Anjali Sharma
GG News Bureau
UNITED NATIONS, 1st May. According to UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric on Tuesday said that Bangladesh on Tuesday has agreed to join an international force that will operate independently of the UN to help restore law and order in Haiti, which has seen gang violence and chaos.
He told reporters that Bangladesh is one of the 6 nations that have written to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres that they will contribute personnel to the Multinational Security Support Mission in Haiti,
UN Security Council authorized the creation of the MSSM mission to help the situation in Haiti by helping its national political force by invoking the UN Charter provisions for maintaining peace.
UN is taking a hands-off approach this time, authorizing a force that will operate independently and not as a UN peacekeeping mission.
The other countries in the Kenya-led force are the Bahamas, Barbados, Benin, Chad, and Jamaica, Mr. Dujarric noted.
Bangladesh is taking a bold step in joining the mission in Haiti after the catastrophic end to the previous UN mission with military peacekeepers ended in 2017 because of accusations that Nepali troops introduced a strain of cholera from South Asia that killed 9,792 Haitians and sickened more than 810,000, according to the WHO.
MINUSTAH was ineffective in bringing peace to the country contributing to its demise.
A smaller mission without the military component that followed ended in 2019.
The armed gangs run several parts in Haiti including Port-au-Prince, and several thousands have perished in the violence that has destabilized the country.
Over 362,000 Haitians have been displaced by gang activity, according to the UN, and 1.4 of its 11.5 million people are threatened by famine, and four million face “acute food insecurity”.
There were few takers because of the history of ill-fated international interventions in Haiti.
Kenya offered to lead the mission but had to overcome court challenges within the country before it could take charge.
Prime Minister Ariel Henry fled the country in February, resigned last week while in exile in the US.
A National Transitional Council with representatives of political parties and civil society groups was immediately created with Finance Minister Michel Patrick Boisvert as interim Prime Minister to find a more enduring solution.
The assassination of President Jovenel Moise in 2021 was one of the milestones in the descent into chaos of Haiti which suffered under decades of brutal dictatorship under the Duvalier family and after its overthrow in 1986 has gone through a military coup and violence that punctuated feeble attempts at democracy.
UN set up $400 million trust fund to help the victims of the cholera epidemic blamed on Nepali peacekeepers but it has collected only 5% of that amount.
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