There is a terrible irony to all this that the authors do not mention. The Bangladeshis now suffer from the largest mass outbreak of arsenic poisoning in the history of mankind, thanks to the wells in their country drilled (with the best of intentions, no doubt) by UNICEF. The arsenic was in the groundwater, and millions of Bangladeshis now suffer from chronic arsenic poisoning; and one in four deaths in Bangladesh has now been attributed to it.

Humanitarian action has thus imported mass poisoning into Bangladesh and humanitarian action has now exported cholera from it. Beware of internationalists trying to do good.

One cannot help but wonder whether Bangladeshi troops were used by the United Nations as a means of giving foreign aid, of killing two birds with one stone, as it were. But the whole episode could scarcely have been better designed to feed into Haitians’ paranoia about the designs of the rest of the world on their country.