Mercenaries: An African Security Dilemma

349 Pages·2000·1.13 MB·English

by  Abdel-Fatau Musah (Editor)

Edited by
Abdel-Fatau Musah and J. ‘Kayode Fayemi
Foreword by Lord Avebury
Mercenaries
An African Security Dilemma
P
Pluto Press
LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIA
First published 2000 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
and 22883 Quicksilver Drive,
Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA
Copyright © Abdel-Fatau Musah and J. ‘Kayode Fayemi 2000
The right of the individual contributors
to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library
ISBN 0 7453 1476 7 hbk
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Mercenaries : an African security dilemma / edited by Abdel-Fatau
Musah and J. ‘Kayode Fayemi ; foreword by Lord Avebury.
p. cm.
ISBN 0–7453–1476–7
1. African—History—1960– 2. Mercenary troops—African. I. Musah,
Abdel-Fatau. II. Fayemi, ‘Kayode.
DT30.2.M47 2000
960.3'2—dc21 99–34771
CIP

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Contents
About the Centre for Democracy and Development vii
Foreword by Lord Avebury viii
Acknowledgements xi
Abbreviations and Acronyms xii
Introduction 1
1. Africa in Search of Security: Mercenaries and Conflicts –
An Overview 13
Abdel-Fatau Musah and J. ‘Kayode Fayemi
2. Private Military Companies and African Security 1990–98 43
Kevin A. O’Brien
3. A Country Under Siege: State Decay and Corporate Military
Intervention in Sierra Leone 76
Abdel-Fatau Musah
4. The Hand of War: Mercenaries in the Former Zaire 1996–97 117
Khareen Pech
5. Mining for Serious Trouble: Jean-Raymond Boulle and his
Corporate Empire Project 155
Johan Peleman
6. Mercenaries, Human Rights and Legality 169
Alex Vines
7. The OAU Convention for the Elimination of Mercenarism
and Civil Conflicts 198
Kofi Oteng Kufuor
8. Understanding the African Security Crisis 210
Eboe Hutchful
vi MERCENARIES
9. Arresting the Tide of Mercenaries: Prospects for Regional
Control 233
’Funmi Olonisakin
Conclusion 257
Appendices 265
I Mercenaries: Africa’s Experience, 1950s–1990 265
II Convention for the Elimination of Mercenarism in Africa 275
III OAU Resolution on the Activities of Mercenaries (1967) 281
IV OAU Declaration on the Activities of Mercenaries in
Africa (1971) 283
V OAU Convention for the Elimination of Mercenaries in
Africa (1972) 286
VI The Report by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Use of
Mercenaries, 1998 289
Notes on Contributors 321
Index 323
About the Centre for
Democracy and Development
The Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD) is a non-profit, non-
governmental, independent research, information and training
institution dedicated to policy-oriented scholarship on questions of
democratic development and peace-building in the West African sub-
region, concentrating on the Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra
Leone. The Centre has offices in London, UK, Accra, Ghana and Lagos,
Nigeria. Its work is grounded in an appreciation of the practical problems
that have inhibited democratic reform in the region, and in the need to
strengthen civil society institutions and government bodies in their work.
The Centre aims to provide accurate information on and rigorous
analysis of democratic developments in the region. It also plans to offer
strategic training to people interested in fostering democratic develop-
ment in the region.
Programme on Conflict Management, Regional Security &
Peacebuilding
In seeking to develop an institutional framework for analysing conflict
and its links with democracy and development, this programme
recognises structural stability as a foundation for sustainable
development. By doing this, we acknowledge the importance of a holistic
security agenda in which the management of violence is subject to
civilian, democratic control. In addition to our work on PMCs we are also
actively involved in civil-military relations and peacebuilding training,
light weapons research and developing a monitoring mechanism for
conflict prediction in West Africa.
vii
Foreword
Lord Avebury
There has been a pressing need for this study, which examines the
connections between African conflicts, the extraction of minerals, and
the use of private military companies (PMCs). Armed opposition groups
exist in Angola, Algeria, Burundi, Central African Republic, Chad,
Democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia,
Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan,
Uganda and Western Sahara. In some cases, the fighting arises from
unresolved aspirations towards self-determination, while in others,
religious and ethnic differences are at issue. In a significant proportion of
these conflicts, however, the ownership and control of valuable resources
is a factor, making the outcomes interesting to multinationals, and
enabling the state participants to consider using PMCs to help secure
victory over their opponents. Johan Peleman traces the astonishing deeds
of Jean-Raymond Boulle and his America Mineral Fields, whose tentacles
reached into several African countries, with the help of good connections
and military assistance.
Despite the adoption of Codes of Conduct for arms sales by the EU, the
OSCE and the UN, large quantities of arms and ammunition are still
pouring into Africa, cutting into the resources available for development
and undermining the continent’s ability to catch up with the rest of the
world. Some of this arsenal is funded by the award of prospective mineral
licences, as in the notorious transaction for the supply of $10 million
military equipment to Sierra Leone arranged with the Thai businessman
Rakesh Saxena, described by Abdel-Fatau Musah.
In spite of the weakness of international law in regulating the activities
of PMCs, a general consensus has evolved that non-state foreign
involvement in Africa’s conflicts should not be allowed. Recognising the
trend, the PMCs are increasingly trying to diversify their activities from
pure combat operations to incorporate the provision of military advice,
the procurement of arms and the supply of passive security services. For
public relations purposes and because of existing legislation against
