U.N. peacekeeping failures chronicled in book

By Maggie Farley
Los Angeles Times

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Andrew Thomson, a doctor, wanted to save lives. Kenneth Cain, a human-rights lawyer, wanted to save the world. Heidi Postlewait, a secretary, just wanted to save some money and leave her broken marriage behind.

The three U.N. staffers came together at a rooftop party in Phnom Penh in 1993, during the heady days when the world body was organizing democratic elections in Cambodia. Fired up by a marijuana-and-rum combo called the space shuttle, they began to think maybe the United Nations really could change the world.

But amid the euphoria were glimpses of the chaos ahead. First came the wild contingent of peacekeepers from Bulgaria, allegedly recruited from prisons and mental hospitals to fill the U.N. quota. "A battalion of criminal lunatics arrive in a lawless land," Cain observes in a book the three have written on their experiences. "They're drunk as sailors, rape vulnerable Cambodian women and crash their U.N. Land Cruisers with remarkable frequency."

Six years later, after stints in Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda and Liberia, the three came to believe that not only was the United Nations unable to keep pace with its grand ideals in the new world order, it actually allowed genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia. They coped by immersing themselves in their work, alcohol, faith and "emergency sex."

The three chronicled their precipitous slide from buoyant idealism to hard-bitten cynicism in "Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures," a best seller published this year by Miramax that has outraged U.N. officials and nearly cost Thomson and Postlewait their jobs. (Cain had already quit.)

But the United Nations' censure has only won the book more publicity — and a six-figure deal with Miramax TV to make a television series.

The three consider themselves whistle-blowers. Top U.N. officials think of them as disloyal. As the United Nations makes moves to garnish their royalties from the book and TV deals, the controversy raises this question: Are they the worst kind of U.N. employees — or the best?

"Frankly, we found it a sensational and selective account of peacekeeping," U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard said. It certainly contains lots of sex. Cain, then an earnest, twentysomething Harvard Law grad, describes a lover teaching him the French word for orgasm. Thomson relates how when he was courting the woman who became his wife, he could not get the stench of corpses out of his pores no matter how many 90-minute showers he took. Even in her embrace, he could not escape his ghosts.

But it is Postlewait's encounters that give the book its title — and have grabbed the greatest attention. At the time of her escapades, she was a tall 30ish redhead from New Jersey with heavy-lidded eyes, freshly divorced and ready for adventure.

After a near miss in a sniper attack in Somalia, Postlewait finds sudden consolation with a Somali U.N. interpreter after they dive for cover in an abandoned vendor's shack. "And then the strangest thing happens," she writes. "I want to rip my clothes off, rip Yusuf's clothes off ... right there. I can feel this pounding inside me and I can't wait. It has to be right now, not in 10 minutes, not five. Now. An emergency. Emergency sex."
 
Postlewait's sexual encounters provide a raw insight into the alienation, connection and betrayal that come with trying to live a normal life against the backdrop of mortar attacks, sniper fire and chaos.

Between missions, she has a weeklong tryst with a Masai tribesman she meets on a Kenyan beach — and then has to decide whether to pay him. Is he a prostitute or just a lucky guy? She has an extended affair with Yusuf, the interpreter, until his best friend tells her she must become his second wife or break it off.

But it's not the descriptions of sex that have dismayed U.N. officials. It is the trio's portrayal of the failures of peacekeeping and the betrayal of trust by an organization dedicated to saving lives.

Thomson, who spent two years pulling bodies out of mass graves in Rwanda and the Bosnian town of Srebrenica — corpses of people who had sought safety with the United Nations — concludes: "If blue-helmeted U.N. peacekeepers show up in your town or village and offer to protect you, run. Or else get weapons. Your lives are worth so much less than theirs."

Although U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who has led a campaign to reform peacekeeping since the Rwanda and Srebrenica massacres occurred under his watch, deemed the book "not so bad," other U.N. officials have been highly critical.

"It is an unfair and outdated image of the United Nations in peacekeeping," said Shashi Tharoor, the undersecretary-general for public information, who was responsible for peacekeeping operations in the former Yugoslav federation during part of the five-year span the book covers. "It reflects a period when the U.N. was scrambling — we went from 5,000 people to 80,000 in two years. Peacekeeping was trying to catch up with itself, and that was like trying to fix the engine on a moving train."

Thomson calls it reforming from within and thinks the book should be required reading for new staff members preparing to go on a mission.

"We didn't start out to write a scandalous book about the U.N.," Thomson said. "But it is a scandal that almost a million civilians, who our peacekeepers had promised to protect, were killed in Rwanda and Srebrenica," Thomson said.

"I find it very difficult that not a single U.N. official in the secretariat was investigated or disciplined for those failures," he said. "And when you put that in the context of Heidi and myself being reprimanded and threatened with dismissal, I find it outrageous."

To the trio's collective surprise, the book has served as much as a recruiting tool for the United Nations as a lightning rod for the world body's critics.