The Irish Examiner (registration required) reports a new book is coming out on UN peacekeeping missions, and that the UN tried to block publication.

THREE United Nations fieldworkers are publishing details of sex, drugs and corruption inside UN missions, despite a UN attempt to block their book.

'Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures: A True Story from Hell on Earth' chronicles the experiences of a doctor, a human rights official and a secretary in UN operations in Cambodia, Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, Liberia and Bosnia.

The controversial volume, due out next week, charges that some UN officials demanded that 15pc of their local staff's salaries go directly to them instead; that Bulgaria sent freed criminals to serve as peacekeepers and that incompetent UN security has cost lives.

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Particularly galling to them is the murder in Mogadishu in Somalia of a young American colleague, shot dead as he rode in a UN convoy.

Kenneth Cain, an American human rights official, complains bitterly that the board of inquiry ignored failings in UN security.

"The board is stacked with UN officials who oversee security," he writes. "I don't trust these f***s for a second to truly investigate and hold one of their own accountable."

After he is evacuated from Haiti because of worsening violence, Dr Thomson advises readers: "If blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers show up in your town or village and offer to protect you, run."