Steamy side of peacekeeping coming to screens

1.00pm

Sex, drugs and corruption among UN peacekeeping forces in the world's most dangerous hot spots will become fodder for a new TV series, a New Zealand co-author of a tell-all book says.

Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures, written by current and former UN peacekeeping mission employees New Zealander Andrew Thomson, Heidi Postlewait, and Kenneth Cain, will be developed and produced as a dramatic series by Miramax Television.

"We hope the TV series will reflect the very best and the very worst of UN peacekeeping forces in the '90s," Thomson, a UN medical doctor who served in Cambodia, Haiti and Rwanda among other danger zones, told a news conferednce.

"We haven't pulled any punches."

The book caused a sensation when it was published by Miramax Books in June over objections by some senior UN officials who thought it cast the international organisation in a bad light and was inaccurate.

Cain, who quit the world body in 1996 after a disillusioning experience in Liberia, said the trio delved into their personal lives to tell "what it felt like and smelled like" and that they felt compelled to write the story of corruption and failed leadership that contributed to disasters in Rwanda in 1994 and in Bosnia at about the same time.

UN spokesman Fred Eckhard described the book as "sensationalist, exploiting the sex angle and not in the UN's interest to be published."

Eckhard confirmed that Postlewait and Thomson, who remain employed by the UN, have been reprimanded for failing to get UN approval for the book.

"We didn't set out to write a scandalous book," said Thomson. "But it was a scandal that a million people were killed and not a single official was investigated or disciplined," he said, referring to 800,000 deaths in Rwanda and 200,000 in Bosnia.

Thomson said Secretary-General Kofi Annan had acknowledged the UN needed provisions to protect whistle-blowers. "Heidi and I see our book as a test case," he said.

The title of the book is taken from an incident in Somalia involving Postlewait, a former New York social worker, and a local interpreter.

"I can feel this pounding inside me and I can't wait. It has to be right now, not in ten minutes, not five. Now," she wrote. "An emergency. Emergency sex."

- REUTER