KOFI DOESN’T WANT YOU TO READ THIS BOOK: My copy just came. Meanwhile here’s a review:

The controversial volume, due out next week, charges that some UN officials demanded that 15 per cent of their local staffs’ salaries go directly to them instead; that Bulgaria sent freed criminals to serve as peacekeepers; and that incompetent UN security had cost lives.

Their first-person account of a decade in UN service also includes candid details of drug use – particularly a marijuana cocktail called The Space Shuttle — and casual sex. It says UN staff in Cambodia resembled “the jet set on vacation”.

“Almost a million civilians (whom) our peacekeepers were supposed to protect died in two genocides,” Andrew Thomson, one of the authors, said.

It certainly seems consistent with reports like this one from the Atlantic Monthly, and with what I’ve heard from friends and acquaintances who have done this kind of work. My guess, though, is that the sex-and-drugs angle, which is relatively minor, will get the most attention, while the corruption and failure to protect innocents — which is a huge UN failing, amply demonstrated in many other reports — will be ignored.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

Thanks for the link to the book. I’ve travelled a bit in SE Asia, including Cambodia and Laos, and in both places have heard a lot of complaints from locals about the UN – in Cambodia, UN “peacekeepers” are popularly credited with introducing and widely spreading AIDS. A combination of poorly disciplined troops, little HIV testing and relatively high pay compared to the locals meant that the money the soldiers received was enough to support veritable harems of local girls. They weren’t shy about spending it, and the results have been pretty tragic. In Laos, the more generalised complaint about NGO’s was that, of the money they spent, very little went to the local economy – rather it disappeared into the pockets of westerner workers as salary. Since these could live very cheaply in-country, most of the cash wound up going right back to their home countries.

Yes, that’s the sort of thing I’ve heard, too.