UN peacekeeping - sometimes the definition of failure

[Sea Skimmer]

If it had been US troops at Srebrenica we’d all be recalling now about how the US Army accidentally killed hundreds of refuges with air strikes and artillery while defeating Serb mechanized troops. But then this is a major reason why the US would rather not get involved in UN peacekeeping operations at all; we'd actually fight back when people shoot at us. The UN blue caps usually have a mission that for one reason or another boils down to observe and report.

[Lord Zentei]

The US would have never been retarded enough to deploy a major military ground force in a situation that hostile with no goddamn ammunition and then ordered its forces not to fight least GASP... they take casualties!

I love the comparison people are making with Mogadishu though, when the entire US problem was being too aggressive in complete and utter contrast to Srebrenica when the UN force was literally worth then useless, it ended up actively aiding the genocide after having created ideal conditions for it to take place in.

Until the UN addresses its shortcomings, this will keep happening. But they can't do that until they acknowledge that there is a problem. With the attitude that the UN somehow, by dint of its nature, defines international law, rather than just being a forum in which international law is implemented, then that's not likely to happen.

[someone_else]

Yeah it kind of is relevant when the country has not had a cholera outbreak in 50 years of massed poor people

Haitian record-keeping isn't exactly up to the task of saying there was no case of cholera in the last 50 years (they didn't even had death certificates before 1997), but there are estimates that 2 or so million die from waterborne diseases each year.

[Sea Skimmer]

They've had plenty of foreign medical personal around who would have noticed any cholera; as this very outbreak shows if the disease appears it would spread like wildfire. Haiti having 2 million water disease deaths per year, out of 9.7 million people? I don't think so. About 80,000 people a year die from all causes in Haiti according to the CIA factbook. Certainly not a healthy place but cholera is a very nasty disease in its own right.

[Slacker]

I think he was saying 2 million die from water borne diseases per year worldwide.