The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (108 page)

I make this argument in four steps. First, I provide brief definitions of ‘mercenaries’, ‘PMCs’, and ‘PSCs’. In the second and third sections I outline the approach taken towards mercenaries in the General Assembly and in the Security Council. In the third section, I argue that the lack of Security Council attention to issues surrounding private force has had two main effects: first, the dominance of the GA approach has constrained the range of possibilities open to the Security Council by closing off the possibility of engaging private force for peacekeeping, and secondly, it has placed the UN on shaky ground as a potential source of regulation for all types of private force.

The three different manifestations of private force addressed in this chapter form a continuum, with individual mercenaries who will sell to the highest bidder at one extreme, and companies formed with very close ties to their home state (and who, indeed, will only sell to their home state) at the other. Most types of private force can be placed along this continuum, but the opposite ends are related only in the sense that they both involve the sale of military services for private gain. Mercenaries, private military companies, and private security companies thus require careful definition to make sure that their differences and similarities are clear.

A mercenary can be defined as an individual soldier who fights for a state other than his own, or for a non-state entity to which he has no direct tie, in exchange for financial gain. Private military companies (PMCs) are tightly organized companies with a clear corporate structure, that provide military services, including combat, in exchange for payment for states or other actors. Private security companies (PSCs) are similarly organized companies which provide military services stopping short of combat, in exchange for payment. These services include translation, close protection, interrogation, logistics and training, as well as security services for NGOs and corporations. PSCs, unlike PMCs, will not engage in combat except in self-defence; the two types of company are similar in that they will work for a variety of states, including, in some cases, the state in which they are based.

Since the United Nations was formed, all three types of private force have played a role in international politics. Mercenaries were most prevalent in the 1960s and 1970s, but are still active today, as the 2004 coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea demonstrates. The PMCs Sandline and Executive Outcomes (EO) received a great deal of international attention for their operations in Sierra Leone, Angola, and Papua New Guinea in the mid- to late-1990s. Both EO and Sandline have since closed their doors, and there is currently no major company which will provide combat services.

PSCs have received international attention since the conflict in Afghanistan in 2001, but especially because of their use during and after the war in Iraq.
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In 2003, one in ten American personnel in Iraq was a private contractor, compared with an estimated one in fifty during the first Gulf War,
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demonstrating the significant growth in the industry. Examples of PSCs include the American companies Dyncorp, Blackwater, MPRI, and Triple Canopy; their British counterparts include ArmorGroup, Control Risks Group, Aegis, and Olive Security.

The United Nations has been involved with all three of these variants. The General Assembly and its related bodies (particularly the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights) have dealt with mercenaries, PMCs, and PSCs; whereas the Security Council has focused on mercenaries and PMCs only when they posed a specific threat to international peace and security.

There have been over one hundred GA resolutions touching on the question of mercenaries, beginning in the late 1960s. The two best known are the Definition of Aggression,
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which states that the use of mercenaries constitutes an act of aggression, and the resolution on the ‘Importance of the universal realization of the right of peoples to self-determination and the speedy granting of independence to colonial countries and peoples for the effective guarantee and observance of human rights’, which states that using mercenaries against national liberation groups is a criminal act and that mercenaries themselves are criminals.
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There have been two other streams of attention concerning mercenaries, from bodies related to or directed by the GA. In 1979, the GA decided to consider the drafting of an international convention against mercenaries.
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The following year, the Assembly established an ad hoc committee charged with the elaboration of such a convention.
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The committee met from 1980 until 1989, and its proceedings provide a clear picture of how member states viewed the mercenary problem.

The committee’s main concerns can be divided into three categories. First, states were concerned that mercenaries threatened human rights, specifically national self-determination, and threatened the independence and territorial integrity of emerging states. Secondly, the committee was worried that mercenaries complicated and intensified internal disputes by bringing in external interests. Finally, the committee was agreed that there could be no such thing as a ‘good’ mercenary or a mercenary who fights for the right reasons: all mercenaries are dangerous simply because they are mercenaries. The ad hoc committee’s deliberations resulted in the drafting of the UN Convention against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of Mercenaries, which came into force in 2001 but still only has 27 parties, none of whom are Permanent Members of the Security Council.
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In 1987, the GA created the office of Special Rapporteur to deal with the mercenary question. Enrique Ballesteros was the first officeholder and served until 2004, when he was replaced by Shaista Shameem. In August, 2005, it was decided that the Special Rapporteur should be replaced by a working group. Ballesteros’ reports had a consistent character and condemned mercenaries on two central grounds. First, he argued that mercenaries violated and threatened human rights, especially the right to self-determination. Secondly, Ballesteros was concerned that mercenaries were particularly dangerous actors because they lacked accountability. Ballesteros saw no real difference between PMCs, PSCs, and mercenaries.
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As he was the Rapporteur when PMCs and PSCs were making international waves, during the 1990s, he was able to help shape the view that all private force is mercenary, and that mercenaries are dangerous actors.

A person unacquainted with the history of the use of mercenaries, presented with the General Assembly’s resolutions, the UN Special Rapporteur’s reports, the ad hoc committee’s deliberations, and the UN Convention itself, might reasonably conclude that mercenaries had posed a grave threat to international peace and in particular to the self-determination of new states. That same individual might well be surprised to find out that mercenaries during this period were generally ineffective and, except in one or two cases, did not have any significant effect on the wars of national liberation or their outcomes. This section provides a brief synopsis of the six major cases of mercenary action between 1960 and 1989, and argues that the GA’s reaction was out of step with reality because of the particular threat mercenaries were seen to pose to national self-determination.

