There is a saying that for evil to triumph it requires good men to do nothing.

It made my night last night to hear that, and tonight to read the transcript as well. It made me a little stronger again in my own little fight against the powers of Bush, Howard and Evangelical evil! Wolf.

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Transcript of Interview with Dr. Andrew Thomson by Andrew Denton - 4th of April 2005

There is a saying that for evil to triumph it requires good men to do nothing. What if you are a good man and you do all you can and evil still triumphs? Would you question everything you hold to be true or would you keep fighting? As a UN peacekeeper, Dr Andrew Thomson has been to every hell-hole on earth - Bosnia, Haiti, Rwanda, Cambodia. With two colleagues he has written a book that has rocked the UN to its core. Called 'Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures', it's the story of what happens when you try to save the world and lose yourself along the way. From New York City, please welcome Dr Andrew Thomson.

ANDREW DENTON: Andrew, welcome to Enough Rope. Where did this desire to serve other people, to do good, come from?

DR ANDREW THOMSON: Andrew, I think it came from my upbringing. My parents were missionaries in the Solomon Islands and Fiji. I guess that's one of the reasons why I decided to go to med school. I thought, maybe simplistically, that with a medical degree I could help people. So I kind of got into medicine just like that.

ANDREW DENTON: While you were in medical school you met a Cambodian man by the name of Veri and he really changed the course of your life, didn't he, in what way?

DR ANDREW THOMSON: This is a guy who was one of about 60 doctors out of 600 who survived Pol Pott's killing fields. He got out with his family to the refugee camps in Thailand and then was taken on as a refugee to New Zealand. I befriended him. I just helped him out with his studies. Little by little, I learned his story and the story of Cambodia and the killing fields. I guess from that moment I wanted to go there. It was an accident really.

ANDREW DENTON: It was an accident that changed everything for you. You went to Cambodia with the Red Cross. You have been there about three years in Phnom Phen when the UN rolled into town for the first election since the overthrow of Pol Pot. How did their arrival change the city?

DR ANDREW THOMSON: You could feel it coming. I remember when I first arrived in Phnom Phen in 1990 there were only a very small number of foreigners in the city. You could feel the UN presence arriving there. There were Paris Peace Accords in 1991. This great machine would sort of arrive within a space of three or four months in the country, in a country which had been cut off. You couldn't fly from Bangkok to Phnom Phen, Cambodia's capital, for years. So suddenly 20,000 blue helmets and 3,000 civilians and I think 4,000 or 3,000 civilian police. Phnom Phen was just inundated with UN people. It was quite extraordinary. There was an enormous euphoria that we could actually make peace in Cambodia, run an election and change that country.

ANDREW DENTON: That was the noble part. It also transformed the city into a bit of a party city, too, didn't it?

DR ANDREW THOMSON: It did everything that supply and demand imbalance does. There were not enough houses, so the prices of apartments went through the roof. New Yorkers were saying they were paying more in Phnom Phen for an apartment than in New York. Traffic stalled. A lot of the UN troops didn't really know how to drive, so they crashed their cars. It was a wild scene.

ANDREW DENTON: You mentioned before there was this idea that the UN would run the country. This was 1993. Saddam had been pushed out of Kuwait, the Berlin Wall had fallen, Yeltsin had stood on a tank in Moscow. The talk was of the new world order, the chance to be on the right side of history. At this time what did you think the UN was capable of achieving?

DR ANDREW THOMSON: Andrew, maybe it sounds crazy now. I know we were naive and young, but we thought that UN peacekeepers could put an end to all of these conflicts that had been driven by the Cold War. We were going to stop war everywhere. A lot of people who were wiser and older than the three of us, Ken, Heidi and myself, really thought that. We signed on to that. You could feel it. You are right. There was a tremendous euphoria. It was a new age. We really bought into it.

ANDREW DENTON: You also bought into what it was to be with the UN. You talk about being a convert to the lifestyle, about jeeps, helicopters and planes lined up around the world to take you to war zones everywhere. Aside from doing good, how much was the lifestyle also a rush?

DR ANDREW THOMSON: For sure. I remember thinking, "Are they paying me to do this? I will do this for nothing." It was heady stuff. It was really addictive. The story of the book is really the fall over the next decade from that heady point at the end of the Cambodian election, which was successful, down into the horrors that followed. There was no way we could know that we were heading for that.

ANDREW DENTON: Before we get to the fall, which was considerable, the title of your book, 'Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures', what does the 'emergency sex' refer to?

