Sex, drugs and peace missions book riles UN chiefs
Tuesday June 1st 2004 - Irish Independent
THREE United Nations fieldworkers are publishing details of sex, drugs and corruption inside UN missions, despite a UN attempt to block their book.
'Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures: A True Story from Hell on Earth' chronicles the experiences of a doctor, a human rights official and a secretary in UN operations in Cambodia, Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, Liberia and Bosnia.
The controversial volume, due out next week, charges that some UN officials demanded that 15pc of their local staff's salaries go directly to them instead; that Bulgaria sent freed criminals to serve as peacekeepers and that incompetent UN security has cost lives.
Their first-person account of a decade in UN service also includes candid details of drug use - particularly a marijuana cocktail called "The Space Shuttle" - and casual sex."Almost a million civilians [whom] our peacekeepers were supposed to protect died in two genocides," Andrew Thomson, one of the co-authors said.The three fieldworkers do much good work - monitoring elections in Cambodia, visiting a Haitian prison, exhuming a mass grave in Bosnia - and the book never quite overcomes their latent sense of self-congratulation.
But as they are hurled into one crisis after another they become increasingly demoralised.
Particularly galling to them is the murder in Mogadishu in Somalia of a young American colleague, shot dead as he rode in a UN convoy.
Kenneth Cain, an American human rights official, complains bitterly that the board of inquiry ignored failings in UN security.
"The board is stacked with UN officials who oversee security," he writes. "I don't trust these f***s for a second to truly investigate and hold one of their own accountable."
After he is evacuated from Haiti because of worsening violence, Dr Thomson advises readers: "If blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers show up in your town or village and offer to protect you, run."
Bulgaria has denied that it sent freed prisoners as peacekeepers to Cambodia but some of the other allegations in the book have effectively been substantiated.
For instance an inquiry into the bombing of the UN office in Baghdad last year found the whole UN security system to be "dysfunctional".(© The Times, London)
James Bone
in New York
© Irish Independent
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