Haiti Disaster Response Paper

Haiti is a country still devastated from the events of January 12, 2010. At 4:53 pm, southwest of the capital of Port-au-Prince, an earthquake measured at 7.0, struck the Haitian people and would have rippling effects in the years to come. More than 300,000 people lost their lives and about a million Haitians were affected overall. Nevertheless, Haiti has always had problems, just after gaining their freedom from France in the early 19th century they were in debt. A writer from BBC News says, “Chronic instability, dictatorships, and natural disasters in recent decades have left it as the poorest nation in the Americas.”

The United Nations is made up of many countries from all over the globe. There are five countries who are permanent roles in it: United States, Great Britain, France, Russia, and China. With these five major countries, there shouldn’t be a reason an organization could have a lack of resource. But during the genocide the UN was not able to bring about enough personal and equipment to sufficiently run a peace keeping operation in Rwanda. With a lack of resources, they also had a lack of will to try and gain resources. People in the Security Council believed it wasn’t going to be anything worth getting into at the start of the killing.

In January 2010, Haiti was hit by an earthquake. It was the most severe Earthquake that the county had seen in years. Three years later, the country still had not recovered from this disaster. Sarah Conque, who is a therapeutic recreational therapist, felt compelled to help the people in Haiti. She started helping while she was a graduate school student.

Haiti was inhabitant of its native people known as Taino until it was Spanish settlers, including Christopher Columbus, arrived and infected the environment with diseases in 1492. France eventually made its way towards the island and half of the island became French, later to be known as Haiti. When it was first established, it quickly became a rich island due to the production of sugar and other agricultural products. The French quickly brought over African slaves in order to complete the work which needed to be done. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the slaves led a successful revolt which eventually led to their independence in 1804. Haiti was the first nation to be led by Africans in the Americas. Today however it has become the poorest nation in the world. It has suffered through multiple natural disasters which have made with economy suffer as well. Due to the fact the island lies on a fault line, the area is more prone to earthquakes occurring. The island is also hurt by hurricanes and tropical storms due to the different air types colliding. Coastal erosion is also constantly affecting the

In October 2014, Nepalese U.N. soldiers stationed 45 miles north of Port Au-Prince were indirectly responsible for causing an outbreak of an infectious and deadly disease by not disposing of waste in a sufficiently sanitary manner. The U.N. made sure they disposed their waste far away enough to meet international regulations but they did not take notice that the area where they disposed their waste was prone to flooding into a major river. Locals would bath, drink and wash their food from this contaminated river. Over 9,000 Haitians have died from Cholera as a result of U.N. negligence and over 10 million have contracted the disease. Needless to say, the Cholera outbreak crippled an already devastated country and once locals learned MINUSTAH was involved, trust in their operational capacity

In the book, Dallaire voices his discontent with the United Nations, especially for the lack of action taken by the Security Council. The mission was commanded from an understaffed and under-funded headquarters in New York, the DPKO. There were concerns regarding the need for soldiers and United Nations personnel that could be used to help maintain peace throughout the mission. The troops that were enlisted for the mission were to assist in ensuring the security of the capital city of Kigali; monitor the ceasefire agreement, the establishment of an expanded demilitarized zone (DMZ), and demobilization procedures, and monitor the security situation during the final period of the transitional Government's mandate leading up to elections; and assist with mine-clearance. The mission would also provide security for the repatriation of Rwandese refugees and displaced persons by assisting in humanitarian assistance and relief operations. Initially, Dallaire requested 5,500 men for the mission however; he was only allocated approximately 2,600 to use. Many of the 2,600 were underqualified, coming for several developing nations who took directions from their own officers rather than Dallaire. No nation would readily contribute to a mission in a country where there were no strategic national or, international interests and no major threats to international peace and security. There were only 2,538 UNAMIR military personnel on the

Upon its withdrawal in 1995, the UN left Somalia in mostly the same state it was in in 1992. The mission created the idea in future involvements not to cross the “Mogadishu line” from peacekeeping to war-fighting (Clarke). UNOSOM 2 also suffered 154 fatalities as well as major problems stemming from the complexity of its mandate and command and control issues, confusion over the appropriate rules of engagement (RoE), lack of effective intelligence gathering capabilities, and the huge challenges involved in a predominantly military mission being tasked with inherently political goals