DR ANDREW THOMSON: The joke is that in the book, anyway, I don't get any sex until chapter four so by that stage it was a big emergency. But the actual title comes from Heidi. She is in Somalia with her Somali boyfriend and they are walking through the US embassy compound, which a bit like the green zone in Baghdad now, was always sniped at and mortared every night. They were wandering through there and a sniper, a Somali gunman, opens up on them and tries to kill them. The bullets are flying around and they dive into the sand. All of a sudden it's over, and Heidi just describes a feeling of knowing she was going to die and then suddenly having her life back, and this huge rush of adrenaline. She says, "I wanted to climb into my boyfriend's skin, to get under his skin, just to feel alive and human." So she pushes him into a shack and rips his clothes off and they make love right there in the middle of a war zone. Afterwards, she is crying and wondering what the hell is going on. She calls that 'emergency sex'. She actually says, "I think I have got post traumatic sex disorder." That's where the title comes from.

ANDREW DENTON: I feel sorry for all her other boyfriends. It is going to be impossible to live up to that sexual experience.

DR ANDREW THOMSON: It was impossible to live up to writing about that with Ken and myself. After Heidi had written her sex scenes we kind of looked at each other and said, "We can't beat that. Let's write about something else."

ANDREW DENTON: I'm impressed you got to sex in chapter four. If it was my book it wouldn't have been til the index. Well done you.

DR ANDREW THOMSON: There wasn't a footnote.

ANDREW DENTON: Now you are boasting. You talk about after Cambodia. You went to Haiti with the UN, where your job was to get information to sort of document the brutality that had been used to depose the elected president to try to persuade the world to intervene. But Haiti was a completely lawless place. Even in hospitals, which you had been used to finding to be protected zones, people were being openly murdered. In a lawless society like this, what did your daily work involve as a doctor?

DR ANDREW THOMSON: My job was to document these people's injuries, if they survived. More often than not, we were just picking up bodies off the street every morning. First of all, this was to get them treated. As you said, they weren't safe in the government hospitals. There was one case where the killers came back into the hospital when the guy was being operated on and threatened the doctor and the nurses and just killed him on the operating table. This wasn't isolated. It had gone on for years. I couldn't believe that kind of brutality. The places that I had been the Red Cross protected you and you didn't come into a hospital. You checked your weapons at the door. Haiti was an enormous shock for me.

ANDREW DENTON: In the middle of all of this madness you came across a US luxury cruise ship. What happened?

DR ANDREW THOMSON: That was insane. I went with a friend just up the coast. I had to get away one day. We were driving, looking for a deserted beach. We came around a corner and over a hill. Down at the bottom of a cliff were hundreds of people partying off a cruise ship. The ship towered over the beach. They had bought everything with them. They had bought the barbecue, the chairs and the food. It looked like some Miami beach pool party. It was insane. We sort of crashed their party, and could not quite figure out who was crazier, them or us, because they had landed there and they didn't even know they were in Haiti. I don't know where they thought they were. We started talking to them. We said, "Do you know what's going on here?" They said, "No, it's a nice beach." At a certain point after we had partied a bit a whistle went and they all climbed back on this huge cruise ship and sailed off. There we were wondering what the hell had happened. It was completely surreal.

ANDREW DENTON: Then you had to go back to the murders and mutilations, which continued until the US finally decided to send in troops. But before they could do that, over in Somalia 18 US Rangers were killed in what we now know as Black Hawk Down. The US lost their nerve, and the ship that the US troops were on turned back within sight of the shore of Haiti and the UN ordered you to evacuate. What was the panic like around you as you were packing to flee?

DR ANDREW THOMSON: It was a complete loss of American nerve. You are right. It was a young President Clinton. When those 19 soldiers were killed in Mogadishu in Somalia, where Ken and Heidi, my co-authors were, they were in the middle of that firefight as civilians listening on the radio. That triggered, as you say, a loss of nerve. The boat with American peacekeepers sailed off into the Caribbean. The whole city saw it, because the city is on a hill. It was demoralising, just the feeling of abandoning a whole people when you had made promises to them that you were there to help them. It was terrible. I was ashamed.

ANDREW DENTON: Fifteen months later you went to Rwanda, because in your words you needed to be in another war zone. Why did you need that?

DR ANDREW THOMSON: I think partly what you mentioned before, the addictive quality of the life. I ended up in New York working as a GP at the UN headquarters. I was bored. I felt that I was useless. I had a lot of guilt for what had happened in Haiti. But I didn't believe in peacekeeping anymore, so I was kind of stuck with not believing in it but wanting to go. That's the addictive quality of it really. I got a call from someone senior in the new war crimes tribunal. They said, "You are not a forensic expert, but you have dealt with a lot of corpses in Haiti. Will you go to Rwanda and set up our forensic investigation unit?" I think my logic was, look, we can't stop these wars, but let's put some of these killers on trial.

