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PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti Anti-U.N. riots rocked several Haitian cities and towns on Monday, led by demonstrators who blame a contingent of Nepalese peacekeepers for a deadly outbreak of cholera. Protesters barricaded roads, burned cars and exchanged gunfire with U.N. soldiers, leaving cities impassable into the night.
A demonstrator was shot and killed by a United Nations peacekeeper during an exchange of gunfire in Quartier Morin, near Haiti's second-largest city of Cap-Haitien, the U.N. mission said. The mission said it was investigating the incident but asserted that the soldier was acting in self-defense.
The 12,000-member force also reported that at least six U.N. personnel were wounded in protests at Hinche in the central plateau. Radio Kiskeya reported them to be Nepalese soldiers. Radio Metropole said at least 12 Haitians were injured in Cap-Haitien.
The cholera backlash plays upon some Haitians' longstanding resentment of the 12,000-member military mission, which has been the dominant security force in Haiti since 2004. It is rooted both in fear of a disease previously unknown to Haiti and internationally shared suspicion that the U.N. base could have been a source of the infection that has now left nearly 1,000 dead.
Cholera had never before been documented in Haiti before it broke out about three weeks ago. Suspicions quickly surround a Nepalese base located on the Artibonite River system, where the outbreak started. The soldiers arrived there in October following outbreaks in their home country and about a week before Haiti's epidemic was discovered.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the strain now ravaging the country matched a strain specific to South Asia, but said they had not pinpointed its origin or how it arrived in Haiti.
Following an Associated Press investigation, the U.N. acknowledged that there were sanitation problems at the base, but says its soldiers were not responsible for the outbreak. No formal or independent investigation has taken place despite calls from Haitian human-rights groups and U.S. health care experts.
The country's health ministry made the announcement on Tuesday, setting the official death toll at 1,034. The figures are dated Sunday and presented after two days of review.
Aid workers say official figures may understate the epidemic. While the ministry of health says more than 16,700 people have been hospitalized nationwide, Doctors Without Borders reports that its clinics alone have treated more than 12,000.
Transmitted by feces, the disease can be all but prevented if people have access to safe drinking water and regularly wash their hands.
President Rene Preval addressed the nation on Sunday to dispel myths and educate people on good sanitation and hygiene.
But sanitary conditions don't exist in much of Haiti, and more than 14,600 people have hospitalized as the disease has spread across the countryside and to nearly all the country's major population centers, including the capital, Port-au-Prince. Doctors Without Borders and other medical aid groups have expressed concern that the outbreak could eventually sicken hundreds of thousands of people.
In the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, health officials banned used clothing from being sold in outdoor markets along the shared border as a precautionary measure to stop the disease's spread.
Violent protests over cholera break out in Haiti, U.N. peacekeepers wounded | cleveland.com
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