The jaded, seamy side of peace

Their story begins just more than a decade ago, on the right side of history.

Andrew Thomson, a doctor, wanted to save lives. Kenneth Cain, a human rights lawyer, wanted to save the world. Heidi Postlewait, a secretary, just wanted to save some money and leave her broken marriage behind.

The three U.N. staffers came together at a rooftop party in Phnom Penh in 1993, during the heady days when the world body was organizing democratic elections in Cambodia. Fired up by a marijuana and rum combo called the space shuttle, they began to think maybe the U.N. really could change the world.

But amid the euphoria were glimpses of the chaos ahead. First came the wild contingent of peacekeepers from Bulgaria, allegedly recruited from prisons and mental hospitals to fill the U.N. quota. “A battalion of criminal lunatics arrive in a lawless land,” Cain observes in a book the three have written on their experiences. “They’re drunk as sailors, rape vulnerable Cambodian women and crash their U.N. Land Cruisers with remarkable frequency.”

Six years later, after stints in Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda and Liberia, the three came to believe that not only is the U.N. unable to keep pace with its grand ideals in the new world order, it actually allowed two genocides. They cope by immersing themselves in their work, alcohol, faith and “emergency sex.”

Thomson, who spent two years pulling bodies out of mass graves in Rwanda and the Bosnian town of Srebrenica -- corpses of people who had sought safety with the U.N. -- concludes: “If blue-helmeted U.N. 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 three chronicled their precipitous slide from buoyant idealism to hard-bitten cynicism in “Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures,” a bestseller published this summer by Miramax that has outraged U.N. officials and nearly cost Thomson and Postlewait their jobs. (Cain had already quit.) But the United Nations’ censure has only won the book more publicity -- and a six-figure deal with Miramax TV to make a television series. The three consider themselves whistle-blowers. Top U.N. officials think of them as disloyal. As the U.N. makes moves to garnish their royalties from the book and TV deals, the controversy raises this question: Are they the worst kind of U.N. employees -- or the best?

“Frankly, we found it a sensational and selective account of peacekeeping,” U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard said, sniffing at their “sex sells” bid for attention. “Apparently, they still believe in the organization enough to collect a paycheck once a month,” he said of Thomson and Postlewait.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who has led a campaign to reform peacekeeping since the Rwanda and Srebrenica massacres occurred under his watch, deemed the book “not so bad.”

It certainly contains lots of sex. Cain, then an earnest, twentysomething Harvard Law grad, describes a lover teaching him the French word for orgasm, directly translated as “to joy,” and how he left the daily horrors behind in those moments. Thomson relates how when he was courting the woman who became his wife, he could not get the stench of corpses out of his pores no matter how many 90-minute showers he took. Even in her embrace, he could not escape his ghosts.

But it is Postlewait’s encounters that give the book its title -- and have grabbed the greatest attention. At the time of her escapades, she was a tall 30ish redhead from New Jersey with heavy-lidded eyes, freshly divorced and ready for adventure.

After a near miss in a sniper attack in Somalia, Postlewait finds sudden consolation with a Somali U.N. interpreter after they dive for cover in an abandoned vendor’s shack. “And then the strangest thing happens,” she writes. “I want to rip my clothes off, rip Yusuf’s clothes off ... right there. I can feel this pounding inside me and I can’t wait. It has to be right now, not in 10 minutes, not five. Now. An emergency. Emergency sex.”

Postlewait’s sexual encounters provide a raw insight into the alienation, connection and betrayal that come with trying to live a normal life against the backdrop of mortar attacks, sniper fire and chaos.

Between missions, she has a weeklong tryst with a Masai tribesman she meets on a Kenyan beach -- and then has to decide whether to pay him. Is he a prostitute or just a lucky guy? She has an extended affair with Yusuf, the interpreter, until his best friend tells her she must become his second wife or break it off. Postlewait and an American soldier in Somalia end their date on top of a soft-sided water tank -- in effect a giant waterbed.

“After, we lay back naked, sweat drying, smoking cigarettes,” she writes. “Then I spotted an observation tower not 50 feet away, where two soldiers with night-vision goggles were peeping down at us.... I think they set me up.”