mercenary activity, they usually advertise the latter activity and are
viii
FOREWORD ix
cagey about the former. They claim to work only for governments and
not for armed oppositions, and they say they operate strictly within the
bounds of domestic and international law. Kevin O’Brien says that IRIS,
a group formed in June 1998, works for UNITA and is thus an exception
to the rule, while Alex Vines claims that there is now an increasing
number of mercenary operations conducted with non-state parties.
Obviously, UNITA has had a great deal of foreign assistance in using the
proceeds of illegal diamond sales to fund large-scale acquisition of
military equipment and the boundary between PMCs and arms brokers
is not sharply defined. Regardless of any doubts PMCs may harbour
working for non-state groups, they have not always acted in the interests
of the people, as the example of PMC support for the dictator Mobutu in
the former Zaire, dealt with by Khareen Pech, clearly demonstrates.
At the same time South Africa, with its experience of one particular
firm, enacted legislation to control the activities of PMCs based on her
territory. The obvious flaw with that approach is that this business can
be run from anywhere in the world, and individual African countries
have no power to regulate PMCs headquartered in the UK, for instance.
International agreements so far hold out no hope either. The OAU
Convention for the Elimination of Mercenarism, analysed by Kofi Oteng
Kufuor, relies on the definition of a mercenary from the UN Convention,
and since they both deal only with foreigners who take a direct part in
hostilities, they have no effect on the indirect but nevertheless key impact
of the PMCs on several African conflicts. The difficulty of enforcement is
possibly the reason why so few countries have ratified the UN
Convention. Nor do these Conventions have anything to say about the
related operations of arms brokers, and the financial role played by
resource extraction multinationals.
At the bottom end of the scale, the PMCs may shade off into Private
Security Companies (PSCs), flourishing particularly where, as Eboe
Hutchful emphasises, the coercive power of the state has declined. These
enterprises are seen as legitimate but have their own problems. When
multi-million dollar capital works are undertaken in connection with
resource development, the owners need to protect their assets from
sabotage, and either the state provides that service, or the owner has to
engage a contractor for the purpose. If the armed forces and police of the
state are seen as incapable of doing the job, there will be a strong
argument for engaging private security guards, who may be more
effective, but are obviously less accountable.
There are no easy answers to a complex and difficult problem, as
perhaps the fact that some PMCs are themselves calling for regulation
demonstrates. Africa will need to establish and refine its own sub-
regional and continental conflict resolution mechanisms, to reduce the
plague of wars afflicting her peoples; licencing of mineral extraction will
have to become transparent so that Africa’s wealth is not misapplied to
x MERCENARIES
the funding of civil wars, and the arms brokers must be put out of
business. J. ‘Kayode Fayemi argues that small arms proliferation poses a
serious challenge to the demilitarisation agenda in Africa, and here, the
enlarged European Union could help, not only by enforcement of its new,
stricter code on conventional arms exports, but also by persuading the
rest of the OSCE, the source of illicit weapons in many of Africa’s conflicts,
to adopt the same rules.
Whether those strategies could make mercenaries permanently
unnecessary, to use Funmi Olonisakin’s vivid phrase, is doubtful.
Conflicts are never going to be eliminated entirely from Africa, and as
the Legg Report says, ‘[PMCs] are on the scene and likely to stay on it’.
However, the international community can go a long way in drastically
reducing the proliferation of PMCs by helping to build the capacity of
autonomous conflict prevention mechanisms in the developing world,
even while western states adopt proactive national legislation to curtail
PMC activity coordinated from their territories. The government has
promised a Green Paper on the subject in the next twelve months, and
this admirable collection by the Centre for Democracy and Development
sets the scene for an intelligent discussion of the issues which must be
faced in a timely and comprehensive manner.
Lord Eric Avebury
Acknowledgements
This book has had a long gestation period and many people have
contributed to its final emergence. We would like to thank first, the con-
tributors – seasoned researchers and activists – whose deep insights and
incisive analyses of the mercenary phenomenon in Africa are brought
vividly to the reader in this book. Besides the authors, many others have
played significant roles in the course of producing this book. In acknowl-
edgement of that, we wish to express our profound gratitude to Liberal
peer and CDD patron, Lord Eric Avebury, for his authoritative grasp of
the issues, constant encouragement to us and agreement to write the
foreword. We also wish to thank Bjorn Warkalla of the University of
Berlin who helped with useful editorial work including significant
updating of the appendices, during his internship at CDD and Emmanuel
Kwesi Aning of the Centre for Development Research in Denmark for
providing hitherto unpublished primary documents. Mohammed Faal
helped greatly in gathering material and providing additional editorial
support just as Charlotte Jenner’s administrative support was crucial in
seeing through the project. Finally, we wish to register our appreciation
to Roger van Zwanenberg and the editorial staff at Pluto Press for taking
a keen interest in the project right from its inception. That Mercenaries:
An African Security Dilemma is in the public domain is due partly to the
unwavering encouragement they gave throughout the book’s
production.
Notwithstanding the numerous assistance received from various
quarters, primary responsibility for the final product lies with the editors
and individual authors.
Editors
June 1999
xi