KATHMANDU: The Nepalese army on Tuesday said it had reinforced protection of its peacekeepers in Haiti after they were attacked by crowds angry over a cholera outbreak blamed by some on the soldiers.
Two people were killed in the riots on Monday.
Nepal, which has more than 1,000 soldiers working with the United Nations mission in Haiti, said “false rumours” that its soldiers were to blame for the cholera could have been the reason they were targeted.
“We are concerned.
Our positions are being reinforced and Haitian police are helping the peacekeepers to protect themselves from attack,” army spokesman Ramindra Chhettri told AFP in Kathmandu.
The United Nations is investigating claims the cholera outbreak emanated from septic tanks at a camp near the central town of Mirebalais, where many of the Nepalese soldiers are based.
But Chhettri said tests carried out on Nepalese soldiers had proved they were not the source of the outbreak.
“These false rumours about the Nepalese peacekeepers could be one of the reasons for the violence. The test results may not have been adequately publicised among the local people,” he said.
Less than a month after Haiti’s first cholera outbreak in half a century, the number of confirmed fatalities stands at 917 and is rising by more than 50 a day. There have been almost 15,000 infections.
Most deaths have been in central and northern Haiti, with the disease not yet widespread in the capital Port-au-Prince, which was badly damaged in a January quake that killed 250,000 people and left over a million homeless.
