Anti-UN riots hit Haiti, blame UN troops for cholera

PORT-AU-PRINCE, (Reuters) – Protesters in Haiti who  blamed United Nations peacekeepers for the epidemic of cholera  there rioted in two cities today, 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 U.N. troops, while in Hinche in the central region,  they pelted Nepalese U.N. 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 U.N. mission has repeatedly denied widespread  rumors that Nepalese U.N. troops quartered in the central  region brought the deadly disease to Haiti.
The U.S. Centers 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 U.N. 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-U.N. 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 U.N. troops, because they themselves  are in difficulty,” he told Reuters. He added the U.N.  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 U.N. peacekeeping contingent in  Haiti is preparing to provide security for presidential and  legislative elections on Nov. 28, and U.N. and government  officials have so far insisted the polls will go ahead despite  the spreading cholera epidemic.