"New World Order" (and other destitute measures)

What do you do when the ideals for which you’ve been living for a decade turn out to betray you? Well, for starters, you write a book about it...

Emergency Sex (And Other Desperate Measures): True Stories From a War Zone is a personal account of the United Nations’ exploits of the 1990s, as witnessed by three young United Nations personnel, Kenneth Cain, Heidi Postlewait and Dr. Andrew Thomson. Coming from different backgrounds, and joining the UN for different reasons, they find themselves caught up in the wave of belief in the “New World Order” which was washing in as the Cold War ebbed out.

With the bipolar political climate no longer around to call the shots, the UN could now finally serve the function for which it was incepted; to prevent or neutralise conflict across the world. At least that was the intention. The wave of belief has long since turned into an equally forceful backwash, approaching a sort of UN nihilism.

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The author trio met in Cambodia as part of the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) in the early 1990s. Leading the country up to national elections in 1993, UNTAC was the de facto government of Cambodia during that period, and consequently put a lot of international personnel on the ground.

Dr. Thomson, who had been working in Cambodia for about three years before this sudden transformation, describes Cambodia’s main city, Phnom Phen, as becoming inundated. Scores of brand new vehicles on the dirt roads, soaring real estate prices, and a party culture that would give the author trio the time of their lives.

“Cambodians deserve a chance at peace and it is your job to give them that chance. You are making history, you are creating a new world. Bon courage!”, said secretary-general Boutros-Ghali. In the spare-time the ‘history-makers’ were living it up, scouring Phnom Phen for ice to go with their mango daiquiries and house parties.

Cambodia’s election was successful, breeding further optimism for all. The years which followed, however, were a let-down; Cambodia slid back into unrest for a few more years, and the author trio were to lose their belief in their work and their employer’s function.

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In 2004, as the book was nearing publication, the UN reportedly, all the way to the then top man Kofi Annan, tried to stop the book from being published. Dr. Thomson, who to this day still works for the UN, initially lost his job over the book, but was later reinstated with the help of a whistleblower organisation. In an interview with Australian ABC [1], Thomson is scathing in his cricism of Annan, who was in charge of the peacekeepers when genocide was taking place in Rwanda and Bosnia, saying: “I would think that you should lose your job if on your watch a million people die. I would think that the last thing that should happen in an organisation whose really only strength is a moral one, is that you get promoted”.

Thomson is one of many to point out disappointedly that the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize should not have been awarded to an organisation whose role after the 1990s was met with perplexity, at best.

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After Cambodia, Postlewait and Cain went to Somalia, Thomson to Haiti. There was nowhere else they’d rather be...

Haiti was utterly lawless with maccoutes - the remnants of former dictator Papa Doc Duvalier’s secret “police” - doing as they pleased to keep the population in terror. Thug tactics which would eventually scare off the a flimsy-nerved US military, and the UN with them. But it was, of course, closely related to the proceedings in Somalia.

Operation Restore Hope in Somalia hardly did what its pompous name belies. This was a humanitarian effort, backed by military presence. The United States, only just done rocking and rolling in the Persian Gulf had every intention of doing so again. They ran the show.

Somalia is to this day without a functioning state apparatus - although probably not to be blamed on the cowboy antics of the United States.

The ‘Black Hawk Down’ incident of October 1993, which left 18 US soldiers dead along with an unknown number of Somalis (though probably ranging in the hundreds) would break the back of the US concept of “humanitarian intervention”.

The first case was to be their loss of nerve in Haiti. The US forces turned back, and the UN consequently decided it was too dangerous for its personnel to remain as well. Dr. Thomson and all the others were pulled out.

In Somalia Ken Cain lost his virginity of naiveté, thinking no longer that the American Way could simply “export democracy” as with the flick of a wand and military brawn.

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“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”; The lessons preached by Dr. Thomson after leading the UN teams exhuming hundreds of bodies in Rwanda and Bosnia. The remark is motivated directly by the “safe haven” of Srebrenica, which the UN vowed to protect. It was overrun by the Bosnian Serb army which went on to massacre the entire male population of the town.

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Young, talented and naive, Cain, Postlewait and Dr. Thomson set out to save the world with the logo and principles of the United Nations. They saved lives, but so very far from all. Their ideals have largely been shot down, but they have earned the privilege of bearing witness; of rendering.

And so they have done. And it’s well worth the time to read their accounts...

[1] See full transcript here: http://www.abc.net.au/tv/enoughrope/transcripts/s1336474.htm