The United Nations will not move Nepalese peacekeepers out of Haiti despite deadly protests over accusations that they caused a cholera epidemic, a top UN official said on Tuesday.
"As of on Tuesday, there are no plans to move them out," Tony Banbury, UN assistant secretary general for field planning, said when asked about the future of the Nepalese contingent of just over 1,000 troops and police.
The Nepalese in the northern city of Cap-Haitien have been under special protection since demonstrations started last week in which at least two people died.
Some protesters have accused the Nepalese of bringing the cholera which has killed nearly 1,350 people. Nepal's UN mission has called the accusations "malicious".
"The country is suffering, there are people dying. It is natural that Haitians want to know what the source is," said Mr Banbury, who has been closely involved in the UN mission in Haiti since the devastating earthquake in January in which 250,000 people perished.
"But we don't know and I understand from the epidemiologists that it is hard to determine. different, very professional experts are pointing in very different directions," the UN official added.
"We have to focus on the response, as important as it is to figure out where it came from."
"Every minute we waste on doing something like this probably means Haitians are going to die. This is a really big emergency and the actual numbers of deaths and reported cases are significantly larger than the reported numbers — so more people are dying than we realize and more people are contracting it," Mr Banbury said.
UN spokesmen have stressed that tests carried out at the Nepalese camp in Cap-Haitien have all been negative.