Mercenaries were involved in conflicts in the Congo between 1960 and 1968; in the Biafran civil war, mainly in 1970; in Angola in 1976; in Benin in 1977; in the Seychelles in 1981; and in Comoros on several occasions between the late 1970s and 1995.

Mercenary intervention in the Congo was perhaps the most problematic of all the cases mentioned.
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Shortly after Congolese independence was declared in 1960, the country fell into civil war and the province of Katanga seceded. Katanga’s mineral wealth meant that its secession was a significant problem for the new state, and interference by Belgian colonial and financial interests was widely assumed to have taken place.
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Katanga hired mercenaries to assist it in the increasingly complicated civil war. By June 1962 there were at least 300 mercenaries in Katanga.
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Many were Belgian, but they came from a variety of European states, as well as South Africa and Rhodesia. Mercenaries inconvenienced the UN Operation in the Congo (ONUC) and in August 1962, the ONUC command launched an operation to capture mercenaries in Katanga, successfully seizing 338 of them.
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Most of the captured mercenaries were deported; but their return to the Congo caused problems for ONUC until its operations ended in 1964.
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ONUC did not leave behind peace in the Congo. Mobutu Sese Seko, who had ultimately come to power, hired the mercenaries Mike Hoare and Jacques Schramme. In 1966 they successfully defended Mobutu’s regime from a coup attempt, but the unit they commanded was disbanded soon after under pressure from the Organization for African Unity.
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In 1967, Schramme and his compatriot, Bob Denard, launched a mercenary rebellion against Mobutu from neighbouring Angola, thereby internationalizing the Congo’s problems. The rebellion caused serious problems for Mobutu – at one stage Schramme was in a strong enough position to deliver an ultimatum demanding negotiations – and took nearly six months to quash.
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Despite the problems caused during the mercenary rebellion of 1967, mercenaries in the Congo were generally regarded as ineffective. Ralph Bunche, who held several UN offices relating to ONUC, complimented a French article on mercenaries ‘since it shows that they are a group of incompetent and fanatical psychopaths
who completely failed in what they were trying to do and did an immense amount of damage to Katanga in the process’, and went on to suggest that the article demonstrated the ‘depths of silliness, destructiveness, and sheer irresponsibility’ of the Congo mercenaries.
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Brian Urquhart holds a similar opinion, and believes that the mercenary soldiers fighting for Katanga in 1960–1 were ineffective soldiers. Despite a ‘flamboyant’ approach, they were essentially a ‘complete fraud’.
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Tickler argues that the assistance provided by mercenaries to Mobutu in 1966 was not helpful and the mercenary side of the operation had been a total failure.’
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The presence of mercenaries, however, was a blow to the Congo’s identity as well as a problem for its political progress, because the presence of white mercenaries symbolized the state’s continued reliance on external assistance.
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Mercenaries fought on both the Biafran and, in much smaller numbers, Nigerian sides during the 1967–70 civil war. Their actions proved to be largely ineffective,
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despite all the attention paid to them by the international media. De St Jorre argues that mercenaries in Biafra performed one useful service in destroying what remained of the legendary invincibility of the white soldier of fortune in Africa’.
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In 1975 and 1976, mercenaries made a dramatic, but again less than effective, appearance in the Angolan civil war which erupted between UNITA, the FNLA, and the MPLA. A previously court-martialled, Cypriot-British, ex-paratrooper named Costas Georgiou, or ‘Callan’, was selected as the leader of an operation to assist the FNLA. Recruiting went on in London through advertisements in newspapers, and a small number of men were recruited, some of whom had positively unmilitary’ backgrounds.
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The mercenaries were only active between 20 January and 17 February 1976, and only faced action for part of that time.
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Some of the recruits from London refused to fight and deserted; some of these men were executed, and the mission deteriorated into a bloodbath among the mercenaries without having much military effect. The mission was ‘a shambles, a text-book [sic] of military bungling and inefficiency which no ruthlessness of method could offset’.
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Thirteen mercenaries were captured by the MPLA and put on trial, charged with the crime of being a mercenary. Arguably, only two of these soldiers had committed any criminal acts,
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apart from the crime of being a mercenary, which did not even exist under Angolan law.
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The mercenaries in Angola had made no military gains and succeeded in killing only each other. The Angolans, however, responded swiftly and severely. The Angolan government not only prepared an elaborate trial, but also invited experts from around the world to form an International Commission of Experts on Mercenaries to observe the trial and make recommendations, which included a draft convention against the use of mercenaries.
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The Angolan response to these foreign troops, caught before they had even begun intervening in the civil war, is a clear illustration of how states overreacted to mercenary action.

Mercenaries were next involved in a coup attempt in Benin in 1977, led by Bob Denard. The coup attempt failed when Denard and his men were driven away by a machete-wielding crowd.
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Denard was also involved in a series of coups in Comoros between 1975 and 1995. The islands are so remote that it took the outside world some time to realize that Denard had organized a counter-coup against his former employers in 1978 and taken on the name of Colonel Said Mustapha M’Hadju, and become the Minister of Defence.
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He made one last coup attempt in 1995, and was removed with French intervention.
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The final major mercenary episode of the 1960–89 period occurred in the Seychelles. In 1981, the mercenary Mike Hoare, who had been entangled in mercenary operations in the Congo, headed a botched coup attempt. Disguised as a rugby team known as the Ancient Order of Frothblowers, the mercenaries were meant to carry their weapons, hidden inside Christmas gifts for local children, in their kit bags’. One of the mercenaries accidentally went through the ‘Something to Declare’ line at customs, his gun was discovered, and the mercenaries seized the airport, where they remained essentially trapped. They ultimately escaped to South Africa in a hijacked plane. The South African authorities tried and imprisoned Hoare for the hijackings.
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