Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures
EMERGENCY SEX AND OTHER DESPERATE MEASURES: ...
EMERGENCY SEX AND OTHER DESPERATE MEASURES:
A True Story from Hell on Earth.
By Kenneth Cain, Heidi Postlewait, and Andrew Thomson. Miramax. 304 pp. $25.95
In the 1990s, as the number of United Nations peacekeeping and observer missions ballooned, hundreds of young people from the United States and elsewhere signed on. Some sought escape, adventure, and a substantial paycheck; others aspired to serve God by serving humanity; and a fair number—reciting “new world order” like a mantra—wanted to be part of the big effort to spread democracy.
At first, making peace seemed to be all about making love under an intense tropical sun, trying on different cultures like so many exotic outfits, living in colonial houses with cooks and maids, and partying with abandon and guiltless pleasure, secure in the knowledge that they were serving a righteous cause. Then came the spectacular failures of UN peacekeeping in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Rwanda.
The three authors—Kenneth Cain, a Harvard-trained lawyer, Heidi Postlewait, a New York social worker, and Andrew Thomson, a New Zealand doctor—met and became friends during their UN service. They tell of first arriving in conflict zones in half-disbelief. “I’m in a movie,” Cain marvels as a Black Hawk helicopter takes him to Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993. When UN colleagues there start to die, “it’s not real,” he thinks. “It’s M*A*S*H; it’s China Beach.” Within weeks, several U.S. Black Hawks are shot down, and the United States and the United Nations recoil rather than retaliate. Illusions crumbling, the friends race to Haiti, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Liberia, where the United Nations and its most influential member, the United States, repeatedly place the safety of UN troops and workers over the needs of the people they have come, ostensibly, to serve. Hundreds of thousands of civilians die.
In vivid and intimate first-person accounts that range from a few paragraphs to 15 pages, the authors sequentially limn and reflect on experiences rarely exposed publicly. Cain arrives with a legal team in post-genocide Rwanda and, knowing that the UN had pulled out in the midst of the Hutus’ massacres of the Tutsis just months earlier, finds himself ashamed to be there, assigned to beseech the survivors to treat genocide suspects more humanely. Postlewait describes the unsound security practices that she believes led to the death of a colleague, contradicting the account in an official UN report. A year after UN peacekeeping forces stood by as thousands of men were killed in Srebrenica, Bosnia, Thomson arrives under the same UN flag to exhume the dead as evidence for war crimes prosecutions. He introduces himself to widows and other relatives. “When I tried to comfort them,” he writes, “they turned on me screaming, spraying spittle into my face.”
Although the three enjoy small victories and develop intense and rewarding relationships, they battle a sneaking suspicion that, in the absence of forceful intervention against brutality, the standard UN peacekeeping offerings—training human rights workers, documenting atrocities, setting up courts, and providing medical aid—only make matters worse. (Indeed, the UN commissioned an expert panel in 2000 to study its peacekeeping work and has subsequently adopted a number of reforms.) The authors’ initial enthusiasm for international peacekeeping turns into a passion for bearing witness, and the ultimate verdict is not a pretty one. No wonder United Nations muckety-mucks are displeased with this book, and not only for its revelations of ineptitude, corruption, and hedonism in UN ranks.
“For me there’s only one lesson,” Thomson 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.”