By John Harker

Earlier this year, Canadians were treated to a glimpse of a new reality in the business of security, and how it has, in many instances, indeed become a business.

A former general officer in the Canadian Armed forces publicly made the case for the UN to draw on private security firms to fulfill peacekeeping mission requirements. No, not the private security firms which guard shopping malls against the depredations of bored teenagers; rather the heavily armed variety which are more commonly known as "mercenary" companies, a label which most of them are anxious to avoid.

According to the Ottawa Citizen of April 6, 1998, Brigadier General Ian Douglas believes there is a place for private security firms in peace operations; he cited the work of one of the firms, Executive Outcomes, in places such as Sierra Leone in 1995. "Look what EO did in Sierra Leone. Without them, there would have been no peace to pursue. They literally stopped the war." Interesting that the "peace" which followed was soon overtaken by a coup, launched by the Army of Sierra Leone in May 1997, one which ended in February 1998 after armed intervention by ECOMOG, the West African regional peacekeeping force built around the Nigerian army. An intervention which spawned its own tales of mercenary involvement, as we shall see.

It has been argued that the UN must take a "more practical" approach to peacekeeping, as wars in places such as Africa are bloodier than ever, and countries, such as Canada presumably, are getting "donor fatigue." In 1995, General Douglas helped organize an $8 million operation which saw 1,500 Zairean troops hired by the UN in Zaire to provide security for refugee camps, and he asserts that the cost would have been $80 million if "traditional peacekeeping troops" provided the same security-a practical solution. General Douglas thinks practicality will drive the use of private security companies: "In a perfect world we don't need them or don't want them. But the world isn't perfect."

One organization long engaged with trying to make the world more perfect is Amnesty International, and its Secretary General, Pierre Sané, has pointed out, also in the Ottawa Citizen, that "mercenaries operate outside the normal criminal justice system and on the fringes of military command structures," thus making them less subject to controls which are never easy to apply in any event.

One other response was quick in coming: Art Eggleton, Canada's minister of defence, was quoted in the Ottawa Citizen of April 7 as saying that there is no room for mercenaries on UN peacekeeping operations; their companies are only concerned with money, he said, whereas a sense of purpose and a contribution to humanity is a very important part of what Canadian peacekeeping troops do.

Peacekeeping, however, is not the only form of armed effort to keep or create a condition of peace. And Sierra Leone is certainly not the only country where the government of the day has brought in mercenaries for a specific purpose. Angola is another.

Sierra Leone and Angola have some things in common: both were colonies of European powers, though Sierra Leone peacefully achieved independence from Britain in 1961, whereas Angola was the scene of a bitter "war of liberation," fought between Portugal as the colonial power and three liberation movements, two of whom are still contesting Angola's future to this day. Also, both Sierra Leone and Angola are blessed with an abundance of diamonds. Or is that cursed? Diamonds may or may not be a girl's best friend, but they do seem to attract private security companies.

Corporate "peacebuilding"

Sierra Leone was in the headlines for much of 1998. The year began with a rebel government in power in Freetown, the capital, but under pressure from an international community committed to a return to power by President Kabbah, who had been democratically elected in November 1996 and ousted by his military in May 1997. Kabbah's election was, at the time, widely applauded as a sign that real change was a valid prospect for Sierra Leone. The elections followed a lengthy period of talks between government and rebel forces, whose violent rejection of business as usual in Sierra Leone had subjected the country to years of bloody conflict.

In January 1996, the International Crisis Group, ICG, sent a mission to Sierra Leone, and its report should be mandatory reading for peacebuilders and peacekeepers.

It asserted that years of successive undemocratic and corrupt government, an absence of social investment, and extreme and widespread poverty characterized Sierra Leone. It said that the crisis in Sierra Leone is not the "rebel war" as many proclaim, but is rather the years of bad governance and economic mismanagement. It also explored a myriad of complicated links between security firms, mining houses, and mining concessions that it feared could have a very strong hold on any future government of Sierra Leone.

That government turned out to be President Kabbah's, re-installed by Nigerian troops in 1998. Kabbah's return was the subject of what became a short-term political story if not crisis in Britain, where the press focused on the role of another private security company, Sandline International, in allegedly providing weapons and skills for the force which defeated the rebels and thus enabled Kabbah to return to Freetown.

