The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order (22 page)

Al-Shabaab is also a globalized enemy, taking full advantage of the technological unification of the world to resource and recruit its ranks and strike alliances with simpatico groups such as al-Qaida in Afghanistan. The most famous fight between a professional military and nonstate actors was the Battle of Mogadishu, which ended in decisive victory for the low-tech clan militias over the US military’s most elite units. The formalized international relations between states as they govern world events have been completely absent from this twenty-year scenario. Somalia represents the antithesis of state-centric international relations theory and demonstrates the emergence of globalized neomedievalism in world affairs.

In Hedley Bull’s day, when the Westphalian order was at an apogee, the notion of pirates threatening the high seas would have seemed like plot fodder for the silver screen. Now it is a fact of life. Piracy off the coast of Somalia threatens international shipping and has reintroduced
pirate
into the lexicon of contemporary global politics.

Since 2005, piracy has become big business in the Horn of Africa, as pirates capture ships in the Gulf of Aden and ransom them and their crews back to the owners for millions of dollars. According to the International Maritime Bureau, in 2010, almost half of the world’s pirate attacks occurred off the coast of Somalia, and 92 percent of successful hijackings were Somali, resulting in 948 people taken hostage, a notable increase from 2004, when there were only five recorded attacks in the region. The World Bank estimates that Somali pirates cost the world $18 billion annually.
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The pirates, armed only with light weapons and small boats, can seize large cargo ships, operate two hundred nautical miles offshore thanks to mother ships that act as floating bases, and can take over a ship within fifteen minutes of being sighted by the ship’s crew, making it difficult for international patrols to respond in time (see
figure 11.2
). This is significant because some sixteen thousand ships a year pass through the Gulf of Aden, carrying oil from the Middle East and goods from Asia to Europe and North America, making it one of the most important trade routes in the world.

Figure 11.2
Pirates holding the crew of the Chinese fishing vessel FV
Tianyu 8
in 2008.

(Source: Wikimedia Commons)

The security demand caused by pirates has attracted PMC supply. The precursors to pirates in the Gulf of Aden were illegal fishing and toxic waste dumping that exploited Somalia’s ungoverned sea space, as pirates later would. A chief security challenge was not rival states but warring clans with ties to illegal fishing profits and the Puntland government. This arrangement evolved into piracy. As Matt Bryden, member of the UN Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea, explains, “By 2003, the fisheries protection racket had become virtually indistinguishable from common piracy.”
¹⁴

In 1999, Puntland hired Hart Security to combat this problem and create a local coast guard. The British PMC set up its base in the Puntland city of Bosasso on the north tip of the Horn of Africa, trained a seventy-man armed force, and enjoyed some success even though it had only a single ship. For example, Hart
Security arrested the Spanish fishing vessel
Alabacora Quatro
and successfully extracted an undisclosed amount from its owners. However, as with many
condottieri
, the company and the client ultimately parted ways over payment disputes and weak contract enforcement.

A Somali-Canadian PMC called SomCan Coast Guard replaced Hart. Like Hart, SomCan protected the shipping lanes from illegal fishing vessels and financed its operations by selling fishing permits, with quarterly licenses fetching upward of $50,000. From 2002 to 2005, the firm maintained six patrol boats and four hundred marines and boasted that it arrested thirty fishing ships. SomCan was also faithless to its employer, like many a mercenary of the Middle Ages, and seldom handed over revenue collected from the fishing licenses to Puntland’s Ministry of Fisheries.

SomCan also blurred the line between PMC and pirate, preying on the countryside, just as out-of-work mercenaries in the Middle Ages frequently became marauders. For instance, SomCan seized the fishing trawler
Sirichainava 12
and demanded $800,000 for its release. This provoked a strong reaction from states as a joint American and British strike force freed the vessels and captured SomCan’s marines, who stood trial in Thailand for piracy and were sentenced to ten years in prison.
¹⁵
Curiously, states responded more forcefully against PMCs patrolling the waters rather than the pirates that threatened them, although in this case, the difference is difficult to discern.

Puntland is not the only territory to hire PMCs. Somaliland, just west of Puntland, contracted Nordic Crisis Management to develop security forces for Berbera, its principal port, to reduce insurance costs for shipping. Unlike Hart and SomCan, Nordic Crisis Management did not directly engage illegal fishing vessels or pirates but acted as military enterpriser: training police, conducting risk assessments, and improving security measures at the seaport and the airport. Somaliland hopes these upgrades will attract international investment and act as the gateway to globalization. Another military enterpriser, British PMC Triton International, has also helped to build Somaliland’s antipiracy coast guard. According to the firm’s chief executive, Simon Jones, its work resulted in more than 120 pirates being captured, prosecuted, and jailed in 2010.
¹⁶

Other firms take a more direct approach and place armed guards on ships, ready to fend off pirate boarders. Known as “embarked security” in the business, these PMCs have more in common with mercenaries than with military enterprisers such as Hart and Triton (see
figures 11.3
and
11.4
). Examples of these PMCs include Antares World, Protection Vessels International, and ESPADA Marine Services; typically, they deploy a squad of private marines on clients’ ships passing through the Gulf of Aden. They also harden the ship by stringing concertina wire around the hull and other protective measures outlined in the Best Management Practices to Deter Piracy (BMP4) guidelines.

