The following is the final extract from the appendix to
Damien Lewis’s book “Operation Certain Death” in which he focuses on the case
for the use of PMCs.
+++++
The growing trend in warfare around the globe has shifted
radically as we enter the twenty-first century. In the classic military combat
of history, two opposing sides fought each other until one side was defeated
and the other claimed victory. In its place, modern wars tend to disdain direct
combat between opposing forces and concentrate on targeting the civilian
populace in order to destroy the ethnic power base and support structure of
rival forces. There are often more than two parties to the war, with shifting
allegencies. In the fromer Yoguslavia, Rwanda, Sudan, the Congo, Burundi,
Algeria, Liberia, Central African Republic, Burma and a host of other
countries, this ‘terroristic’ approach to warfare has turned conflict into
human tragedies for the civilian population, as opposed to focusing on
battlefield victories and military casualties. The end of the Cold War
effectively ushered in a new era of ‘Hot Peace’, where in Western powers like
the UK have to deploy forces in firefighting operations around the world.
Sierra Leone is a prime example of this new-style warfare.
Whereas peacekeeping may have worked in the past – the old
UN style of blue helmets keeping two sides apart – it does not necessarily do
so now. In the past there were clearly defined sides to a conflict, wars were
largely fought between two foreign powers through their military forces.
Examples of such ongoing UN peacekeeping initiatives are the Eritrea-Ethiopia
conflict, the India-Pakistan conflict and the Cyprus (Turkey versus Greece). In
all these cases, the war is defined by being waged between two, easily
identifiable sides – the armies of the nations involved. In these cases,
‘old-style’ UN peacekeeping does still seems to fit the bill.
But in the complex mix of civil wars and rebel factions and
guerrilla insurgencies, old-style peacekeeping doesn’t always fit the bill. In
Sierra Leone, for example, there simply was no peace to keep. This is what the
UN failed to realize when it sent 13,000 peacekeeping troops to that country – and
it learned its lessons there the hard way. At the time, UNAMSIL was the largest
United Nations peacekeeping effort in the world – yet its role in Sierra Leone
was to prove an embarrassing debacle.
At worst, the UN should at least have been on a peace-enforcing
mandate, as opposed to a peacekeeping one – empowered to use lethal force
against recalcitrant rebels. At best, the UN needed an aggressive and
professional fighting force to take the war to the rebels and finish them once
and for all. This is what Executive Outcomes had achieved with 150-odd
mercenaries over nineteen months in 1995-6, at a cost of under $2 million a
month. After EO’s intervention, and for the first time that decade, Sierra
Leone witnessed an end to the civil war and the rebels were forced to the peace
table. Four years later 13,000 UN peacekeepers arrived, at a cost of some $600
million a year. Within months of their arrival the civil war was back on again,
and UN forces stood by impotently as the RUF advanced on Freetown, threatening
to plunge the country back into a living nightmare. In short, in Sierra Leone
the UN lost the peace.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Outcomes
http://www.fas.org/irp/world/para/executive_outcomes.htm
As Hugo Young wrote in the Guardian, in May 2000:
The force in Sierra Leone is the largest UN peacekeeping
army in the world. Yet it is pathetically failing. It has become hostage to the
armed gangs of the rebel forces who are destabilizing the regime it should be
defending… If this massive UN presence is incapable of sustaining peace against
a disorderly and largely untrained rabble, one must ask what future there can
ever be for the entire principle of humanitarian peacekeeping intervention by
the UN.
It was in May 2000 that the British took unilateral action
and sent its toughest armed forces into the fray. This was no peacekeeping
mission and the British government were careful not to get bogged down in the
UN operation. This was a separate and complementary force to the chaotic and
malfunctioning UNAMSIL, and it did not share the UN’s peacekeeping mandate. The
British went to Sierra Leone with a similar set of objectives to Executive
Outcomes before them: to go on the offensive and take the war to the rebels. In
a matter of weeks, the concerted action of a five-hundred-strong force of Paras
rolled the rebels back into the jungle and defeated their offensive.
