U.N. missions painted as booze-soaked orgies

NEW YORK -- A book by three current and former U.N. employees about peacekeeping operations portrays wild parties with alcohol and drugs, and convicts and mental-asylum inmates passing as soldiers. Embarrassed U.N. officials have threatened firing or other disciplinary action against two of the authors, Heidi Postlewait and Andrew Thomson. U.N. rules bar employees from writing about their work without approval, which had been denied in this case. The third author, former U.N. employee Kenneth Cain, works full time as a writer. The book, "Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Matters," covers the authors' experiences during the mid-1990s in Cambodia, Somalia and Haiti and paints unflattering pictures of the operations and the peacekeepers. It is due out on June 1. The U.N. peacekeepers sent to Cambodia in 1993 to restore normalcy and supervise open elections, resembled "the international jet set on vacation," writes Mr. Cain, a Harvard law-school graduate.

Embarrassed U.N. officials have threatened firing or other disciplinary action against two of the authors, Heidi Postlewait and Andrew Thomson. U.N. rules bar employees from writing about their work without approval, which had been denied in this case.

G** Damn totalitarian fascists! Why the H*** are we still dealing with these low-lifes? They are NOTHING like us! We admit our faults and try to fix them. These ANIMALS want to control everything like the dictators they are! I will NEVER vote for Kerry, and I will shout down any DemoCrat FOOL!

A favorite drink among the U.N. personnel at the parties was the "Space Shuttle." It was made "by distilling a pound of marijuana over a six-week period with increasingly good quality spirits. It is a work of love, and the final product is an amber-colored liquid that tastes like cognac. We drink it with rounds of Coke."

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They're drunk as sailors, rape vulnerable Cambodian women and crash their U.N. Land Cruisers with remarkable frequency."

Without going into the merits of the accusations in the book, U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard conceded that the United Nations does not have a system to "verify" the credentials of troops offered for peacekeeping.
"When it comes to formed military units, we rely on the donor country to give us professional soldiers. ... There is not a quality-control test, and units vary in the degree of their training from country to country, even from unit to unit," he said.
Dr. Thomson, a U.N. physician, says in the book that he was sent to Haiti in mid-1993 to investigate human rights violations by the junta of Gen. Raoul Cedras.
In the country just a month, Dr. Thomson complained: "I'm already enraged, not by the work, but being unable to work. My patients are all either headless and rotting or alive and rotting, out of reach behind prison walls."
As conditions worsened, the United Nations decided on a pullout and sent Dr. Thomson to the nearby Dominican Republic.
"The U.N. yanked us out against our will into this catatonic tropical suburbia, this retirement home for failed humanitarians, leaving us sidelined with no way back in," he wrote.
Mr. Eckhard said a decision on whether to discipline the authors is "a political decision, but the authors have violated staff rules."
But he acknowledged that the world organization has no legal recourse to stop the publication of the book. A spokesman for the publisher, Miramax Books, said the company is not bound by obligations between the United Nations and the authors. ~ Washington Times May 27, 2004 Pg. 1; U.N. Missions Painted As Booze-Soaked Orgies; By Stewart Stogel, The Washington Times

I was a bit suprised to read of the advanced reviews of this book.. I had the opportunity to spend some time around peacekeepers in Kosovo and found them a dedicated and special breed of people who go to places that are in various states of chaos and brave it out for the mission.

They are not soldiers, these are UN employees. In Kosovo, they went in right after the fighting ended. They lived in poor conditions as the Kosovans did, no heat, hot water or running drinking water. Constant threat of violence, poor communications home. They may have been there for sex and orgies, but I did not see any, nor was it ever mentioned. As a matter of fact, many were married and some had families who had joined them in theatre. Their prime mission seemed to be to help bring peace and stability to a place that was torn literally in half.

Just my thoughts from some one who was there..

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