NEW YORK, January 8 (Sputnik) — As Haitians prepare to mark the fifth anniversary of an earthquake that claimed some 230,000 lives, pressure groups are warning that donors and the UN are failing survivors on the impoverished Caribbean island.
"Five years ago the eyes of the world were on Haiti after the devastating earthquake tore lives apart and left more than two million people homeless. Sadly, since then the world's interest has waned while tens of thousands of people remain destitute and homeless," Chiara Liguori, of the UK-based rights group Amnesty International, said in a statement.
Meanwhile, the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux in Haiti, has criticized the United Nations for failing to respond to a subsequent cholera epidemic that has sickened more than 720,000 Haitians and killed 8,700 others, the rights group says.
"The cholera epidemic is an excellent sincerity test for the UN, and the UN has flunked that test," said the group's lawyer Mario Joseph in a statement. "Cholera is a man-made disaster that could have been easily avoided by minimally adequate sanitation at the UN bases, or stopped with 19th Century technology."
The ongoing Haiti cholera outbreak began in mid-October 2010. It has been deemed the worst epidemic of cholera in recent history by the US Center for Disease Control and prevention.