In Sierra Leone peacekeeping failed on every level and cost
a fortune. Peace-enforcement would probably have fared little better. What
Sierra Leone needed was a military force capable of waging warfare against
rebel forces in order to protect a vulnerable and traumatized civilian
population. Sadly, peace just wasn’t in it.
And what of the UN’s own position on its woeful performance
in Sierra Leone? In effect, the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, damned the
British military role with faint praise. While lauding the ‘big psychological
boost’ the arrival of the British Rapid Reaction Force under Operation Palliser
gave to the then 13,000 UN forces in country, he went on to say that ‘it would
have been preferable if they would have been under the UN.’ That misses the
whole point. It goes against the very reasons the British were successful. The
soldiers that the British sent in were not UN peacekeeping forces. These were
men sent in to wag war on the rebels of Sierra Leone, to take the battle to the
jungles and chase the rebels back to their lair.
In truth, the arrival of a few hundred British Paras under
Operation Palliser prevented the UN forces that outnumbered them some thirty to
one from collapsing completely, and at the same time stopped the RUF rebels from
taking Freetown. As the Paras flew into Lungi Airport in May 2000, the people
of Freetown were poised to turn on the UN blue helmets and literally rip their
throats out. As far as they could see, the 13,000 UN ‘peacekeepers’ appeared
unable and unwilling to keep the peace, or even to stop the rebels from seizing
the nation’s capital city. The murderous rebels were poised to run amok in
Freetown once again, and the forces of the United Nations had clearly failed
them. When the Operation Barras assault forces hi the West Side Boys three
moths later, this sent out yet another powerful message to the rebels in Sierra
Leone: the rule of international law was not to be flouted, however absurd and
ineffective the UN had proved up until then.
But where the UN fails, are Western armies like Britain’s
always going to be wiling to intervene? So many examples – Bosnia, the Congo,
Rwanda, to name but a few – suggest otherwise. And one of the unique lessons of
Sierra Leone is perhaps that of the role mercenaries can play in such
situations – rebranded as Private Military Companies (PMC’s). Not once, but
twice, PMCs waged war in Sierra Leone to stop the massacre of the innocents by
faceless, soulless, evil killers. Where 13,000 UN peacekeepers with an annual
budget of over half a billion dollars failed dismally in 2000, a force of just
150 mercenaries deployed by Executive Outcomes succeeded four years earlier
with an annual budget of $20 million.
Yet the international community reacted at the time with
outrage that a group of mercenaries could be used in such a way. Why? Does
political correctness make it acceptable that countless innocent men, women and
children be raped and maimed and abused and murdered by psychopathic killers
while the UN stands by and does nothing, but unacceptable for mercenaries to
step in and stop the slaughter? Does some refined sense of political
correctness somehow make it all right for the slaughter to continue as long as
mercenaries are not involved, even when those mercenaries are there by the
invitation of the legitimate ruling government?
A year after EO were forced out of the country, Colonel Tim
Spicer’s Sandline, a British PMC, stepped in to play a further, key role in
vanquishing Sierra Leone’s rebels. But like EO before them, Sandline’s reward
was to be vilified in the media and disowned by British politicians. Sandline
became embroiled in the so-called ‘Arms-to-Africa’ affair, a sorry scandal of
distasteful political expediency and pointless buck-passing that saw the FCO
pilloried in the press and Sandline hauled over the coals for the role it
played in shipping arms to Sierra Leone – when all Spicer’s men had done was to
help reinstate a democratically elected African president to his rightful place
as the leader of his country. Again, the question has to be asked, why?
Sandline, like EO, helped to drive a bunch of murderous, evil killers out of
Freetown and return the President of Sierra Leone to power. And for their
efforts they were pilloried. Does this make any sense to anyone, anywhere?
http://www.sandline.com/site/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandline_International
As Andrew Rowbathan MP stated in the House of Commons
(around the time of May 2000 launch of Operation Palliser), when commenting on
the abject failure of UNAMSIL:
A 150-strong deployment by a private military company [EO]
in 1995-6 is widely acknowledged, even among the critics of ‘mercenaries’, as
having created the conditions that brought the rebels to the negotiating table
and brought about the first democratic elections for many years. The later
crisis in Sierra Leone would never have arisen if the contract with Executive
Outcomes had not been prematurely terminated in 1996 (contrary to advice given
to the Sierra Leone government at the time).
