 Book Reviews
with Robin Osborne
Emergency Sex (And Other Desperate Measures)
By Kenneth Cain, Heidi Postlewait & Andrew Thomson
Ebury Press $34.95
 A recent news despatch from Haiti told of UN forces and Haitian police trying to disarm gangs ahead of elections later this year: 'UN peacekeepers in armoured vehicles made high-speed sweeps... amid a surge of violence that has killed hundreds since September, including two UN peacekeepers.'
Such scenarios feature in this disturbing book, not only in Haiti, where in 1993 the same thugs were let off the hook by the UN and the US, but in other major hotspots like Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda and Liberia.
New Zealand doctor, Andrew Thomson, recounts how America and the UN pulled back from helping the Haitians because of America's recent humiliation by the Somalian warlord, Aideed, in whose country a US-led peacekeeping force had met with various setbacks, including the 'Blackhawk Down' fiasco.
Dr Thomson and his co-authors, a Harvard-trained lawyer with a human rights bent and an administrative staffer, met in Cambodia where the world body was overseeing an election that brought thousands of UN staffers to the ravaged country.
Coming together in other trouble spots, often under fire or confronted with the corpses of genocide victims, they became deeply disillusioned with the UN bureaucracy and are now whistle-blowers at a time when the organisation is rocked by sex scandals involving peacekeeping troops in Africa, Europe and East Timor.
The three-part narrative describes operational events as well as personal survival techniques, including alcohol, partying and the sex of the title. Heidi Postlewait gets most of the sexual action and writes frankly about her casual, sometimes urgent, affairs as well as serious relationships with a Somali and a Haitian.
But the UN's lack of will commands most attention, starting with the abandonment of the Haitians to a brutal dictatorship. Reflecting on the failure of the UN (with today's Secretary-General Kofi Annan as head of peacekeeping operations) to prevent massacres in Rwanda, where 800,000 Tutsi people were slaughtered by the Hutu-led regime, Bosnia and Liberia, the doctor writes, 'If blue-helmeted UN 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. I learned that the day we were evacuated from Haiti.'
The trio pulls no punches in detailing how the UN's operations are flawed and morally corrupt, suggesting the rot goes right to the top. Yet it is the authors who have been disciplined.
- Books reviewed are available at Book Warehouse, Keen Street, Lismore.
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