Haiti’s Cholera Kills Thousands, WikiLeaks Publishes US Diplomatic Cables, North Korea Shells a South Korean Island and Tunisia’s Protests Begin

Jamaica Homes Global Conflict & Caribbean Impact Review | Published 3 January 2011 | Reporting Period: 3 October – 2 January 2011

Quarterly Briefing

• Haiti’s cholera epidemic, which began in October, has killed over 2,000 people by year’s end and infected over 90,000; the disease emerged in the Central Plateau, spread rapidly through a country whose water infrastructure was already devastated by the January earthquake, and is now a second humanitarian catastrophe running concurrently with earthquake recovery.
• WikiLeaks begins releasing 250,000 classified US State Department diplomatic cables on November 28; the “Cablegate” release reveals candid American assessments of world leaders, diplomatic negotiating positions and sensitive intelligence; governments from Moscow to Riyadh to Kingston react with a mixture of fury and embarrassment.
• North Korea fires artillery shells at the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong on November 23, killing two South Korean marines and two civilians; the attack, the first against South Korean civilian territory since the Korean War, triggers an intense military and diplomatic crisis.
• Tunisia’s protests begin on December 17 when Mohammed Bouazizi, a street vendor whose produce cart has been confiscated, sets himself on fire in the town of Sidi Bouzid; demonstrations spread rapidly across the country through the end of December and into January.
• Ivory Coast descends into a political crisis after incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo refuses to accept defeat in the November 28 run-off election; the UN, ECOWAS and France recognise Alassane Ouattara as the winner; Gbagbo’s refusal threatens to reopen the country’s civil war.
• South Sudan’s independence referendum, agreed under the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, is scheduled for January 9; the south is expected to vote overwhelmingly for separation, which would create Africa’s newest state and potentially spark a conflict over oil-rich border territories.

Prologue: A Caribbean Crisis Hidden Inside a Humanitarian One

The final quarter of 2010 opened with Haiti still buried in the rubble of the January 12 earthquake — over 220,000 dead, 1.5 million displaced, reconstruction barely begun — and added cholera to the list of catastrophes afflicting the hemisphere’s poorest nation. The epidemic’s origin and spread became a political controversy in itself: United Nations investigators subsequently confirmed that the disease had been introduced to Haiti’s Artibonite river by a Nepalese MINUSTAH peacekeeping contingent, a finding that generated legal action against the UN and deep bitterness in Haiti about the organisation that was supposed to be helping rather than harming. Beyond Haiti, the quarter produced a global transparency shock in the form of WikiLeaks’ diplomatic cables, a North Korean military escalation that briefly raised fears of Korean War resumption and the first visible tremors of what would become the Arab Spring. For Jamaica and the Caribbean, the dominant story was Haiti’s: a neighbour’s suffering was both a moral obligation and a regional vulnerability that the quarter made measurably worse.

Haiti’s Cholera Crisis

Cholera had been absent from Haiti for nearly a century when the first cases were confirmed in the Artibonite Valley in mid-October 2010. The disease, which kills through dehydration caused by severe diarrhoea and vomiting, spread with extraordinary speed through a population without functioning water treatment infrastructure. By the end of December, over 2,000 people had died and the epidemic was accelerating. The capital Port-au-Prince, where hundreds of thousands still lived in tent camps with no sanitation following the earthquake, was particularly vulnerable. Aid organisations that had been focusing on earthquake reconstruction pivoted to emergency cholera response; oral rehydration therapy and water purification tablets were distributed but the infrastructure to prevent transmission — clean water and sanitation — would take years to build.

For the Caribbean region, Haiti’s cholera epidemic represented both a humanitarian emergency and a disease-spread concern. CARICOM member states reviewed their own water and sanitation protocols; Jamaica’s Ministry of Health issued advisories for travellers and provided technical support to Haitian counterparts. The epidemic reinforced the case for sustained regional investment in Haitian public health infrastructure rather than the episodic emergency responses that each successive catastrophe had produced.

WikiLeaks, Korea and the Ivory Coast

The WikiLeaks diplomatic cables, released in coordination with The Guardian, New York Times, Der Spiegel and other news organisations from 28 November, provided an unprecedented window into American foreign policy’s private reality. Cables revealed that Arab leaders, including Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, had privately urged the United States to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities; that American diplomats had assessed the Chinese government’s online censorship capabilities with concern; that State Department personnel had been instructed to collect biometric and travel data on foreign officials at the UN; and, closer to the Caribbean, that American assessments of regional governments were frank in ways that official statements were not. The publication created diplomatic incidents globally and prompted renewed debate about classified information, national security and press freedom.

North Korea’s artillery strike on Yeonpyeong on 23 November — the first North Korean attack on South Korean civilian territory since the armistice of 1953 — produced an immediate military response from South Korean forces and intense diplomatic activity from the United States and China. South Korea held military exercises; the United States deployed the aircraft carrier George Washington to the Yellow Sea; China urged restraint from all sides while refraining from condemning the attack publicly. The crisis subsided over December without further military exchanges, but the underlying tension of a nuclear-armed state with an erratic leadership remained unresolved.

Looking Ahead

Tunisia’s protests are barely two weeks old as this edition publishes; whether they will produce political change or be suppressed is entirely unclear. South Sudan’s referendum on 9 January will almost certainly produce a vote for independence; the international community’s ability to manage the transition and prevent conflict over oil-rich border territories will be tested in the months following. Ivory Coast’s Gbagbo shows no sign of yielding; the scenario of a return to civil war in West Africa’s cocoa-producing heartland has real commodity market implications. Haiti’s cholera epidemic will intensify before it abates; the international community’s commitment to the country’s recovery must be sustained rather than renewed only in moments of acute crisis. And the world enters 2011 with the Middle East’s authoritarian order showing its first visible cracks — though whether those cracks will widen into the structural collapse that the next quarter will reveal is not yet apparent.

Jamaica Homes Global Conflict & Caribbean Impact Review is published quarterly, examining how wars, geopolitical tensions and major international crises have shaped Jamaica, the Caribbean and their economies.

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