As James R. Davis, a Canadian security consultant, writes of
the EO Sierra Leone operations: ‘I have to respect a group of solders who have
the courage to put their lives at risk when the rest of the international
community just stood by and watched. In Sierra Leone they fulfilled their
contracts and won these dirty wars for their paymasters.’ Or Michael Grunberg,
an adviser to Sandline: ‘If the indigenous population of a country like Sierra
Leone – the very people who will be able to go through life with both hands as
opposed to having them chopped off with a blunt axe by the rebels – want a
company like Executive Outcomes to maintain the peace, who should blame them in
the absence of any other help?’
Or Colonel Tim Spicer, late of Sandline:
Since the end of the Cold War, smoldering ethnic conflicts
have broken out all over the globe. In the old days, one or other of the
superpowers would have snuffed them out. Now, the forces of the traditional
‘policemen’ are depleted. Most have neither the resources nor the political
will to involve themselves in faraway conflicts, particularly if it is not
nationally significant. So how can countries create a safe, stable environment
for peaceful existence and economic growth? Often they can’t and are left on
their own with catastrophic results. That’s where private military companies
come in. Could things have been different in Burundi or Rwanda if an effective
military force had been deployed quickly? The answer is yes. Thousands of lives
could have been saved, but nobody went.
Speaking of Rwanda, Paul Williams makes the following point:
PMCs can deploy rapidly, can risk the lives of their
soldiers more readily than states, and can avoid the political entanglements
that tend to haunt complex UN operations. After exploring whether it had the
capacity to react to the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Executive Outcomes concluded
that not only did it have the capacity to rapidly deploy 1,500 soldiers with
air support within six weeks, but it could have done so for $150 million for a
six-month operation. Compare this to the UN operation [UNAMIR II], which
deployed after the genocide and ended up costing $3 million a day (or $547
million for a six-month period). Executive Outcomes were welcomed in Freetown
and would no doubt have been lauded in Rwanda, had the $150 million been found
to pay for them to halt the genocide.
With US forces loath to intervene in Africa and British
forces overstretched, PMCs may remain the most attractive option. But there is
still the question of who would pay for them to intervene in a crisis like
Sierra Leone. The soldiers who populate PMCs are professionals and they work
for money. In fact, most soldiers, most peacekeepers – most aid workers and
human-rights monitors for that matter – work for money and have to be paid. If
the money can be found to pay for the inflated budgets of disastrous UN
‘peacekeeping’ efforts, then the international community can afford the more
reasonable budgets of the PMCs. At present there are only two options open to
world leaders, other than sending in a PMC. The first is the UN, which as the
case of Sierra Leone shows (along with many other examples) is prohibitively
expensive and tragically ineffective. The second is the army of an effective
military power, but political will and public inertia often go against such
unilateral military interventions in far-distant conflicts.
If a mechanism can be found to fund the PMCs, there are
significant advantages to their role in spearheading any international
intervention. PMCs are not better than professional national armies, but they
do risk less of the unpalatable spin-offs that make military interventions
difficult for Western governments. Most importantly, casualties are a fact of
life among the men who work for PMCs, and they do not have the same emotive
impact or media interest as do those from national forces. And PMCs can move
quickly. While presidents and world leaders vacillate, PMCs can get men and
equipment in-country efficiently and rapidly to intervene where needed.
These PMCs are not old ‘dogs of war’. These are no casual
mercenaries. In Sierra Leone, Executive Outcomes had its own air force for
international medical flights and logistics, its own training teams to drill
some fighting discipline into the SLA, its own intelligence-gathering and
operational planning facilities, its own attack and transport helicopters. EO’s
operatives briefed international governments and led national armies of sever
countries in the war against the rebels. If PMCs are to take on some of this
international conflict-termination role, that will be because they are uniquely
placed to deploy a large number of highly trained and disciplined former army
personnel more quickly and more cheaply and with none of the associated PR
risks of either the United Nations or national governments.
