Posted on 05/27/2004 11:43:05 AM PDT by tjwmason
Thursday, May 27, 2004
A tell-all book by two U.N. employees and one former U.N. staffer details regular drug-induced Friday night sex parties in Cambodia and peacekeeping forces comprised of convicts and mental-asylum inmates who were often drunk on assignment and raped local women at will, the Washington Times reports.
Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures: A True Story From Hell on Earth is due to appear in bookstores June 1. The book cites the authors' experiences in the mid-1990s on assignments in Cambodia, Haiti and Somalia.
The two authors who are currently U.N. employees, Heidi Postlewait and U.N. physician Andrew Thomson, have been threatened by embarrassed U.N. officials with termination or other disciplinary action. U.N. rules bar employees from writing about their experiences without approval, which the authors did not have. The third author, former U.N. employee Kenneth Cain, works full time as a writer.
The authors describe Friday night sex parties in a villa in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, at which alcohol and drugs were common. U.N. personnel reportedly had a favorite drink, the "space shuttle," which was made with a pound of distilled marijuana.
In another chapter, the writers detail how Bulgarian peacekeepers in Cambodia were not actually trained soldiers. The book says the Bulgarian government, strapped for hard currency, offered a deal to inmates, pledging them pardons if they accepted a six-month assignment in Cambodia. For sending troops, the U.N. would give Bulgaria financial compensation.
"The Bulgarians wanted the money but didn't want to send their best-trained troops. So ... they offered inmates in the prisons and psychiatric wards a deal: Put on a uniform and go to Cambodia for six months, you're free on return," a passage from the book says.
Scores of criminals accepted the offer, the authors say.
The Bulgarians are "a battalion of criminal lunatics (who) arrive in a lawless land. They're drunk as sailors, rape vulnerable Cambodian women and crash their U.N. land cruisers with remarkable frequency," Cain says.
Yesterday, the Bulgarian Embassy denied the accusations. "It is totally untrue that the mission was made up of prisoners," Ambassador Elena Poptodorova said. "Its members were reservists and they were led by military commanders. Our regular army units were forbidden by law from undertaking foreign assignments at that time," she said.
Poptodorova contended that Bulgaria would not have undertaken the assignment because it needed hard currency since "U.N. compensation for our expenses came much later."
She acknowledged there were some problems with Bulgarian peacekeepers but insisted they were "the exception rather than the rule."
U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard said the United Nations does not have a system to "verify" the background or professionalism of the troops countries donate as peacekeepers.
Thomson details in the book his frustrations in Haiti in 1993 when he was dispatched to investigate human rights abuses by the junta of General Raoul Cedras. After being in the country a month, Thomson says, "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."
Despite the needs in Haiti, the United Nations pulled out of the country when conditions deteriorated, and sent Thompson to neighboring 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.
The decision whether and how to discipline the authors is "a political decision, but the authors have violated staff rules," Eckhard said.
However, he conceded the United Nations has no legal ability to stop the book's publication (Stewart Stogel, Washington Times, May 27).
Holding my breath for the media's wall to wall coverage of this... [inhaling now- hhhhhhoooooooppppp]
The SacBee has not run a single story on the UN oil for food issue in the last three months.
I just cannot fathom why so many in the media put so much faith in the UN. What specifically about the existing organization equates to legitimacy in international affairs?
Destroy the UN and let the bottom feeders sort themselves out. Advanced societies can continue to evolve and prosper. Humans managed to achieve quite a bit before hte UN came along. We'll manage without it.
The saga continues .....
Nice.
The drinking, drugs, sex, theft, embezzlement, skimming, extortion, blackmail, rape and very bad driving are considered, in the UN organization, to be on-the-job training for when a UNer is promoted to the home office in NYC.
My copy was just sent out today..cant wait!
So if this book shows up on the NYTimes Best Sellers list...
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