Port-au-Prince - Protesters in Haiti who blamed United Nations peacekeepers for the epidemic of cholera there rioted in two cities on Monday, hurling rocks and setting fire to a police station, police and eyewitnesses said.
In the country's second city of Cap-Haitien on the north coast, the demonstrators torched a police station after confronting UN troops, while in Hinche in the central region, they pelted Nepalese UN peacekeepers with stones.
“The whole city is blocked, businesses and schools have closed, cars have been burned. It's chaos here,” a local businessman in Cap-Haitien, Georgesmain Prophete, told Reuters. There were no immediate details of any casualties.
A cholera epidemic, which broke out last month, has killed more than 900 people in the poor earthquake-hit Caribbean country, and the UN mission has repeatedly denied widespread rumours that Nepalese UN troops quartered in the central region brought the deadly disease to Haiti.
The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has said DNA testing shows the cholera strain in Haiti is most closely related to a strain from South Asia.
But neither the CDC, the United Nations or the Haitian government has linked the outbreak to the Nepalese.
Experts say that while Haiti's poverty and poor sanitation have been major factors in the spread of the outbreak, cholera had been absent from the country for decades. But they said it would prove very difficult to trace the source with certainty, or determine how it had re-entered the country after such a long absence.
Local reporters in Hinche said protesters stoned the Nepalese UN peacekeepers there, yelling for them to leave the country.
Joany Caneus, director of police for the northern region where Cap-Haitien is located, said the anti-UN demonstrators there set fire to the Pont Neuf police station.
“You can imagine how difficult it is when we cannot have the usual back-up of the UN troops, because they themselves are in difficulty,” he told Reuters. He added the UN peacekeepers in the city had asked for a Haitian police patrol to be posted in front of their headquarters.
The more than 12 000-strong UN peacekeeping contingent in Haiti is preparing to provide security for presidential and legislative elections on November 28, and UN and government officials have so far insisted the polls will go ahead despite the spreading cholera epidemic. - Reuters