Private Armies and Military Intervention

David Shearer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781136047121
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

The nature and role of paid foreign forces have altered considerably in the late twentieth century. 'Military companies' – private firms providing active military assistance, in some cases involving combat – have exploited the increasing reluctance of Western governments and multilateral organizations to intervene directly in civil conflicts. As a result, their influence has increased. David Shearer argues that the debate over the use of these companies – notably the South African firm Executive Outcomes (EO) – has not, however, kept pace with their development. Companies such as EO are widely seen as merely modern-day mercenary outfits exploiting violence for private gain.

Shearer contends that the need to recast the debate on military companies is urgent. These companies are not a passing phenomenon; if anything, their influence and activities are set to increase in the next century as Western military retrenchment continues. Efforts to restrict the activities of military companies by drafting international or domestic legislation have to date been ineffective, and are likely to remain so.

This paper – the first detailed analysis of the private military sector – argues that dismissing it as an unpleasant aberration is misleading and unhelpful. Military companies can claim success in achieving immediate strategic objectives. The author cites two examples at length – EO's operations in Angola in 1993–94, and in Sierra Leone in 1995–96 – and suggests that military force can stabilize a crisis. Engagement with military companies may create possibilities for them to complement international and regional peacekeeping efforts. Traditional UN peacekeeping is flawed in terms of its speed of mobilization and lines of authority, and is hampered by interference from contributing countries. The private sector may avoid many of these difficulties.

Private Armies and Military Intervention concludes that transparency of operations and business relationships is a crucial first step towards ensuring the accountability of the private military sector. However, a coherent policy towards military companies has yet to be formulated. Current frameworks under international law are insufficient and inappropriate. Characterizing the activities of military companies as 'mercenary' offers few useful means to tackle the issue within a framework of international policy. What is required is a more pragmatic approach that assesses the effectiveness of – and engages with – private armies.

chapter 1
Mercenary or Military Company?

How are we to understand the nature and role of military companies? The controversy surrounding the involvement of a private military company in Papua New Guinea (PNG) in early 1997 illustrates the way in which the use of the term 'mercenary' can make it more difficult to understand the strategic implications of private military force.

In February 1997, the PNG government signed a contract worth $36 million with London-based Sandline International to provide military training, including combat support and equipment, to its special forces. Sandline, headed by former British Army officer Tim Spicer, sub-contracted most of the work to Executive Outcomes (EO), a South African military company previously employed by the Angolan and Sierra Leone governments. The PNG government planned to launch a military assault against the secessionist Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA). Winning the nine-year conflict - or at least forcing a settlement - would, it was hoped, reopen Bougainville's Panguna copper mine, once the source of one third of PNG's export earnings.

Australia, PNG's neighbour and former colonial ruler, condemned the operation. Prime Minister John Howard referred to Sandline and EO as 'mercenaries' and threatened 'significant' consequences should the two companies be used.¹ The leader of the parliamentary opposition, Kim Beazley, branded them 'assassins', and Australian newspapers made repeated references to 'dogs of war'.² PNG Prime Minister Sir Julius Chan, facing an impending election on a platform that pledged to end the Bougainville insurgency, was unapologetic. With no other assistance forthcoming, he claimed he had no alternative but to turn to the 'private sector'.³

The PNG government clearly expected more direct Australian support. Acting PNG Prime Minister John Giheno, who replaced Chan in the débâcle that was to ensue, accused Australia of hesitating to make a 'firm commitment', but '[crying] foul every time we have turned elsewhere for help'.⁴

Canberra was reluctant to become involved in what it saw as an intractable war on the side of a poorly disciplined army with a deficient human-rights record. The government also faced a vocal Bougainville lobby demanding the island's independence. The Panguna mine, part-owned by Anglo-Australian company RTZ-CRA, was itself a source of discontent. The largest of its type in the world, Panguna was perceived to have returned little to the local economy and was accused of causing severe environmental damage. Bougainville landowners joined with the BRA to force the mine's closure in the late 1980s.

