As the international community continues to throw its moral weight and its financial and technical resources behind well-intentioned peacekeeping missions to protect civilians and reduce the societal ravages of conflict, it unwittingly gets in the way of unimaginably profitable illicit business interests that prefer instability and conflict over peace. This lack of understanding of the operational environment causes United Nations (UN) missions to last interminably long and to be repeated, often resulting in peacekeepers and other stabilization actors themselves turning to lucrative criminal activities,1 due to long stays, dangerous and unpleasant living conditions, and low income and opportunity.
The deleterious effect of crime on peace and stability operations can be easily understood when criminal activities clearly affect specific operations, such as critical materiel disappearing on the eve of an offensive, but the underlying role of organized crime is not always as simple to identify or to convince policymakers of its seriousness.
In the wake of the March 2016 airport and metro bombings in Brussels, Belgium, the complex and disjointed security and intelligence configuration of not only the European Union (EU), but the Belgian and even the Brussels security apparatus became starkly apparent. Belgian Justice Minister Koen Greens was internationally lampooned for his public comment, âAt that moment, he was not known for terrorism, but as a criminal,â meant to explain why Belgium did not monitor Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, one of the Brussels bombers, because he was not known to Belgium as a terrorist but [only] as a criminal.2 Despite el-Bakraouiâs record of violent crime and despite a warning from Turkish authorities who had earlier deported him to the Netherlands after he tried to enter Syria to join an Islamic extremist group, Belgian authorities failed to monitor him. This unambiguously showed the rest of the world the clear link between violent criminals and violent extremists. These individuals know each other, these groups work together to obtain resources, these groups co-opt the same corrupt facilitators, and these groups share the routes that convey their illicit goods, associates, and services. Even when their ideologies and motivations are widely divergent, they also often share essential motives, especially when gaining economic or political influence or causing disruption or destabilization is of benefit to all such groups.
In 2000, the UN General Assembly adopted the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (TOC) but it failed to provide a precise definition. Article 2(a) of the Convention offers four key identification criteria of a TOC group:
- 1.Three or more persons not randomly formed
- 2.Existing for a period of [unspecified] time
- 3.Acting in concert with the aim of committing at least one crime punishable by at least four yearsâ incarceration [does not specify by what legal code].
- 4.In order to obtain, directly or indirectly, a financial or other material benefit.3
In 2011, the US National Security Council published its âStrategy to Combat Transnational Organized Crimeâ defining TOC as âself-perpetuating associations of individuals operating across borders to obtain power, influence, monetary and/or commercial gains, wholly or in part by illegal means.â4 Despite these indications that TOC is recognized as a global problem, it is addressed only to a small degree in a few UN mandates and only sometimes finds its way into the planning process in New York.
These groups protect their activities through corruption, violence, and by implementing a cross-border structure that both expands their activities and reduces their risks. Criminality in peacekeeping mission areas is generally dealt with in a fragmentary manner, if at all, and the response is incongruous with the importance of integrated planning and execution at the mission level. Mission success, however, is predicated upon a multidimensional/multidisciplinary approach toward UN missions and a clear division of labor between military and police in the planning stages, as well as finding or establishing complementarity among the various players, particularly when deployed to complex environments.
TOC mitigation, when considered, is usually treated as separate from corruption and terrorism, but in reality, the three are intertwined. Recent research strongly correlates the often symbiotic relationship among transnational crime, corruption, and terrorism commonly found in the environments where peacekeeping is required.
As a number of noted scholars, economists, and journalists have illustrated repeatedly, the extreme economic dislocation and inequality that emerged with the fall of the Soviet Union and the birth of capitalism across the formerly communist Eurasian landmass, caused a large number of people to turn to aspects of criminality for their livelihoods in this ânew economy.â Even groups that were once motivated by political, religious, ethnic, or other ideological concerns were forced to turn to criminal sources of funding, however reluctantly, as their US and Russian backers no longer found their causes and their targeted furtherance of instability valuable.
Post-conflict states typically have an economy in disarray and a traumatized population whose livelihoods and educations have been interrupted, resulting in a need for retraining, but once they receive such training, there must be jobs available to employ them. What is forgotten in the fighting is that many combatants have families, sometimes large, extended families, and a common desire or obligation to provide for them during both war and peace. Lack of such economic opportunity, even in stable states, such as the United States and the Scandinavian countries, still drives young people from some disenfranchised parts of society toward the upward mobility offered by criminal gangs.
