By Tribune-Review

Published: Tuesday, March 5, 2013, 9:00 p.m.
Updated: Wednesday, March 6, 2013

If an international corporation treated Haiti as the United Nations did after all fingers pointed to Nepalese peacekeepers as the source of a devastating cholera outbreak in 2010, the lawsuit filed against the company would be “stratospheric.”

So begins an extensive examination of the United Nations' “mission” by Armin Rosen for The Atlantic — not only of the Haiti cholera outbreak that killed 8,000 people but of the philosophy of lawlessness that permeates today's Turtle Bay.

This, after U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon rejected direct compensation to Haiti's victims, citing diplomatic immunity.

Despite the preponderance of scientific evidence that leaves little doubt, Mr. Ban won't even acknowledge the cholera outbreak's link to U.N. peacekeepers, whose failure to abide by even the most basic sanitation precautions reportedly infected a tributary of Haiti's largest river.

And never mind the United Nations' efforts to sanitize this scandal.

Almost three years after the outbreak, cholera is projected to kill up to 1,000 people annually in a country that didn't have any reported cases for a century, Mr. Rosen says.

“The U.N. has few legal obligations to anyone or anything other than itself, and it's not fighting the cholera allegations because it simply doesn't have to,” Rosen writes.

So once again, the United Nations places itself above any law except that which it decrees. Its response to Haiti deserves an equal if not overdue response from the United States to the U.N.:

Get lost!

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