Figure 11.3
Armed civilian contractors, known as “embarked security,” guard a commercial ship passing through pirate waters. (Courtesy of Port2Port Maritime Security Ltd.)

Figure 11.4
Embarked security being deployed to a freighter by helicopter. (Courtesy of Port2Port Maritime Security Ltd.)

Another PMC, Typhon, offers protection to cargo vessels sailing off the coast of Somalia, but unlike PMCs that put armed guards on board other people’s ships, Typhon supplies its own. For a fee, its private navy will escort convoys across pirate-infested waters and establish an exclusion zone of one kilometer around the client ships. Typhon’s ships are armed with machine guns and utilize drones and radar to detect pirates. Anthony Sharpe, the company’s CEO, says that shipping companies would benefit from reduced insurance premiums: “I have spoken to the underwriters at Lloyds [insurance company] and the expectation is that there will be a 50% to 80% reduction in premiums for customers who use our services.”
¹⁷

After the Nisour Square shootings, Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater, left the United States for Abu Dhabi, where he has become a deal maker within the industry, connecting companies with clients and vice versa. He helped the South African PMC Saracen International win contracts from Somalia’s beleaguered government to protect its leaders, train Somali troops, and battle pirates and Islamic militants. Saracen was formed from remnants of Executive Outcomes and is managed by Lafras Luitingh, a former officer in South Africa’s Civil Cooperation Bureau, a covert government-sponsored hit squad that operated during the apartheid era and is now defunct.

Saracen operates independently of all international and multilateral frameworks in Somalia, and little is known about the firm’s intentions other than profit motive. Between May 2010 and February 2011, it trained, equipped, and deployed fighters in an attempt to create one of “the best-equipped indigenous military forces anywhere in Somalia,” according to a UN report.
¹⁸
Saracen’s training camp near Bosaaso was the best-equipped military facility in Somalia after the UN bases in Mogadishu. The company planned to establish a force approximately one thousand strong, equipped with three transport aircraft, three reconnaissance aircraft, two transport helicopters, and two light helicopters. The maritime component of the force would be equipped with one command-and-control vessel, two logistical support vessels, and three rigid-hulled inflatable boats for rapid deployment and intervention.

Using shell companies, Saracen secretly shipped military equipment into northern Somalia on cargo planes, which the UN report declares “the most brazen violation of the arms embargo by a PSC.” Worse, the company’s presence has aggravated already tense relations in the region, and a UN accused the PMC in several reports of trying to form a “private army.”
¹⁹
Finally, local authorities and the UN force commander asked the company to leave Mogadishu, which it did.

Suffering from negative publicity, Saracen did what many multinational corporations do in such situations: it rebranded itself, just as Blackwater did after Nisour Square. Luitingh formed a new PMC in Dubai called Sterling Corporate Services with the staff that worked for Saracen. Their employer was the same
as Saracen too, the United Arab Emirates, which secretly contracted the PMC to create the “Puntland Maritime Police Force,” aimed at preventing, detecting, and eradicating piracy, illegal fishing, and other illicit activity off the coast of Somalia. The Sterling’s base included a modern operational command center, a control tower, an airstrip, a helicopter deck, and about seventy tents, which can host up to fifteen hundred trainees.

Sterling is an example of a strong PMC, like Executive Outcomes, as it accompanied Puntland forces on combat missions. The 2013 documentary film
The Project
shows the company in action along with a South African “trainer” acting as a door gunner in one of the helicopters. One of Sterling’s employees, Lodewyk Pietersen, was killed while the Puntland Maritime Police Force was conducting an antipiracy operation in Hul-Anod, a district in Iskushuban that pirates use as a base.
²⁰
In June 2012, Sterling abandoned its operations, leaving behind an unpaid but well-armed security force in Puntland.

Sterling Corporate Services is not the only PMC seeking business in Somalia. The State Department contracted DynCorp International to equip, deploy, sustain, and train international peacekeepers from the Ugandan and Burundian contingents.
²¹
Additionally, it indirectly financed Bancroft Global Development to train African troops to fight al-Shabaab. The firm offers the United States a convenient way to fight its war on terror in Africa without committing its own forces to the battle for fear of becoming entangled in the conflict, an attribute of neomedieval warfare. As Johnnie Carson, the State Department’s top official for Africa, explains: “We do not want an American footprint or boots on the ground.”
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