A Personal Journey Through the United Nations
Yeo Bock Cheng spent 32 years at the United Nations. He believes he was the first Singaporean to build an entire career there. His story starts with a casual job offer in Bangkok and ends with him arranging billions of dollars in peacekeeping payments in New York.
This is part of my retelling of “50 Years of Singapore and the United Nations” (Tommy Koh, Li Lin Chang, Joanna Koh, 2015, ISBN: 978-9814713030).
Chapter 45 is written by Yeo himself. He describes the journey from being a young civil servant in Singapore to rising through the UN’s ranks all the way to Director level. Along the way, he survived a kidnapping, helped evacuate staff from Saigon and Dacca, and played a key role in modernizing how the UN finances peacekeeping operations.
A Job Offer He Almost Ignored
In January 1969, Yeo was part of a Singapore delegation from the Finance Ministry. They were in Bangkok for a session of the UN Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East (ECAFE). They were also there to plan logistics for an upcoming ECAFE conference that Singapore was hosting.
During the visit, ECAFE’s Chief of Administration asked Yeo if he would be interested in joining the UN. Yeo did not take it seriously. He said yes, filled out the application, and forgot about it.
Then the offer actually came through.
A Finance Ministry representative told Yeo that the UN wanted him. But the Ministry would not agree to keep his position open during a secondment. If he wanted to go, he had to resign.
Yeo resigned. His fiancee, Lee Kim Eng, encouraged him to pursue his dream of working abroad, even though she had her own career prospects in Singapore. Their parents were not thrilled but did not stand in the way. Yeo’s teenage brother ended up with the responsibility of looking after their parents.
On August 17, 1969, Yeo started at the UN in Bangkok. He would not leave the organization for 32 years.
Being Singaporean Helped
Yeo makes an interesting observation about what it was like to be Singaporean at the UN. Singapore already had a reputation for good governance, even in the late 1960s. That reputation rubbed off on Singaporeans working in the Secretariat. People assumed they were hardworking and honest. It helped his career.
The Singapore government was always aware of what its citizens were doing at the UN. Embassy staff and Mission staff knew where Yeo was and what assignments he had. When they needed information about UN matters he was involved in, they would reach out. Otherwise, the relationship was friendly but distant. Ships passing in the night, as Yeo puts it.
Wild Early Years in Bangkok
Yeo spent nine years in ECAFE’s Division of Administration. The work ranged from running a printing shop to managing buildings, travel, contracts, and conference logistics. He was also the Emergency Officer during crises.
And there were crises.
In October 1972, the Thai military attacked student and worker demonstrators at Bangkok’s Democracy Monument. The UN premises shut down. All staff were sent home except for the security team, Yeo’s boss, and Yeo himself. They had to guard the property.
Then things got worse. When rioters attacked a nearby police headquarters, the police ran into the UN compound for safety. Yeo had to do two things at once: convince the rioters not to follow the police into the UN premises, and convince the police (who had changed into civilian clothes) to leave through a side exit.
He was also involved in the evacuation of UN civilian staff from Saigon when South Vietnam fell. And later, the evacuation of staff from Dacca during the civil unrest that created Bangladesh.
Kidnapped at Gunpoint
In early 1978, something terrifying happened. Yeo had been catching and stopping various shady schemes in his administrative work. This made certain people angry.
One morning, on his way to work, a disgruntled former UN local staff member abducted him at gunpoint. There was an accomplice. The plan, it turned out, was to kill him.
Instead, the kidnapper forced Yeo to drive home, where he threatened Yeo’s wife and two young daughters. Then he robbed him and abandoned him in a rice paddy far outside the city.
The irony is that the people who wanted Yeo gone did not know he was already scheduled to transfer to New York later that year.
The incident made local newspapers. Yeo’s family had police protection for the remaining months of their stay in Thailand. The Thai police caught the kidnapper two years later. The UN paid for Yeo to fly back to Thailand to testify. The man was convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison.
New York and the Budget Committee
Yeo transferred to UN Headquarters in New York on August 16, 1978. He joined the Secretariat of the Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions (ACABQ). He stayed there for 13 years.
The ACABQ is a 16-member expert committee. The General Assembly appoints its members to review all of the Secretary-General’s administrative and budget proposals. It works behind closed doors, without formal rules of procedure.
Yeo’s job was to draft the committee’s reports after its hearings. He had a strange position: part of the UN Secretariat, but technically working for the General Assembly. He got to watch from the inside how Secretariat officials dealt with Member State representatives, and how those representatives negotiated and cut deals among themselves.
Sometimes, he says, it was not pretty. But it was invaluable experience. By the time he left, he was the committee’s Deputy Secretary. He had become one of those rare UN staff who understood how both sides of the house worked.
