PRIVATE MILITARY FIRMS IN AFRICA

Abstract

fictional scenario in which a private military firm (PMF), in response to a genocide unfolding in the shadow of international inertia, steps forward with an offer to secure safe havens for refugees. Fiction moved a step closer to reality recently when the United States pledged more than US $200 million in the form of private contracts in support of the African Union Mission in Sudan. In August of this year, Lieutenant Colonel Michael Bittrick, the US State Department’s deputy director of regional security affairs for Africa flew to Addis Ababa to work out the details of an agreement by which two private firms, Dyncorp Corporation and Pacific Architects and Engineers will provide housing, office equipment, transport and communications equipment in support of African Union troops. Although the nature of the support is logistical and may therefore seem innocuous, it nonetheless enables scarce military resources to be concentrated where they are most needed. True to the new mantra of north-south peacekeeping collaboration, it also spares the donor country the risk of putting its soldiers’ lives at risk in a conflict that is, for the moment, of marginal interest to its foreign policy goals. This is not the first time that the support of a multi-national peacekeeping force has been contracted out to PMFs. Firms such as Lifeguard provided security for the staff of humanitarian agencies in Sierra Leone, the PMFs Pacific Architects and Engineers and ICI Oregon supported ECOMOG forces in West Africa and currently both UNMIL (Liberia) and UNAMSIL (Sierra Leone). More than a decade ago, the American firm Brown and Root (now Kellogg, Brown and Root, employed in support of American troops in Iraq) was contracted by the US Department of Defence to support American military peacekeeping interventions (a time when the US still sent troops on African peace missions) in both Somalia and Rwanda. There has been great deal of involvement of the sector in protecting infrastructures and industries in conflict areas, as well as in supporting governments in the training, equipping and restructuring of armed forces, intelligence gathering, ad infinitum. Private military firms are as pervasive in Africa as security problems themselves. According to the watchdog organization Public Integrity, there are few African states that have not, at some time or another, engaged the services of a private military firm in some capacity, either in the handling of crises or more often, in the more mundane training, support and equipping of armed forces. Furthermore, the transmutations and permutations of companies, some of which have been remained in place before, during and after conflicts, defy static typologies. PRIVATE MILITARY FIRMS IN AFRICA Rogue or regulated?