But it’s not the frank descriptions of sex that have dismayed U.N. officials. It is the trio’s naked portrayal of the failures of peacekeeping and the betrayal of trust by an organization dedicated to saving lives. “It is an unfair and outdated image of the United Nations in peacekeeping,” said Shashi Tharoor, the undersecretary-general for public information, who was responsible for peacekeeping operations in the former Yugoslav federation during part of the five-year span the book covers. “It reflects a period when the U.N. was scrambling -- we went from 5,000 people to 80,000 in two years. Peacekeeping was trying to catch up with itself, and that was like trying to fix the engine on a moving train.”

Tharoor, a writer himself, said some of the book’s accounts were moving but that the very public criticism by employees was disloyal -- and against staff rules.

Postlewait and Thomson were supposed to get permission before publishing anything having to do with their work for the organization. After being notified of the rule -- and perhaps too late to stop publication -- Thomson did apply, but was denied permission. The two have since received an official reprimand that could affect future promotions and were notified that they were not allowed to accept a book advance or payment for the television series. They are now appealing to an internal U.N. tribunal.

“You write memoirs after you’ve left the organization,” Tharoor said. “You don’t attack the very organization in whose name you continue to act. It causes doubts about your own convictions if you continue to work there.”

Thomson calls it reforming from within and thinks the book should be required reading for new staff members preparing to go on a mission. The reprimand was particularly galling to him because it was written on April 7, the day the U.N. commemorated the 10th anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda, where 800,000 people were massacred while U.N. peacekeepers watched or fled, being outnumbered and unequipped to defend the people they were there to protect.

“We didn’t start out to write a scandalous book about the U.N. But it is a scandal that almost a million civilians, who our peacekeepers had promised to protect, were killed in Rwanda and Srebrenica,” Thomson said, referring to the U.N.-declared safe zone where as many as 8,000 Muslim men and boys were slaughtered.

“I find it very difficult that not a single U.N. official in the secretariat was investigated or disciplined for those failures. No one was reprimanded, no one was fired, and no one had the decency to resign,” he said. “And when you put that in the context of Heidi and myself being reprimanded and threatened with dismissal, I find it outrageous.”

The book, which grew out of the three friends’ reminiscences at New York cafes after their return, wasn’t meant to be a treatise on the U.N., just a memoir of the most transforming experiences of their lives. But as they wrote, one theme kept recurring: disillusionment, with the U.N.’s failures and with their own role in them, from petty corruption to the unimaginable catastrophes in Rwanda and Bosnia.

Thomson, a New Zealander with haunted eyes, joined the U.N.’s medical team to find solace in healing people, but ended up digging up the dead. In 1995, he was asked to lead a forensic team to exhume mass graves in Bosnia and Rwanda to gather evidence for war crimes trials. But the widows and survivors in Srebrenica didn’t understand what the U.N. team was doing there, and they are unforgiving.

“When I tried to comfort them, they turned on me screaming, spraying spittle into my face,” he writes. “They’re right to spit. What happened here is obscene. Barely a year after the killings, we waltz back in under the same despised U.N. flag to clean up the cadavers. I was naive to expect gratitude.”

Cain, who is from Michigan, experiences a different sort of remorse in Rwanda as a human rights officer sent to relieve an overcrowded prison after the genocide. He stands by as his escort from the Rwandan army takes about a minute per prisoner to sort the guilty from the innocent.

In the back of a flatbed truck, the army escort begins a call-and-response song that sounds to Cain like a hymn of deliverance, and he claps and sings along. But later he finds out the song is about committing genocide, a kind of torture for the condemned -- and he feels sick and implicated.

“We are the only beneficiaries of our righteousness,” he concludes.

They find themselves burned out, infected by the people around them who see the U.N. as a betrayer, not a savior. Almost 10 years after they set out, each drifts back to New York.

Cain quit the organization to become a writer, believing he can speak more freely from the outside about the hypocrisy he sees in the U.N. Thomson stayed on as a medical officer at U.N. headquarters, treating employees as they rotate in and out of missions, dispensing prescriptions and advice on how to cope with post-traumatic stress. Postlewait is now a training officer in the peacekeeping division, knowing that all of her colleagues have read the intimate details of her sex life. She is unfazed by the whispers and the disapproval of peers who think she shouldn’t have exposed the U.N.’s dirty laundry.

“They are asking us to risk our lives and bury our friends,” she said. “We have the right to tell the truth.”

To their collective surprise, the book has served as much as a recruiting tool for the U.N. as a lightning rod for the world body’s critics, with readers contacting them to ask how they can join, and even offering Postlewait advice on her personal life. But they say most of all, the writing of it -- and now their daily defense of what they wrote -- has given them a new cause: to change the one organization they still believe can change the world.