ANDREW DENTON: 800,000 people, conservatively, died in Rwanda. It was a country described by one of your co-authors, Ken, as smelling of decomposing flesh. It was in everything, in your hair, on your clothes, that smell, and on the utensils you ate and cooked with. How do you live in an environment like that?

DR ANDREW THOMSON: I don't know. You go about your daily business and you keep working and try not to think about it too much. Rwanda after the genocide was one large cemetery, the whole country. We would find decomposing bodies at the bottom of our gardens in the houses that we rented. You would be driving through the Rwandan countryside, which is beautiful by the way. It's the land of a thousand hills. So there are banana groves and there is mist. It is gorgeous country. You would come around the corner and there would be a mass grave open with a thousand decomposing bodies in it, and people with shovels and picks trying to pull the bodies out. It was something out of hell, it really was.

ANDREW DENTON: We now know the UN knew about these massacres before they happened, yet they did happen and in full view of the world. As you were working in these mass graves, having come from parents who were missionaries, did you wonder about God?

DR ANDREW THOMSON: Yes, I wondered about everything that I thought I understood and believed every day. I wondered about my own organisation. Standing on those mass graves or knee-deep in cadavers inside the graves and looking up at survivors who would come and wait for their loved ones. I didn't speak the language, but I knew what they were asking me in their eyes. You look into their eyes and you know they are saying, "Why did you do this? Why did you people abandon us?" Of course, where was the God that I believed in, the God that is merciful and protects the weak?" Certainly not in Rwanda during that genocide. God took a holiday or a snooze or maybe just didn't care. I don't know. I don't really have that straight yet. But a lot of questioning, sure.

ANDREW DENTON: What astonishes me is that in the middle of all of this you found love, the women you went on to marry, Susanne, a Red Cross worker. How on earth in this environment, literally an entire country of decomposing bodies, do you motivate yourself?

DR ANDREW THOMSON: Isn't it strange? I know. It was the last thing on my mind. Susanne was working for the International Committee of the Red Cross, which is a great organisation. She was working on tracing children who had been lost during the genocide and taken into Zaire. Her work was pretty fulfilling. She actually turned up at the mass grave one day. There was this blond woman, attractive. I didn't have my head on that at all. But there she was. That's something that I think you know. Susanne, we just had a daughter, our first child, three months ago. She is born really out of the love that blossomed in that horror. I can't explain it, but it is kind of wonderful and unexpected for sure.

ANDREW DENTON: Hard to tell your daughter when she is older that your eyes met across a crowded grave.

DR ANDREW THOMSON: Yes, I wonder what she will think of both of us but particularly me when she is old enough to read this book. But that's been part of the positive thing about writing it, that you don't come home from these missions and these war zones and sit down with your loved ones and say, "Here is what happened. Here is everything that happened in chronological order." You don't even talk really. Having put it on paper, it's a lot easier to deal with it now.

ANDREW DENTON: You went through intense depression while still working as a peacekeeper after Bosnia, and you talk about this in the book, a moment where you came very close to suicide. What got you to that point and what stopped you from taking that course of action?

DR ANDREW THOMSON: I think I got ground down by doing the mass grave work. Bosnia, although the death toll was much less than the Rwanda genocide, was worse in a way, because the UN set up safe havens for vulnerable Muslim civilians. Those Muslims believed the UN's promises of protection. Again, we made promises that we didn't keep and a lot of people died. When the Serbs overran those safe havens the UN troops surrendered. At Srebrenitsa, which was one of them, 8,000 Muslim men and boys were slaughtered, and we were digging up those graves. I had this terrible struggle within myself that I believed intensely in the work. We were doing historical work digging up evidence of Europe's largest massacre since World War II. At the same time, it was grinding me down and destroying me. When I read my diaries from those days, it is just one day after another of despair. But I think I was so close to it that I didn't really see what shape I was in. I had become kind of a zombie just going and doing one day after another. I think the danger is that you don't know how low you have sunk, because you keep moving. You are kind of afraid to stop. That's the dangerous point when you stop. I came back to New York and Susanne had gone on to work in Columbia. I visited her there. I write about this in the book. I think because I had gone there on holiday while she was working I had a lot of time to sit around the hotel swimming pool and reflect on the violence that I had seen. I remember thinking, "I can't go on." I walked up to my hotel room, which was on the fourth floor, and hung out on the ledge and thought, you know, "I'm going to do it." Then I had this crazy thought, which is a medical one, I guess, "Wait a minute. If I do it from here I'm not going to die, I'm going to end up a paraplegic or tetraplegic; it's not high enough. Then I thought, "What is Susanne going to do, coming back to this hotel room to find the guy she loves dead?" I think at that moment I just pulled back, I realised that I was in real danger. That surprised me in a way. I thought being a doctor I would know myself better than that, but obviously I was blind to it.

