Emergency Sex (And Other Desperate Measures): True Stories from a War Zone [Paperback]

I implore everyone to read this book which details the horrendously corrupt ineffectuality of the United Nations who stood by when massacres were taking place in Rwanda, Srebenica and Darfur.
One of the co-authors, Dr Andrew Thomson, wrote a line in the book that has led to his dismissal, as reported recently in the Sunday Observer by Andrew Thomson (another of the book's authors), Thomson was lamenting UN negligence in failing Bosnian Muslims who it had promised to protect in its 'safe area' of Srebrenica where 8,000 men lost their lives. Thomson wrote, '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 UN leader Kofi Annan has had an easy ride from Left wing liberals who read constant uncritical accounts of his leadership in progressive newspapers like the Guardian. It is the job of the concerned and the commited of the left to construct real critiques of the UN before the right wing in America and England come to colonise the moral high ground on this issue.
Despite being reigned in by the dictats of the security council Annan has personally overseen the systematic corruption of his organisation in oil for food and sex for food scandals.
In a recent article Cain tells of his trip to the Rwanda genocide museum in Kigali where there is a reproduction of the infamous fax sent by UN commander General Romeo Dallaire imploring the then head of UN peacekeeping, Annan, for authority to defend civilians being slaughtered in their thousands. The museum also reproduces Annan's response, ordering only the defence of the UN's impartiality, forbidding him to protect desperate civillians waiting to die. While the UN withdrew as the massacres escalated - 800,000 Rwandans were left to die.
The authors moral courage in writing this book is to be celebrated and it deserves a wide readership. Hopefully serving as a timely reminder that real opposition to war, famine and corruption involves more than simplistic Bush-hating and buying centre left newspapers while self conciously advertising your hatred of Republican foreign policy.
I wish the authors every success.

Having sent some time in some of these places during my Air Force days I was interesed to see a different perspective of these places. This book is not only gritty but honest and even when times seem boring this only punctuates the frustration and fear felt when times you thought things could not get worse, they do. As the entries (this is written in a journal style) continue you are drawn into the small group and begin to genuinely care about them.
Some of the atrocities recorded here are hard to stomach but have to read so that even when you are safe and comfortable at home you can appreciate that because you can't see evil in the world, it doesn't mean it's not there. This book is proof that there are good people who care but are constantly having their hands tied by those who just don't want to look bad.
Read it, read it, read it.

My first recommendation is to read the other reviews, especially those who gave this book three or fewer stars. These give a good balance to the more enthusiastic five-star reviews.

As many other reviewers have spelled out the thread and content of 'Emergency Sex...', I won't waste anymore space on that. Instead, I'll cut to the strengths and weaknesses of the book. On the plus side, it gives a reasonable inside account of the 'nineties, the decade in which humanitarian interventionism commenced in earnest, when the UN was riding high, and to which end the humanitarian business was booming - the UN created so many professional staff in this period, especially off the back of Bosnia, that they have been over-staffed for years as a result (not so easy to get people `out' once `in'). The decade that ended with the distasteful sight of 200+ NGOs lined up and raring to enter Kosovo in June 1999.

Of the three authors, the Kiwi doctor, Andrew, is the most worthwhile - as a medical doctor he actually has the most to offer in real, practical help; Harvard graduate Ken seems pushy, yet naïve or perhaps an unwitting zealot for the new world order, something perhaps heading towards the 'Quiet American' of Graham Greene. Social worker Heidi, doesn't really have many redeeming features, other than a bit of pluck. In her rush to be different from the models that occupy her soon-to-be ex-husband's fashion industry world, she reveals her own vanities, as do her predictable sexual encounters. And so we continue in that vein.

The book starts well enough, and the device of alternating input from all three works best in Cambodia, where they first meet. I agree with the reviewer who said it felt as if the whole book had been written up by Ken. This literary device tends to run a bit out of steam by the time we get to Somalia - Ken and Heidi's parts provide some of the more lively/less purplely prose, in contrast to Andrew's flaccid Haitian debacle.

Each section has a brief introduction to cover what was happening in each place. Knowing little about Cambodia and only remembering the barest of details of Somalia, Rwanda, and Liberia, I found these welcome. However, this was soon spoilt by the Bosnian section - considering Andrew was there (albeit in the later stages), he seems remarkably ill-informed about the intricacies of the war there - it's as if he had just resorted to a CNN, Fox or BBC briefing: emotive and sensationalist. This spoilt the whole book and confirmed my initial suspicions that their, at times, lightweight sensationalism is the hallmark of the whole work.

Working for over two years with UNHCR in the Balkans I did meet quite a few people like this: lost souls in need of thrills, needing to feel needed and worthwhile; the wars become scaffolds for wilting egos. A local colleague told me that people generally viewed the so-called aid-workers as people who could not 'make it' in their own countries, that they were `on the run'. Indeed, I saw the irony of working in the UN refugee agency which was staffed by many self-motivated `refugees' from the US and western Europe. Many complained that once the shooting stopped, it became boring: they were gagging to get to the next `one'. These three seem no exception; I feel no sympathy for them: they put themselves in those places - they had choice, unlike the people they were supposed to be helping. Their own cynicism over the United Nations seems too little, too late to my mind - there is much truth in what they say, but they are as guilty as those they criticize.

In short, the basis of the book is factual: it is entertaining and informative to a certain level - the student of these conflicts will learn something; it's a reasonably pacy read. But it is self-indulgent and often maudlin; the thread-bare excuse for their debaucheries that it's either `emergency sex' or go off the rails, is near pathetic. It feels more that they came to those places for themselves, not for the people there. There are too many revealing comments: Ken can barely disguise that he appears jealous of the attention a colleague gets who has just lost someone close. Personally, for me the core of this book is contained in the episode when Ken recounts a rooftop sexual encounter with a French aid worker in Haiti, who at `the moment' whispers `je je je jouis' [I enjoy/am gratified] - the whole tenor of the book is more that the `jouissance' was all theirs!