The head of Sandline, Tim Spicer, former British Army officer, was investigated by Customs and Excise authorities in Britain for an alleged breach of the UN arms embargo, which was directed not only at the rebels but also at Kabbah's camp and his Nigerian supporters. Spicer maintained that he had received official approval for his "gun running" from the British Foreign Office. Did the Foreign Minister know? was the question asked by Britain's press. The standing of the minister was badly tarnished by the affair, which saw the Prime Minister having to defend the actions of the British High Commissioner in Sierra Leone for instigating the use of Sandline.

The Prime Minister's line was that as the rebels were the enemies of international law and order, breaking UN sanctions and British law was "an overblown hoo-hah." Had the initial drafters of the UN resolution banning arms shipments to the conflict discriminated between the Kabbah government and the rebels, perhaps all this would have been avoided, but the affair points to the complexity of understanding the place of private security companies in "peacebuilding." And it leads back to the need to better understand just who and what these companies are. The two imperatives are linked.

Security firms typically claim that they operate under invitation from legitimate governments and are paid to provide a service.

But critics suggest that the pay-off in many cases is in the form of mining concessions, or shares in the same-Angola being another case in point.

Mercenary miners?

Angola is one of the world's top producers of high quality gems, and diamond sales have been estimated at $1.5 billion a year. It is home to a diverse collection of actors and institutions, saints and sufferers. Diamond mining in Angola has been likened to life in the old Wild West, but that frontier did not know of the anti-personnel mine or the AK-47, both well-known to the long-suffering people of Angola.

It is in this highly volatile, and still worsening, political and security climate that mining firms hope to operate. In one particular incident in a mining district, a truck carrying 16 policemen hit a landmine and UNITA soldiers waiting in ambush shot the survivors. Later that month, 215 villagers were killed in Mbula, in northeastern Angola. The government was quick to blame UNITA, and UNITA, in calling for a UN inquiry, was quick to blame diamond gangs operating in the area. UNITA's Political Commission claimed that the massacre was "the result of hostilities between groups of garimpeiros, illegal diamond prospectors, both Angolans and foreigners, who have significant military forces at their disposal under the cover of so-called private security firms."

The role played by mining and security firms in Angola remains obscure, but it is clear that diamonds and UNITA go together: some estimates put UNITA's income from diamonds at close to $1 billion per year, enabling it to re-arm to the point that, by late July, as tensions rose, the Economist magazine suggested that the Armed Forces of Angola were unsettled at the prospect of renewed civil war. They did not know just how well UNITA had used the past months of relative peace to prepare for vicious war. Diamonds are UNITA's best friend.

Allies and interests

And what about the private firms? Some are better known than others. Perhaps the best known, and maybe least understood, is Executive Outcomes. Then there is Sandline International, which figured at the centre of the British political mess following the ending of the coup against the government of Sierra Leone in February of this year. Then there are the links that connect them to one another and to their collaborators, investors, and allies.

Roger Moody, writing in the March 1998 issue of the New Internationalist, suggests that the allies include not only troubled governments in Africa, but major western powers. He quoted David Shearer, an analyst with London's International Institute for Strategic Studies and one of the authors of the ICG report on Sierra Leone, as saying that nothing that companies such as EO and Sandline would do would be contrary to the wishes of major powers such as Britain.

Certainly, many of the principals have served with the British Army. Peacebuilders can never overlook the role and nature of armies, be they the armies of fragile states, of "liberation movements," or of intervenors such as the countries which commit troops to answer the peacekeeping calls of the United Nations. Many of the armies of such "supplier countries" are themselves going through change and adjustment processes. Robert Kaplan, widely known for his characterization of the fragility of peace and development, has written about the growing recourse not so much to private security companies, but to their state counterparts, the special forces components of national armies.

Writing in Atlantic Monthly in February 1998, Kaplan, in offering an explanation for what he contends will be a growth in the use of special forces, touched on one line of reasoning deployed in defence of private security companies: saving money. Perhaps the UN Zaire operation is an indicator of how "public" monies can be saved by buying "private" protection. Kaplan maintains that in the future, the public will demand protection-for as few tax dollars as possible-from a whole new kind of enemy. And he is not speaking of Zaire or elsewhere in Africa. He cited an urban geographer who recently told him that "Vancouver-a typical emerging city-state with a productive economy and its own strategic transport links-will have no particular need for either Canada or the United States. But it will require a protective shield of the kind that Washington's Special Forces and intelligence units can provide."

Kaplan sees these special forces as being able to "(this time) truly win hearts and minds, by acting as doctors and aid workers in a Third World city or village-and also if need be, kill or apprehend a war criminal, a terrorist group, or another adversary." But on the streets of Vancouver? What Kaplan predicts for our North American cities is a future which will "be brutal to industrial-age armies with big tanks and jets, and kind to corporate-style forces in urban settings." Why not turn, then, to corporate structures themselves, instead of changing the nature of the armies our publics pay for? Will the private security companies replace armies at home as well as abroad?

