During his speech before the U.N. General Assembly, Haitian Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe called on the United Nations to take responsibility for the cholera outbreak that has killed more than 8,000 Haitians and sickened more than 600,000. The disease strain has been traced to U.N. peacekeepers from Nepal who deployed after Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake, but the United Nations has refused to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation sought by victims and family members. Outside the United Nations, dozens of people gathered to condemn the U.N. role.

Jimy Mertune, protester: “With the cholera in Haiti, where the issue was already a poor country, it became worse because we didn’t have the infrastructure. And it’s crazy that the water that we consider as life has become something that we fear to drink because we don’t have clean water. So, the effect — the implications are even more, more than what we even put in the media, because certain things we cannot record. It’s definitely a crisis in this country where 6 percent of this nation is being affected by this epidemic.”