This is of great concern today in Colombia as the euphoria over the late 2016 peace deal ending 50 years of civil war dies down. Yes, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of ColombiaâPeopleâs Army (FARC) and National Liberation Army (ELN) have agreed to lay down their arms and the violent clashes among the Cali and Medellin cartels have abated, but there is still plenty of profit to be made in the cocaine trade and there are plenty of young men who have known nothing but war and who have only the skills and tools of violence with which to make a living.
Recent historical examples abound of the end of war leading to the beginning of an unstable peace and the rise of criminal syndicates that often take advantage of the fragile peace to recruit associates, co-opt corrupt officials and develop markets in both licit and illicit goods and services that legitimate governments are unable or unwilling to provide to certain geographic or demographic elements of its sovereign territory. The general lack of rule of law that abounds post-conflict incubates crime as host nations and domestic and international partners scramble to establish transitional public security as a foundation for the other elements of stabilization, such as governance and a sustainable economy.
In post-conflict or fragile states, the most destabilizing element is societyâs young men who lack skills adaptable to the legal economy and have been permitted and often encouraged to use brutality to further profit or ideological aims and have been provided the training and resources to do so effectively. Once the conflict ends, they are expected to settle down and become productive members of society with civic outlook and civilized manners. If there are no economic opportunities for these testosterone-driven, battle-hardened beings, stability is a pipedream.
Although in most former Soviet and Communist countries, the demise of the empire did not result in widespread violence, with the exceptions of Armenia and Azerbaijan and parts of Georgia and southern Russia (i.e., Chechnya and Daghestan), the void created by the loss of that power structure across the 15 constituent republics as well as in Eastern Europe into the Balkans led directly to the genocidal Balkan Wars of the early 1990s.
Very briefly, the crisis began brewing in the late 1980s in Yugoslavia, as the Serbs had been the Balkan darlings of the Soviets, due to their shared language and culture. Serbs tended to run the civil service and the military and had key Communist Party positions in all of the ethnically based republics of the country. As the Soviet Union breathed its last, Serbs began to be perceived as those colluding with the Soviet system to keep others in Yugoslavia enslaved. Yugoslavian President Slobodan MiloseviÄ, a Serbian nationalist demagogue, began to turn that language around, hearkening back to allusions of anti-Turk sentiment prevalent in World War I and language from the Crusades to sow tensions among the Croats, Bosnians, and other ethnic groups that comprised the tenuous country that was Yugoslavia.
MiloseviÄâs famous battle cry, âOnly unity will save the Serbs!â meant that the Serbian people must take control of the other areas of the fragile country, such as Bosnia and Croatia, to ensure protection of the Serbian minorities there as things fell apart. Croatia declaring independence was the starting gun for mass atrocities that resulted in a complex war and genocide that ostensibly ended with the Dayton Peace Accords in 1994 but continued unabated in Kosovo, a restive ethnic Albanian province of Serbia, until a 1999 peace accord quelled the violence.
In the decade of viciousness unimaginable in Europe at the time, crime became a form of art. There were virtually no Balkan leaders not involved in the organized crime game in some form, as active puppet masters, as participants, as facilitators, or simply as part of the many who looked away and still profited from passivity. As nationalism ignited Yugoslavia into a conflagration of atrocity, organized crime was right there, fueling the fires and enabling all sides. As the violent political battles raged, killing thousands, business partners continued selling arms and provisions and smuggling violent actors among the warring factions even to the detriment of their own ethnic group.5
As the more distant outposts of the Soviet empire, the Balkans enjoyed relative independence, and the hard currencies they brought in through limited trade with the West had aided in sustaining the entire Soviet sphere. When the Empire fell, the special privilege Yugoslavia had as a link between the communist and capitalist worlds was lost, and it was seen by the East as a bit wild and traitorous and by the West as a shabby backward country.
Bulgaria was another odd Balkan case with an entirely totalitarian and paranoid leadership, but its access to the Black Sea beaches gave it a bit of a cache as an Eastern Riviera and the ability to move goods over land and sea. The first modern Bulgarian-origin TOC syndicates were essentially created by the Bulgarian KGB (DS) in the 1960s, smuggling drugs, arms, and technology.
Eastern Europe has, for decades, been known as the âheart of cybercrimeâ with Bulgarian hackers having been tasked in the Soviet period with developing the first computer viruses for Cold War cyber warfare and continuing to thrive in that arena.
Enterprising Bulgarians who, like the Tuaregs in Mali, see themselves as storied historical traders over rough, remote terrain are now trading in bits and bytes.
Most of the global superstars of the computer industry today started out at Stanford University, whose longtime partnerships enabled them to establish working and funding partnerships in Silicon Valley that would not have been possible almost anywhere else. Had there been the legitimate capital, financial and economic instruments, regulations, and accrediting bodies in Sophia in 1985, the Googles and Apples might have emer...