NZ-born UN physician fights retaliatory dismissal

Andrew Thomson could just walk away. Shrug his shoulders, find another doctor's job, and spend more time with wife Suzanne, a former Red Cross worker, and their first child, one-month-old Clara.

Twelve years with the United Nations, latterly a medical officer in New York, Dr Thomson, 41, has worked in many of the world's hell-holes, among them the mass graves of Bosnia and Rwanda.

There are far easier ways to make a living than tallying the victims of massacres.

But Wellington-born Dr Thomson is embarking on a high-profile fight to keep his job.

He says he is still loyal to the UN despite his part in a best-selling book, Emergency Sex (and Other Desperate Measures), which led to the UN refusing to renew his contract.

"There is no doubt in my mind it's a disguised sanction for having co-authored and published the book," says Dr Thomson by phone from the United States, where the story is big news.

He received confirmation that he was jobless on the same day in mid-November that his child was born. He was with his wife in her native Switzerland at the time, on paternity leave.

Dr Thomson sounds indignant but also calm: "I've been threatened by experts in Bosnia, Rwanda and Haiti," he quips.

Probe his motivations and it appears he is driven by a deeply held conviction that UN workers must not only bear witness in war zones, but bear witness to the actions of the UN itself.

"If they're saying, on one hand, we should never forget and we should learn from these tragedies, and on the other hand, trying to bury testimony from those same tragedies, I'll fight for that," says Dr Thomson, who started his career at Auckland Hospital.

"I do have a desire to bear witness. I can't tell you where that comes from, but it is a strong desire."

Dr Thomson and his co-authors, administrator Heidi Postlewait and human rights lawyer and former UN staffer Ken Cain, published their raw, diary-style book in June. They had sought permission from UN top brass but it was refused.

In 299 compelling and often bleakly funny pages, they laid bare their actions (sometimes unwise) and emotions (often tangled) as they worked in Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia, Liberia, Somalia and Haiti in the 1990s.

The book records the UN's failure to prevent genocide in Rwanda, drug-taking and boozing by UN personnel, and claims that Bulgarian peacekeepers sent to Cambodia were convicts and psychiatric patients.

Dr Thomson, whose idealism was sorely strained by his time in the field, is nonetheless contemptuous of UN official Shashi Tharoor's argument that the allegations are history and should stay there.

"I violently disagree. Genocides never go away. We are still talking about the Holocaust and learning from it; people are still suffering 60 years after.

"Officials should spend time at mass graves and with survivors. These people spend too long in New York in the glass headquarters on high floors, where the air is thin and the stench of death, and the pain and suffering of the people we're supposed to serve, doesn't reach them."

Mr Tharoor, criticised in the book for his handling of the UN mission in the former Yugoslavia, has also suggested that people do not have the right to bite the hand that feeds. Retorts Dr Thomson: "That's almost an implication that the UN is buying our silence."

This week Dr Thomson and Ms Postlewait, whose contract has 18 months still to run, gained a powerful ally in the Government Accountability Project (GAP), a heavyweight Washington law firm. It has saved the jobs of various whistleblowers.

GAP has sent UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan a firmly worded letter requesting a meeting and threatening legal action. There has been no response.

The UN's own internal justice system is a slow "kangaroo court", says Dr Thomson, but on Thursday he made the first challenge to his dismissal.

You could argue that any organisation working in chaotic war zones will fall short of lofty ideals, but Dr Thomson alleges deliberate moral failings by senior UN staffers: negligence, dishonesty, disinterest. And in the world according to Dr Thomson, moral failings are inexcusable.

If his career at the UN does prove to be over, Dr Thomson will seek work with another humanitarian agency.

In the meantime, "the hope is that the UN will think twice next time they try and dismiss a whistleblower - someone who really wants to speak honestly about what they've seen, and [in] the motivation that things might improve".

ANDREW THOMSON

* Age 41, married to former Red Cross worker Suzanne, with one child, Clara.

* Born in Wellington, started his career at Auckland Hospital.

* Twelve years with the United Nations, working in Cambodia Bosnia, Haiti and Rwanda.