Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations visited Haiti on Monday and sought to assure Haitians that he was committed to ending a cholera epidemic “as quickly as possible,” but he did not acknowledge his organization’s possible complicity in causing it, the subject of at least two lawsuits filed in the United States. In a speech in Los Palmas, a village ravaged by the disease, Mr. Ban called the visit “a necessary pilgrimage” that was aimed at expressing solidarity with the cholera victims. He has been seeking to raise $2.2 billion to eradicate cholera, which has killed more than 8,000 people in Haiti since 2010. It was absent from the country for nearly 100 years until after the January 2010 earthquake. Forensic studies have identified the cholera bacteria as an Asian strain carried by Nepalese members of a United Nations peacekeeping force in Haiti. Stanley N. Alpert, a lawyer representing Haitian victims in a lawsuit, called the secretary general’s speech “devoid of any sense of responsibility for the fact that the U.N. brought the cholera to Haiti and it should have gone into overdrive to shut it down.”
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