…
Equipped with several different and incompatible radio
communications systems, the various UN contingents were often unable to even
communicate with each other. They were hardly the best-quality, most highly
motivated soldiers in the first place. But parachuted into Sierra Leone’s civil
war with an inadequate mandate (they had to have really, really good reasons to
shoot any of the rebels), incompatible comms equipment and a defunct
command-and-control structure, is it any wonder the UN mission imploded? The UN
is not to blame – its member governments are. The UN invariably ends up being
provided the world’s least competent soldiers to carry out the world’s most
difficult peace missions, a guaranteed recipe for failure.
Following the near collapse of the UNAMSIL in May 2000, the
army chiefs of staff from the nine different countries providing troops met in
New York to discuss a change in their mandate from ‘peacekeeping’ to ‘peace
enforcement’. Yet they refused to endorse this – arguing that it would be
tantamount to a declaration of war against the RUF, which was not what their
forces had originally signed up for.
Brigadier General Douglas, an adviser on UN peacekeeping
operations, is not alone in being an advocate for PMCs to be given a greater
role around the world. He recently briefed UN officials on the role PMCs can
play, and the argument is achieving increased currency in international
peacekeeping and political circles. There are many detractors still, but the
Brigadier General believes it is only a matter of time before PMCs are widely
used with UN operations. In perhaps the first case of its kind, Brigadier
General Douglas helped organize an $8 million UN contract to hire 1,500 troops
in Zaire to provide security for the UN refugee camps. It would have cost the
UN $80 million to have paid traditional peacekeeping troops to have done the
same job.
Dr Kevin A. O’Brien, an expert on international security
issues, argues that the twenty-first century may witness the rise of a new type
of PMC, one that overturns the stereotypes of old-style ‘mercenaries.’ In fact,
he argues that the new model PMC had already begun to emerge out of the last
decade of the twentieth century.
http://www.fco.gov.uk/Files/KFile/pmcobrien.pdf
Of course, there are caveats to the use of PMCs. First, PMCs
would need to adhere to the laws of war and deliver on a specific contract and
mandate as agreed with their paymaster (the UN or other world body). To help
ensure this, their operations would be placed under the jurisdiction of the
International Criminal Court, as part of the terms of their employment. Second,
as Paul Williams points out, there is a danger that in privatizing
peacekeeping, states may turn their backs on their responsibility to maintain
international peace and security in general. The divide between rich-world
peacekeeping and poor-world peacekeeping could become even more stark – there
being a willingness to intervene in our own backyard and a lack of will to do
so elsewhere. But as the lessons from Rwanda and Balkans (to name but two
examples) amply demonstrate, that international will to intervene is all too
often lacking.
Paul Williams also notes that private military forces are
one of the major causes of the dilemmas now affecting continents like Africa –
where wayward mercenaries will work for the highest bidder, regardless of their
legitimacy. And he point that the EO are largely the exception, rather than the
rule. Few other PMCs have organized and run combat missions on a level that EO
did in first Angola then Sierra Leone.
Williams cautions that peacekeeping operations of whatever
nature out to aim to encourage non-violent forms of conflict resolution.
‘Dispersing military force to a greater number of actors only complicates
already complex emergencies. Privatized peacekeeping may lead to less
regulation and less democratic scrutiny.’ Other risks include the fact that
PMCs could withdraw from an operation if the factors changed on the ground and
it became unprofitable for them. And that PMCs recruit effective solders first
and foremost, whose experience of peace operations and respect for human rights
may leave something to be desired. There is also the issue of who should have
the power to hire the private peacekeepers. But the answers to such questions
surely lie in proper regulations, control and accountability. As Paul Williams
points out: ‘Ultimately, those hiring PMCs must be morally responsible for
their actions.’