It was outrage at the charge that the PNG government was employing 'mercenaries', rather than the activities of Sandline per se, that precipitated a political crisis. The head of the armed forces, Brigadier-General Jerry Singirok, exploited the episode as a means to harness wider discontent among the military and led a mutiny that ousted Chan in March 1997. Australia's outspoken condemnation of the contract added impetus to Singirok's rallying cry But Australia's motivation appeared to stem more from strategic concerns about Indonesia's possible reaction than from moral indignation at the use of foreign military companies. Singirok claimed to be acting out of concern for 'the people', but, as a later enquiry revealed, he had been a principal negotiator in the Sandline deal and had appeared to back it until the end. He had been steadily losing political favour after a disastrous $iom military offensive - High Speed Two - against the BRA in 1996. Much of the funds earmarked for the operation remained unaccounted for. Singirok, facing possible dismissal, found in the Sandline deal - which was cancelled in March 1997 - a pretext to ensure his political survival.

The Sandline incident illustrates the dilemma faced by governments which, lacking options to resolve internal insurrection and conflict, choose to employ foreign military forces. Labelling a military company 'mercenary' feeds a set of pre-conceived ideas and obscures the issues at stake. Mercenaries are widely perceived to be war profiteers exploiting violence for personal gain. There has therefore been little attempt to examine whether the use of private military force has proved successful in ending wars that seemed immune to other solutions. In some states, notably Angola and Sierra Leone, there is evidence to suggest that private military action has - at least temporarily - stabilised a volatile situation.

Private military forces cannot be defined in absolute terms: they occupy a grey area that challenges the liberal conscience. Moral judgements on the use of mercenaries are usually passed at a distance from the situations in which these forces are involved. Those facing conflict and defeat have fewer moral compunctions.

Historical Context

The use of paid foreign force has historically attracted little attention because it was accepted as normal practice. The Ancient Greeks employed Macedonians; Rome hired one Germanic tribe to defend its Imperial borders against another. Throughout the Middle Ages in Europe, mercenaries were considered important components of fighting forces and were often employed as elite units or as advisers.⁵

Foreign forces or mercenaries tended to prosper in unstable conditions, or following a change in the existing order. Increases in private military forces have also often coincided with the end of a period of conflict which saw standing armies reduced. Both conditions prevail after the end of the Cold War, as they did in mid-fourteenth-century Europe, when mercenary activity expanded rapidly at the end of the first phase of The Hundred Years' War. Demobilised troops formed themselves into so-called 'free companies' and entered the service of feudal lords, notably in France.

The period was characterised by instability. France was weak and divided, Italy volatile. As with the post-Cold War era, the loosening of a rigidly defined order - the feudal system - and the absence of firm central control created an atmosphere conducive to the 'privatised' soldier.⁶ Condottieri - named after the condotta or contracts they signed - recruited ex-soldiers and hired them out to warring Italian principalities. The Swiss soldiers that defended the early cantons of the fifteenth century were so impressive in battle that other principalities and kingdoms were eager to hire them. They were recruited as a papal police corps by Julius II (the Swiss Guards persist to this day). Mercenaries showed little discrimination in whom they fought for, but their usefulness to a monarch or lord made them generally accepted. Contracting out military functions was seen, then as now, as a useful way to avoid the obligations of a state towards its 'native' troops: mercenaries 'left no troublesome widows and orphans; at the end of the campaign, they could be sent away unlike a country's own men'.⁷

By the late eighteenth century, conscript and standing armies had largely replaced ad hoc military formations. As a result, the use of mercenaries declined markedly. The concept remained widely accepted, although not without question. Lord Camden condemned the British government's proposal to send troops from Hesse in Germany to fight in the American War of Independence in 1775, calling it a 'mere mercenary bargain'. Parliament backed their dispatch by a comfortable margin nonetheless.⁸ Later, tolerance of 'privatised' military force and the freedom to contract out fighting services also chimed with the nineteenth century's embrace of economic liberalism.

paid foreign forces are historically unremarkable

Attitudes towards warfare - and hence employing mercenaries - were to alter dramatically in the second half of the twentieth century. Although some limitations on the unilateral use of force existed under customary law and international conventions prior to the Second World War, a state's right to wage war as a permissible means of producing change remained generally accepted.⁹ The role and legal status of mercenaries during conflicts were little examined.¹⁰