ANDREW DENTON: You talk about the betrayals of Rwanda, Haiti and Bosnia, and we know of other things with the UN now of children in the care of UN peacekeepers being raped and abused by them. Who do you hold responsible for the UN's failures and what do you accuse them of?

DR ANDREW THOMSON: One of the reasons we wrote is that what we saw continued to go on. For example, we wrote about UN peacekeepers raping vulnerable Cambodian women, particularly the Bulgarian contingent. We put that in there because everyone knew they were doing it in Cambodia. These guys were recruited from the prisons, and they behaved like animals. This has gone on in UN peacekeeping since then. It's exploded into the scandal in Congo now, but it has been going on for a long time. We wrote about our civilian bosses, some of them taking kickbacks. Everyone knew that it was going on, particularly in some of the African missions. Now you have this enormous international criminal scandal of the Iraq oil for food program, the mind boggles with the billions of dollars that have gone missing. We wrote about and we have talked about talked about UN peacekeepers making promises to protect vulnerable civilians and then walking away and doing nothing in the face of genocides. Today you have Darfor, where it is going on again. It is almost like the chickens are coming home to roost for everything we wrote about. You have to blame the bosses. They can't sit above this and say they didn't know or they are surprised it happened. This is one of the things that drives you crazy, I think, at the UN, that the senior people are unaccountable for all their actions. That is one of the reasons we wrote, and I think maybe it explains the UN's reaction against, the book.

ANDREW DENTON: What about the man at the top, Kofi Annan, do you believe he's also culpable?

DR ANDREW THOMSON: He said that himself. My opinion of Kofi Annan is coloured by having worked in Rwanda after the genocide, and having worked in Bosnia after the genocide. He was In charge of the peacekeepers during those two genocides and he did and said nothing in Rwanda while the death toll went from death toll went from 10,000 to 50,000 to 100,000 to 500,000 he kept silent and did nothing. The same thing in Bosnia, when Srebrenitsa fell. Although he started to apologise, he has not been held accountable. I would think that you should lose your job if on your watch a million people die. I would think the last thing that should happen in an organisation whose really only strength is a moral one is that you get promoted. So Kofi Annan for me is the best example of unaccountability at the UN. If the boss is unaccountable, many of the other senior people will be unaccountable as well. Other people who didn't serve in Rwanda or Bosnia may have a different opinion of Mr Annan, but I lost enormous respect for him working in those countries. I lost more respect for him when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. I think that's a highly moral honour and it doesn't deserve to go to someone like that or to an organisation like ours.

ANDREW DENTON: You write in the book that if the blue helmeted peacekeepers come to your town and offer to protect you, run; your lives are worth so much less than theirs. Yet you still work at the UN. Why?

DR ANDREW THOMSON: That's a line that has gone around the world and has made the people at the UN headquarters extremely angry with me. But it is also a truth.

ANDREW DENTON: Why is that?

DR ANDREW THOMSON: On the other hand, I saw the very best of the UN at the beginning of the 1990s. Maybe I'm a hopeless optimist, but I think it's an organisation with potential, and that makes it even more devastating when it doesn't live up to it. We don't practise what we preach. That's the problem. I think we should preach a lot less and practise a lot more.

ANDREW DENTON: All that you have seen, Andrew, and still you have brought a little girl into the world.

DR ANDREW THOMSON: If you go on like this, you are going to make me cry. She is a joy. I'm gaga about her. She is so innocent. It almost makes you more angry now you are a parent. Imagine if the UN had promised to protect my little girl and then didn't.

ANDREW DENTON: A final question about you, Andrew: you were part of a failed effort to keep peace. Do you think personally you will ever be able to find it?

DR ANDREW THOMSON: I look back on those years and think is there anything that I could have done differently. I think not. I think that I believed what I believe and I went through stuff that I never expected to go through. I am at peace now, because I have been able to use my medicine to help people. And when there were only dead bodies to deal with, I did forensic work. Maybe if you had done different missions, if you had been younger than Ken, Heidi and myself, and had gone to, let's say, East Timor, which was a success, in large part due to the Australian military presence; if you had done successful missions you might write a different book. But we ended up in the worst ones, and we tried to be honest. I'm not sure that I'm the first in line for firing at the United States, I have got to tell you.

ANDREW DENTON: Andrew, thank you very much for sharing your story with us. Take care.

Notes

Dr Andrew Thomson's book is called 'Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures'. The the co-authors are Heidi Postlewait and Kenneth Cain. It is published in Australia by Random House.