US academic Doug Brooks has recently carried out a study to
ascertain how much it would cost the UN to contract PMCs to end all of Africa’s
internecine civil wars. He asked Sandline to come up with an informal tender
bid for the task. The price tag? Just $750 million, or only a little over the
cost of one year’s disastrous ‘peacekeeping’ efforts of the UNAMSIL in Sierra Leone.
Brooks, a specialist on African security issues, argues that PMCs would do the
work far more effectively. He believes that it is time the UN contracted out
its peacekeeping, peace-enforcement and humanitarian efforts in Africa, because
no one else is willing to do the job properly.
http://www.raceandhistory.com/cgi-bin/forum/webbbs_config.pl/noframes/read/493
Recently, a consortium of PMCs calling themselves the
International Peace Operations Association (IPOA) has proposed that it be hired
to work on behalf of the largely ineffectual UN peacekeeping operations in
eastern Congo.
http://ipoaonline.org/php/
In the USA, the use of PMCs is already becoming very much of
a reality: Dynacorp are training the police force in Iraq; Vinnell have for
many years trained the National Guard in Saudi Arabia; Kellog Brown and Root
are involved with security in Iraq for Halliburton.
http://dyn-intl.com/
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=672
http://www.vinnell.com/
http://www.halliburton.com/
http://www.answers.com/topic/kellogg-brown-and-root
http://www.blackwaterusa.com/
++++++
I guess my research into the topic of PMCs leads me to a
very cautious conclusion. Clearly there are times when the only solution to a
just cause (such as many of the troubles in Africa) require military force to
give peace and freedom a chance. Just as clear is (a) the inability of the UN
to be reliably effective in dealing with these situations; (b) the
unwillingness of the major super powers to intervene and (c) the enormous cost
of traditional peacekeeping efforts.
On one that the purely theoretical argument that all of
Africa’s major conflicts could be resolved of at least managed for under $800
million when peacekeeping efforts in a single one of Africa’s conflicts was
costing (and failing) nearly that amount demands further investigation.
I think the issues of UN conflict intelligence, combined
with the relatively low quality of expertise and intelligence that traditional
peacekeeping contributing nations are likely to have when being placed into
such conflict zones combined with their residence to be an effective fighting
force ensure the failure of such peace keeping missions.
Clearly, both the body of intelligence needs to be put in
place and access to a fighting force that is both competent and willing is
essential for the UN moving forward.
However, just as critical is an understanding of the
implications of using these forces. Clearly even the worlds most powerful armed
forces (the US army) and debatably the worlds greatest intelligence agency (the
CIA) have clearly misjudged both the tactical execution (Somalia, Iraq, Vietnam
etc) and the long-term (CIA involvement in Afghanistan) effects of their
policies. As equally disturbing is the human rights violations of the US army
AND the UN peacekeeping behavior of the Jordanian peacekeepers themselves in
Sierra Leone (they sold ammo and intelligence to the West Side Boys to enable
them to attack the Nigerian UN peacekeeping force in return for conflict
diamonds) and these are national armies who are supposed to exemplify standards
of decency and respect. Layer onto this the lack of trust the general
population has to big business and its executives and you have a potential
recipe for disaster.
I doubt I would trust the UN and its policy makers with the
detailed understanding of the generally confusing alliances that occur in
internal civil wars to be able to always make wise decisions on the deployment
of lethal force. The exact same pressure that keeps the superpowers from
intervening (shying away from losses and fearing public opinion) seems to be
the missing element that would help to keep PMCs in check.
With that said and always leaning on the side of the
carrot and the stick (or the iron fist in a velvet glove) I think that IF the
worlds superpowers are NOT willing to intervene justice demands that the UN
carefully consider the use of PMCs. For me the swaying argument is the price
tag, the cost being about 1/10th of the cost of deploying UN
peacekeeping soldiers (while being more effective) can mean that money can be
used towards a greater investment in effective rehabilitation and education for
those involved in the conflict. Civilians and combatants alike in these
countries need to see that there are viable alternatives for them than the
savagery of conflict.