Posted on 05/02/2004 4:01:01 PM PDT by blam
UN threatens authors of 'racy' exposé
By Charles Laurence in New York
(Filed: 02/05/2004)
The United Nations has threatened to fire two officials who wrote an expose of sleaze and corruption during its peacekeeping missions of the 1990s.
Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, is understood to have favoured an attempt to block publication of the memoir, Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures, a True Story from Hell on Earth, due to be published next month.
Still reeling from the Iraqi oil-for-food scandal, officials in the upper echelons of the UN are alarmed by the promised revelations of wild sex parties, petty corruption, and drug use - diversions that helped the peacekeepers to cope with alternating states of terror and boredom.
Other senior officials, however, have apparently argued that any attempt to gag the book's three co-authors - Heidi Postlewait and Andrew Thomson, who are still on the UN payroll, and Kenneth Cain, who is now a writer - would prompt more negative publicity.
Under UN staff rules, writers have to submit manuscripts for scrutiny. Authors can be disciplined if their work is not approved but they insist on publication.
Last week, a UN spokesman admitted that the book had been judged not to be within the interests of the organisation. "We can't stop them publishing, but the rule means that the two who still work for us can be disciplined and dismissed," he said.
The co-authors, who met in Cambodia in 1993 and later worked in Haiti, Kosovo, Liberia and Somalia, claim that petty corruption over expense accounts and living allowances was rife.
Ms Postlewait was in her early thirties when she went on her first trip abroad for the UN, supervising elections in Cambodia. There, she soon worked out that she could save enough money from her expense account to set herself up nicely back in New York. In other frauds, UN staff were said to quote blackmarket currency exchange rates to pad out their expenses.
The authors also complain that they encountered "bureaucratic betrayal" on missions, as the UN allegedly struck cynical deals with corrupt local officials.
One senior UN official who defended the book said that he believed it belonged in the "contemporary tradition of gritty war reporting", and would do little damage to the reputation of UN peacekeepers.
Last week, none of the three authors was available for comment. Mr Thomson, the son of missionaries, is in Cambodia, where he has built a house, and Mr Cain, a law school graduate from Harvard, is in Vietnam. The UN spokesman said that Ms Postlewait was travelling, but did not know her whereabouts.
Cigareetes, whiskey and wild wild women
They'll drive you crazy, they'll drive you insane;
Cigareetes, whiskey and wild wild women
They'll drive you crazy, they'll drive you insane.
Should read -- Still reeling in the Iraqui Oil-for-food scandal --
First President Bush has to win a second term.
Nice ditty!
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