife, who was visiting at the time, also died that day, along with an estimated 200,000-250,000 Haitians.
The following morning, on January 13, a temporary HQ was established in MINUSTAH’s Log Base and a video teleconference was conducted with UN HQ in New York. They told the Haiti team that at 1 pm they wanted to do a second teleconference with updates and data on who were on duty during the quake.
This was a problem for Col. Khatri since all of his documents were still inside Christopher Hotel, and going into the debris was not allowed, especially since aftershocks were still hitting the city. However, since the original Pilipino guards had sustained injuries, Nepali troops who had come the night before were temporarily on duty at the hotel. So Maj.
Dinesh volunteered to go inside the building after borrowing a soldier’s helmet. He managed to bring out the ”Master file” from the Col. Khatri’s desk. At 1 PM, the Colonel was able to provide New York with a report. The next day, he managed to have the computers of his immediate staff and his own recovered, enabling them to quickly produce the most updated information on who might have been missing.
“I firmly believe that the reason the Nepali forces could function so efficiently was also because the Nepali battalion did not suffer any casualties, let alone fatalities,” Col. Khatri said, days before leaving Haiti after completing his term there. “Those military contingents who suffered losses, it was difficult for them. Not only did they have to rescue and recover their own, but they also naturally fell into a grieving period.”
Sri Lanka, Bolivia, and Nepal were the earliest responders after the quake hit Port-au-Prince. Nepali soldiers stayed on duty at the hotel for a week.
Election peacekeeping
In days leading up to the elections, Nepali soldiers fanned out across Haiti. Some were posted in remote parts of the country, accessible only after walking for eight hours after motorable roads ended. At some places, they personally guarded and delivered ballot boxes in the absence of election officials. In some cases, they apprehended weapons. In the end, their reliable work was noted by MINUSTAH, although the election results remain controversial and its relationship to MINUSTAH highly politicized.
Weathering the storm
In early December, life at the Nepali camps in Port-au-Prince, Mirabalais, and Hinche, moved on unflinchingly. Commanders attended functions hosted by other contingents, and anticipated the post-election results violence, many of them still busy tying loose ends from the election week. Soldiers reported for duty, spent their free time playing sports or working out at the gym, or just sitting around and talking. Most who were asked responded that they did not pay attention to the cholera allegation; confident it was not true, though admittedly embarrassed for Nepal. All they really want is to complete their 6-month duty tour as best as they can in this foreign land, and go home.
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