Privatizing security

There are obviously other dimensions to the privatization of security besides armies. Policing and corrections are going far down that path in many countries.

For corrections, there are now some Canadian examples to set alongside those frequently found in the United States. The public is buying prison services from private contractors. In policing, there are also examples in Canada of residents in given areas paying directly for extra policing services, or buying a patrol car for use by the police in the purchasing locality or neighbourhood only. And of course, the growth of private companies "policing" our shopping malls and other places continues.

In South Africa, where Executive Outcomes began, private security companies specializing in neighbourhood protection abound. Most of them employ "armed response" agents, and in the eyes of many householders they are more reliable, and react more promptly, than the beleaguered South African Police Service. And the lack of confidence in the police is not restricted to urban South Africa. In May 1998, it was reported that farmers in the border area near Lesotho had engaged Executive Outcomes to assist them in preventing their cattle being rustled and taken into Lesotho. The SAPS stock theft unit was criticized as being willing to patrol by day but not by night, when the stock thieves were most active.

The managing director of EO, Nic van den Bergh, told the Johannesburg Star (16 May 1998) that "if our presence in the area can enhance law and order and prevent further property losses for farmers, then we have achieved our aim." The company's presence along the border was, he said, part of its expansion into rural South Africa; he foresaw "an increase in the provision of tailor-made solutions to private security problems in the Republic of South Africa."

Does the growing privatization of security portend a decline in the very idea of "public security problems," even of public purpose itself, driven by an exaltation of private interest? What will such a change mean for our societies? Our human rights, the rule of law, democracy - the more these are priced, the less they are valued. The more we allow cost to be the only or primary consideration in assessing the imperatives of public policy, the less will be the protection offered to those who may need it the most but can afford it the least.

The privatization of security does not inevitably lead to these outcomes, and many of the firms involved are owned and led by good people, but they can never be allowed as a substitute for the obligation any society carries towards the protection of all of its members. Private profit and public purpose are not inevitably at odds, but there can never be any doubt as to which must always be afforded primacy. We cannot afford anything less.

When the Johannesburg Star looked into the EO foray into stock protection it contacted the SA Department of Foreign Affairs, and a department spokesman said there would be no problem with the EO presence along the border, as long as the company stayed within the law, and within South Africa; otherwise, the law against mercenaries would apply.

In April, South Africa adopted legislation making it illegal for foreigners in South Africa to engage in mercenary activities or to plan military attacks on other states, or for South Africans to recruit, use, train, or finance mercenary soldiers, and the law was clearly a response to stories of the successful military forays into Africa by Executive Outcomes.

EO's first home is nervous, if not so much about EO, then about the power of mercenaries and the culture of private security. Perhaps the nervousness is misplaced, perhaps our public interests can only be met by the judicious resort to private power, in this sphere as in many others, but there does seem to be a pressing public need for the application of transparency and clear thinking about this phenomenon. It has been argued that the private security companies can be "regulated" in the public interest, and this may be right, but the history of regulation bears frequent witness to how power has suborned purpose, how the regulators have served the regulated.

Only transparency and understanding can prevent this outcome, and their time is now. This would be in the public interest, but also in the interest of the investors who make up private companies, particularly those Canadian companies getting more and more involved in resource development in Africa, where mercenaries have been so much in the news. In September, the Minister for International Trade, the Honourable Sergio Marchi, told an Ottawa audience that more than half the new mining ventures in Africa involve Canadian companies. Mining development requires focused energy and resources. It would be helpful to the companies involved in it if they were not engaged in a constant struggle, a trial of allegation and retraction, stemming from the fact that too often public security is not available to those on the ground, be they companies, development NGOs, or the people of the region, and use is made of available help.

Transparency is necessary, but also necessary is the return of public purpose and public security, a culture of human security, in which all of us should have an interest. Demonizing, arranging for scapegoats-these are neither necessary nor sufficient. They cannot be allowed to remove from us the burden of contributing to human security for all.

John Harker is a consultant active in peacebuilding issues, particularly in Africa. He has served as a senior official with the International Labour Office, as a Special Advisor in the Office of South Africa's Deputy President, and as the Executive Director of Canada's Professional Association of Foreign Service Officers. Earlier this year, he was commissioned by the Secretary of State for Africa to provide a briefing paper on Sierra Leone, and in May he travelled extensively in Angola on behalf of the International Development Research Centre.