POLITICS-UN: Regulating Hired Guns

By Thalif Deen Reprint | | Print |

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Apr 2 1999 (IPS) - When a band of mercenaries tried to take over the chain of coral islands that form the Republic of Maldives in 1979, a reporter covering the story asked a Maldivian diplomat about the strength of the country’s standing army.

“Standing army?”, the diplomat laughed. “We don’t even have a sitting army in the Maldives.”

The military situation is the same today. With a population of about 280,000 scattered across 220 of its 1,200 small coral islands in the Indian Ocean, the Maldives is one of the few countries in the world with no regular troops, tanks, combat aircraft, warships, or missiles.

The island’s fragile defences have attracted an assorted group of free-lance mercenaries and bounty hunters who twice were unsuccessful in heading a coup against the government – once in 1979, and then in 1988.

They bungled the first effort police intervened, and the attempted coup in 1988 was put down with the intervention of Indian troops.

Today, however, mercenaries like those who once tried to overthrow legitimate governments – such as in the Maldives and later in neighbouring Comoros – are being hired by democratically- elected governments to fight armed rebel groups.

In some cases, they are being deployed by governments-in- exile seeking to return to power with the help of hired guns.

A new UN study on mercenaries released Thursday calls for the creation of an international oversight body which would have the authority to review the use of private security firms and mercenaries on a case-by-case basis.

The study says the recruitment, financing and use of mercenaries is “unacceptable under any circumstances” even when the aim is to restore a constitutional regime overthrown by a military coup.

“The mere fact that it is government that recruits mercenaries or contracts companies that recruit mercenaries for its own defences or to provide reinforcements in armed conflict does not make such actions any less illegal or illegitimate,” the study says.

According to the report, the laws of most UN member states do not classify mercenaries as criminals. In others where being a mercenary is classified as a crime, there is no known case of the law being enforced.

For instance, Britain’s 1870 Foreign Enlistment Act probihits British citizens from becoming mercenaries or from recruiting them but the last case in which a person was tried under that law was in 1896.

More than 100 years later in 1997, the British company Sandline International signed a 36 million dollar contract with the government of Papua New Guinea to fight a rebel group, the Bougainville Revolutionary Army.

In Sierra Leone, the same firm signed contracts with several financial and mining companies – who were trying to protect their investments against rebel forces – to restore the ousted government to power.

Another company, Executive Outcomes of South Africa, also had a similar contract with Sierra Leone in 1996.

Last year, mercenaries were deployed in civil wars in several African countries, including Liberia, Sierra Leone, Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and also in Papua New Guinea in the south Pacific, according to the report.

Enrique Bernales Ballesteros, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Mercenaries, labels mercenaries as “criminals.” They act “not out of altruistic motives but to earn money in exchange for tactical and strategic skills in the handling of weapons and explosives.”

Ballesteros also traces a connecting link between mercenaries and terrorism. “The commission of terrorist acts has been established through many terrorist attacks in which the perpetrator was proven to be one or more mercenaries hired to commit the crime.”

“The situation today in Sierra Leone was a human rights disaster in which the presence of mercenaries had no other purpose than to continue the conflict,” he said.

Although there was “alarming” data on the negative abuses of military security firms, he cited South Africa as one of the few countries which regulated military foreign assistance and private security firms within the scope of international law and human rights.

In 1998, Pretoria enacted a law to define the jurisdiction of private security companies hiring out mercenaries. Under the new law, any national or foreigner resident in South Africa, and who participates in military missions outside the country, is liable to a fine of about 200,000 dollars and 10 years in prison.

The study says that the South African government imposes limits on the freedom of security companies who are empowered to deal with military matters. It also regulates, but does not prohibit, the existence of these companies.

Meanwhile, the Pretoria-based Executive Outcomes, which was established in 1989, has complied with the law and registered with the Department of Defence as an organisation providing military assistance, mainly training abroad.