Private military companies — or mercenaries, as some prefer to call them — should play a bigger role as peace enforcers in conflict areas around the world, Wits University academic Natashia Chhiba argues.
A lecturer in international relations, Chhiba argues in her PhD thesis that international multilateral organisations such as the United Nations and the African Union should hire private armies to secure peace because they are cheaper, quicker, expedient and do not come with political baggage.
”They [private armies] are not held hostage by general public opinion — for example, the United States public’s views on sending forces to conflict areas such as Iraq,” Chhiba told the Mail & Guardian.
The debate was reignited after UN Secretary General Kofi Annan this month formed a 16-member panel to look into new global security threats. Outsourcing peacekeeping is one of the mooted ways of meeting such threats.
Chhiba’s views have been rejected by some commentators, who say that putting peacekeeping in the hands of private militias would emasculate states and weaken multilateral organisations. Critics say that private armies are accountable to nobody and have an appalling human rights record.
Chhiba acknowledges that such private armies would have to be regulated and would have to adopt codes of conduct. According to the Wits lecturer, it costs the UN $3-million a day to maintain peacekeeping forces in Sierra Leone. In 1995 South African-based Executive Outcomes, a private military outfit, fielded 300 troops in Sierra Leone to ward off an advance by Foday Sankoh’s Revolutionary United Front.
Executive Outcomes’s success was achieved in about nine months, at a cost of $36-million, after it had taken UN troops almost two years to perform a similar task.
Such companies are not the same as mercenaries, said Chhiba. ”Paramilitary companies are corporate entities that offer services such as active combat, logistics, training and de-mining. They can also offer protection for humanitarian causes.”
UN structures are inadequate to keep peace because they lack the funds and the political will, and are often held back by red tape. Internationally, private military companies are said to be growing. According to US publication Business Week, a two-year study completed in 2002 by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists identified 90 private military companies (PMCs) operating in 110 countries.
”US companies dominate, but sizeable [private military companies] operate out of Britain, South Africa, Russia, Israel and other countries,” said the magazine.
The US has also hinted at the possibility of outsourcing peacekeeping. In July US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told Congress that the monthly bill for the Iraq operation was about $4-billion. In the light of this the outsourcing of peace-keeping operations to poor countries or even to private enterprises would save US taxpayers lots of money.
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and Peter Hain, Minister for Europe, are known to be in favour of some form of regulation for military companies rather than banning them.
”It is British government policy to outsource certain tasks, which, in earlier days, would have been undertaken by the armed forces,” Straw is reported as saying.
George Wachira, a Kenyan scholar and expert on peace and security issues, described private armies as ”hired thugs”. The ”privatisation of security”, he said, was ”worrying”. Mercenaries wage war on behalf of actors in African conflicts, or ”hired thugs are used by political actors to visit violence on opponents”.
Dr Adekeye Adebajo, executive director of the University of Cape Town-based Centre for Conflict Resolution, told the M&G that outsourcing peacekeeping would be ”a cop-out” by multilateral agencies such as the UN, the Southern African Development Community and Ecomog, the peace-keeping arm of the Economic Community of West African States.
”Private military companies are wrong for Africa. Let us rather strengthen regional organisations and use them under the UN umbrella,” he said. He conceded that the UN needed to improve its turnaround time regarding deployment of troops in troubled areas.
But, said Adebajo, based on the Sierra Leone example, the suggestion that it was cheaper to outsource peacekeeping was ”exaggerated” because it had only been a short-term solution.”Besides,” he argued, ”Executive Outcomes committed atrocities in Sierra Leone.” Western groups, he said, would not advocate the use of mercenaries in their own countries.
”There are people who think Africa is a soft target. The reason we have to send our own troops is so that we can hold them accountable.”