At its formation, the UN had inherited financial problems from its predecessor – the League of Nations (McDermott, 2000). Seventy years down the lane, financial problems have been at the core of the UN activities in peacekeeping missions. Thus, the issue of budgetary crisis with regards to financing old and new peacekeeping operations continue to persist. According to McDermott (2000), peacekeeping “have been both the making and near breaking of the organization.” On one hand, peacekeeping expansion from traditional peacekeeping to peacekeeping and now peacebuilding have contributed to the exponential growth of the organization. On the other hand, the spread out of peacekeeping increases cost and have overly

The UN defines complex emergencies (CE) as, “a major humanitarian crisis, of a multi-causal nature that requires a system-wide response.” I set out to determine if public-health interventions in complex emergency settings are useful; if so, how can they be efficaciously implemented. I hypothesize that a triad of multilateral military actors, international health institutions, and civilian humanitarian organizations− working as a closely coordinated coalition will optimize health outcomes. Via an aggregation of current peer reviewed articles, I have found the most vital, practical and effective modules for health interventions in CEs. These modules

The fact that the United Nations failed to prevent the Rwandan genocide is unavoidable. Nevertheless, due to this atrocious event, the UN has learnt an important lesson so that it can avoid further more of genocides. The Rwandan genocide consisted around 800,000 Tutsi’s that got massacred by the Hutu extremists for 100 days. After the UN reflected and learned from the massacre in Rwanda, the UN announced to establish and work as Responsibility to Protect; To intervene when a country is involved with atrocious acts, such as genocides (Bryce-Pease, 2014). Romeo Dallaire, a former general of the United Nations Mission In Rwanda, argues that the UN has not learnt much or reformed its peacekeeping methods, since many conflicts still exists (Bryce-Pease,

Humanitarian aid during natural disasters is a little different from aid that is given during times of war. Access to humanitarian aid during times of war can be difficult due to many complex problems that can arise. The goal of humanitarian aid is to “save lives, alleviate suffering and maintain and protect human dignity during and in the aftermath of emergencies”, but problems arise when it comes to deciding who to help and where the lines are drawn for impartiality (“Humanitarian Aid” 1). Humanitarian organizations claim to work by the “principles of humanity, neutrality and impartiality”, but by doing this they may actually be altering the outcomes and prolonging the duration of wars, particularly for those in Bosnia and Rwanda (Wassenhove 4). There are several theories about why aid is thought to prolong wars, none of which have been studied enough to be proven.

Another failure of the Secretariat was that the UNAMIR mission was not supplied with enough resources. (1) The stats of their mission meant that they were only able to “monitor,” “assist,” and “investigate.” Although General Dallaire attempted to get cables through asking for changes in the mission’s mandate and a request for more troops to prevent a massacre, he was in instead given unclear or simple no directions. (11) This left the force unable to defence civilians, and themselves, and gave the Blue Helmets absolutely no chance to stop the killings from occurring. (2) The International community failed to provide what they stated would accompany the UNAMIR mission, which even before this failure would not have been equipped to handle a

Analysis of the UN paper “Contributing to the ANPDF:
The United Nations in Afghanistan working as one”

The first impact is the freedom to pursue the humanitarian assistance is disappearing because of the control of politic pressure to cure and give medical aid to a particular region, person or the obligation to not to do so. The second impact is looking from the perception of a population where humanitarian relief being exercised, If people from the battle zone notice the relation between one particular party and the humanitarian organization, it can lead to losing access from the community as well as staff insecurity in the fields (Barnett, 2005,

Measuring the effectiveness of the United Nations Peacekeeping Organization is daunting because of the evolving geopolitical atmosphere. It would be easier to measure its effectiveness in one situation in the past. In 1945, the United Nations charter is sensible (Trachman, 2005, p. 381). Encouraging states to work together and creating this forum for the superpowers to make decisions was theoretically ideal. But today the major threat does not come from one of the superpowers but terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, or a weaker rogue nation (Trachman, 2005, p. 382). All of which do not answer to the constraints of the UN Charter. It is this purpose of reviewing the past