A Run Through the Department of Public Information
In September 1991, the UN Controller pulled Yeo out of the budget committee and sent him to the Department of Public Information (DPI). The recently appointed Under-Secretary-General for DPI, a recruit from the corporate world, was struggling with the UN bureaucracy. Her current Executive Officer was not helping. The Controller thought Yeo might do better.
He spent four years in DPI. The new boss was unpredictable, but Yeo says she was a breath of fresh air compared to some of the other department heads. He earned her trust over time and was sorry to see her go. After she left, three more Under-Secretaries-General cycled through the position in quick succession.
During these years, Yeo also worked with Kofi Annan, then a senior Secretariat official who would later become Secretary-General. Annan asked Yeo to join the Board of Trustees for the UN International School in New York as Treasurer. The school’s management and finances needed fixing. Over the next 10 years, they got it done.
Peacekeeping Finance and the Big Transition
In 1995, Yeo was selected as Deputy Director of the Peacekeeping Financing Division. In 1998, he became Director. This was the most challenging and interesting period of his career.
Before 1990, UN peacekeeping was fairly low-key. Missions in Cyprus, Lebanon, and the Golan Heights were modest, stable, and low-risk. The “Blue Helmets” were typically placed between two countries that had been fighting and wanted a break. A small group of staff at headquarters handled the logistics.
Everything changed after the Cold War ended.
From 1990 to 1994, the UN was suddenly thrown into large, complex operations. Somalia. Yugoslavia. These were not simple standoffs between two countries. They were civil wars, ethnic conflicts, and failed states. The Secretariat was not equipped for it. The General Assembly was not equipped for it. Things got messy.
New peacekeeping missions kept coming. The General Assembly and Secretariat had to build new structures fast. A new Department of Peacekeeping Operations was created. A new Peacekeeping Financing Division was set up in the Controller’s office to handle the budgets.
But there were problems.
The Security Council and General Assembly kept approving short mandate extensions: three to six months at a time. By the time financing was approved and money started coming in from Member States, the mandate period was almost over. The Secretariat could not spend the money fast enough, and then got criticized for not using approved resources.
Peacekeeping also became more dangerous. The conflicts were no longer between professional armies. There were militias, warlords, and ethnic fighters. Blue Helmets were no longer seen as neutral. They got shot at. Death and injury cases went up. Western countries that had traditionally contributed troops started pulling back and pushing other countries to step up. This meant troop reimbursement rates and death and disability benefits all had to be renegotiated.
Yeo was in the middle of all these negotiations. His team worked out practical arrangements that let the Secretariat do its job. They got agreement on annual budgeting for peacekeeping missions. They spent time meeting with defense, police, finance, and audit officials from major contributing countries. Transparency and trust-building were essential.
He also wrote, on his own time, a comprehensive handbook compiling all the institutional knowledge about peacekeeping financing that he had gathered over the years. People kept reinventing the wheel. His handbook helped stop that.
The Satisfying Ending
The payoff from all this work was significant. Major contributing countries started paying their dues on time. Troop-contributing countries got reimbursed faster. And in late 2001, the United States finally paid off most of its accumulated peacekeeping arrears.
Yeo was the one who arranged the immediate reimbursements to all the troop-contributing countries from that US payment. It was a huge moment.
He decided that was the high point. He was not going to top it. So he retired at age 55 in December 2001.
What I Take Away From This Chapter
Yeo Bock Cheng’s story is the most personal of the three chapters covered here. It reads like a full life story, not just a career summary.
He went from a junior civil servant in Singapore to the Director of Peacekeeping Finance at the UN. Along the way, he got kidnapped. He protected UN buildings during a military crackdown. He helped evacuate people from war zones. He worked for difficult bosses. He helped Kofi Annan fix a school’s finances.
What comes through most clearly is that the UN, for all its bureaucracy and dysfunction, gave Yeo a career that no single country’s civil service could have matched. He saw the inside of peacekeeping negotiations during the most turbulent period in UN history. He built the financial systems that kept Blue Helmets funded and countries reimbursed.
And he started it all because someone in Bangkok casually asked if he wanted a job, and he said yes without thinking twice.
About the Author
Yeo Bock Cheng was born in Singapore and is a Peranakan. He attended St. Andrew’s School and then the University of Singapore, graduating in 1968 with a BA in Political Science. He joined the UN Secretariat in 1969 and served for 32 years, rising to Director level. His assignments included ECAFE in Bangkok (1969-1978), the ACABQ Secretariat in New York (1978-1991), the Department of Public Information (1991-1995), and the Peacekeeping Financing Division (1995-2001). He retired in December 2001. He and his wife retired in the United States.
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