However, the bloodshed of the Second World War, following hard upon the losses of 1914-18, engendered a strong belief that the right of states to wage war upon each other should be strictly curtailed: the UN Charter of 1945 prohibited war except in very limited circumstances. Mercenaries were seen as flouting both the spirit and philosophy of this new order by profiting from - and possibly encouraging - conflict. Critics also viewed them as a threat to the stability of sovereign states, the building blocks of the post-war era. This new perspective, however, applied only to inter-state conflicts. Civil wars continued to be perceived as terrorism or insurgency, the internal business of the state concerned.

By the 1960s, the activities of foreign troops in Africa had established an image of the mercenary as an agent of the colonial powers and therefore a reactionary symbol of racism and opposition to self-determination. This perception took hold despite a general absence of loyalty to a cause or side. Mercenaries gained particular notoriety in the Belgian Congo, where individuals such as Dublinborn 'Mad' Mike Hoare, Frenchman Bob Denard and Belgian Jean Schramme - nicknamed les affreux, the 'terrible ones' - led Katanganese Gendarmerie rebels against the UN peace-enforcement operation supporting the 'unity and integrity' of the country." Members of the mercenary force later fought alongside Prime Minister Moise Tshombe's new government. Mercenaries showed a similar lack of ideological concern in Nigeria's break-away Biafra province, fighting both with separatists and with the Nigerian government in the 1967-70 war.¹²

In Benin, Denard was involved in a failed coup attempt against President Mathieu Kerekou in January 1977; he was also implicated in successful coups in the Comoros Islands in 1975 and 1978, and in 1995 led a failed attempt to oust Comoros President Said Mohammed Djohar. Hoare overthrew Seychelles Chief Minister James Mancham in 1977 and returned to the country in 1982 in an unsuccessful bid to topple Mancham's successor, France-Albert Réné.

Although the activities of individual mercenaries were condemned, states continued to deploy foreign troops. Moroccan forces were contracted by Zairean President Mobutu Sese Seko in 1977 to quell an uprising in Katanga province, now Shaba in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DROC). Cuban troops fought Somali forces in the disputed Ogaden region of Ethiopia in 1978 and also backed the socialist Movimento Popular para a Libertação de Angola (MPLA). France continued its practice - begun in 1831 - of recruiting foreign soldiers to fight abroad in the Foreign Legion. The UK established Gurkha regiments of Nepalese nationals in 1947 to participate in international conflicts on London's behalf. Although foreign and motivated principally by financial gain - the basic characteristics of mercenaries - these forces were considered legitimate since they were integrated into national armies. Moral questions surrounding their use were rarely asked.

Legal Definitions

Apart from the period of instability surrounding the transition from colony to independent nation in the 1960s, mercenary activity remained largely peripheral to the strategic interests of the superpowers. Incidents such as those in Benin, the Seychelles and the Comoros Islands provoked a strong public reaction that magnified their impact beyond their real strategic significance and, in general, Western states paid little attention.

Nevertheless, hostility towards mercenaries, particularly from some African governments, prompted efforts to limit their activities. The UN passed a series of resolutions condemning mercenary activity in the Congo which, although mostly covering specific circumstances and not legally binding, were important in establishing a legal definition of mercenary activity Three instruments of international law are important:

• Article 47 of the 1977 Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions;
• the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) Convention for the Elimination of Mercenarism in Africa of 1977; and
• the International Convention Against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of Mercenaries of 1989.¹³

Article 47, which provides the most commonly accepted definition of mercenaries, was included in Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions after pressure from African nations led by Nigeria during the Diplomatic Conference on Humanitarian Law in Geneva in 1974-77. Developing countries wished to see a definition that ranged wider than that preferred by the West, and Article 47 was adopted only after leng...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of maps and tables
• Glossary
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Mercenary or Military Company?
• Chapter 2 The Expansion of the Private Military Sector
• Chapter 3 Case-studies
• Chapter 4 Assessing Capabilities and Limitations
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Notes
• About Private Armies and Military Intervention