A UN physician is being allowed to keep his job after losing it over writing a book exposing alleged sex, drugs and incompetence in UN peacekeeping missions, his lawyers said on Friday. The case has been described by the doctor's attorneys as a test for how the United Nations, currently working on whistle-blower regulations, treats critics among its staff.
| Kofi's feeling the heat and has to make nice. It has nuttin' to do with the holiday. |
Tom Devine, legal director of the Washington-based Government Accountability Project, which defends whistle-blowers, said Dr. Andrew Thomson would stay in his post after his current contract expires on Dec. 31 and not be forced to leave the United Nations. Thomson and his lawyers contend his employment was terminated because of the book he coauthored, after 12 years of service and praise for his work as a medical officer. In an email sent to journalists, Devine said that "based on confirmation from highly reliable sources," there had been an "informal resolution of his case." He did not give details. "Dr. Thomson looks forward to many more years at the United Nations, serving its vital mission," Devine wrote. The case had also won the backing of Sen. Richard Lugar, the Indiana Republican who chairs the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Lugar wrote to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan asking him to investigate the Thomson controversy and provide a progress report on promised whistle-blower protection regulations.
Thomson and his coauthors wrote "Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures: A True Story from Hell on Earth", published in June by Miramax, which plans to turn it into a television series. It describes sex, drugs, failed leadership and incompetence in UN missions in Cambodia, Haiti, Rwanda and Bosnia during the 1990s. Thomson, a New Zealander, worked for the United Nations on a year-to-year contract, including exhuming corpses to obtain forensic evidence of massacres in Rwanda and the Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica. Another author, Heidi Postlewait, still works for the organization, her contract having some 18 months to run. The third writer, Kenneth Cain, has left. |