Emergency Sex

The statement “the more acute the situation and by extension the greater the need, the less useful the United Nations is and the more irrelevant international law becomes”, was once observed by a critic while talking about the United Nations. This essay will examine this question by drawing upon the book Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures, as well as look at some of the efforts of Rafael Lempkin. The above quote, in my own opinion, is stating that the more desperate a situation becomes, the lesser amount of good the United Nations will be able to do to resolve the situation. The worse things are, the more likely international law will be broken, and will be allowed to be broken by the U.N., the ones who are supposed to enforce it

Let’s start off with Condition bravo in the book, which takes place in Cambodia, 1993. The authors state how Bulgarian peacekeepers sent to Cambodia were nothing more than “prison inmates and the patients of psychiatric wards, even though they arrived in military uniform to become UN Blue Helmets.” Kenneth Cain describes how the “blue helmets” were hated by everyone in Cambodia and described them as "A battalion of criminal lunatics who arrive in a lawless land. They’re drunk as sailors, rape vulnerable Cambodian women and crash their UN Land Cruisers with remarkable frequency."

Overall, the Cambodian election is cake, the work is easy and uneventful, the election successful and the trio move on to other peacekeeping assignments, where their fortunes change dramatically. The UN workers did their job and were successful in Cambodia without many instances of corruption. Heidi and Ken go to Somalia and come under siege, Andrew goes to Haiti where he is a helpless and frustrated observer in the face of Haitian warlords. When Heidi and Ken lose a colleague in Mogadishu, their disenchantment for the UN grows. There is evidence of UN corruption here. In Somalia, Cain is caught in a Somali attack on a U.N. ceremony celebrating the UN sponsored reopening of the Somali courts. Unfortunately, during the attack, many of the judges are killed or driven off, and Cain learns that his boss had pushed for the provocative reopening of the courts so that he could collect 15 percent of the judges’ salaries for himself. Stories like those are present the authors’ U.N. experiences. Cain also relates that while in Rwanda, the chief administrative officer of the U.N. mission is replaced for requiring a 15 percent kickback on everything the U.N. purchased. However, when the replacement CAO arrives, he quickly institutes the same kickback requirement.

In the book, Ken Cain offers harsh criticism about the UN’s ineffectiveness and bureaucratic pettiness while in Somalia. A direct quote from the book states: “On April 6, 1994, one week after US forces withdrew from Somalia, a plane carrying the president of Rwanda was shot down over Kigali and massacres of Tutsis and moderate Hutus began within half an hour. UN peacekeepers withdrew while a radical Hutu militia, the interahamwe, engaged in an orgy of killing over ninety days at a rate three times that of the Holocaust ... when it was over, 800,000 had been slaughtered. Having failed to intervene in genocide on the ground for the second time in two years, the UN again choose to prosecute it in court instead, creating the second war crimes tribunal since Nuremberg.” All three authors save their most severe criticism for the Rwanda Genocide, saying that they were cowards for not preventing genocide and humanitarian disaster before it occurs. They say how a Canadian General Dallaire sent an urgent fax to the U.N. stating that an imminent genocide was going to occur. Kofi Annan ordered him to stand down and do nothing at all. Ultimately, the general and his force were withdrawn, but the authors believe this relatively small but well-armed force could have halted the genocide before it began.

Genocide was a term coined by Rafael Lempkin, stating that the following characteristics constitute it. The intent of the offenders is to destroy or degrade an entire national, religious or racial group by attacking the individual members of that group. This attack is a serious threat either to life, liberty, health, economic existence or to all of them. The offenders may be representatives of the state or of organized political or social groups. Liability should be fixed upon individuals both as to those who give the orders and to those who execute the orders. The offender, should be precluded from invoking as his defense the plea that he had been acting under the law of his country, since acts of genocide should be declared contrary to international law and morality.

Since the consequences of genocide are international in their implications, the repression of genocide should be internationalized. The culprit