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| Mercenary law overlooks a hired gun
solution |
August 1, 2003
 By Peter Fabricius
On
Monday, former French soldier Francois Richard Rouget - aka Sanders
- became the first person to be charged under the law banning South
African soldiers from freelancing abroad.
Rouget, a
naturalised South African, allegedly tried to recruit mercenaries in
South Africa to fight in the Cote d'Ivoire civil war.
He was
charged under the Foreign Assistance Military Act, which was
promulgated by the new South African government in 1998. The aim was
to stop former soldiers of the apartheid government from selling
their services in Africa, without regard for the South African
government's foreign policy objectives in the countries
involved.
It was revealing that a day or so after Rouget's
appearance in court, Defence Minister Mosiuoa Lekota announced that
the government had turned down a request from the Economic Community
of West African States (Ecowas) to add troops to a regional force to
intervene in the Liberian civil war. Lekota hinted that South Africa
was already over-stretched by committing peacekeeping troops to
Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
South Africa is
not the only country reluctant to get really involved in Liberia.
The United States is ready only to provide backup to an Ecowas
force. Ecowas, though, is dithering. While the world fiddles,
Liberia burns.
Many experts have said that it would not take
a huge force to pacify Liberia, as Britain pacified neighbouring
Sierra Leone and France, Cote d'Ivoire. Princeton Lyman, the former
US ambassador to Nigeria and South Africa, has warned, though, of
the dangers of sending in an inadequate and incoherent force which
would merely endanger the lives of the peacekeepers as happened in
weak UN missions to Rwanda in 1994 and Sierra Leone, before the UK
went in.
We are seeing an increasing reliance on strong
outside countries, acting either alone or in coalitions of the
willing, to pacify African conflicts - to create the peace that the
UN generally demands before it is willing to go in
. But no one seems very keen to do that
dirty work in Liberia. The US says it is overstretched in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
And the African Union's standby force will not
be ready to do that job for a very long time.
It is surely
time to consider farming out the dirty work to people who actually
want to do it - the mercenaries.
In 1995, the SA
security/mercenary company Executive Outcomes, hired by the
legitimate government, decisively defeated the repugnant RUF rebels
in Sierra Leone with a few hundred men and a few helicopters. Then
Sierra Leone succumbed to political pressure to get rid of the South
African "dogs of war" - and promptly suffered major
reversals.
And EO disbanded because of the above-mentioned
Foreign Assistance Military Act.
The Sierra Leone/EO deal in
1995 could instead have become a model for future contracts between
international organisations like the UN and Ecowas or individual
governments, on the one hand, and private military/security
companies on the other.
Many would protest that mercenaries
cannot be trusted to fight for the right cause. True. But they are
going to do that anyway. If the international community wants to get
the dirty work of war done when no one else will do it, it may have
no alternative but the mercenaries.
These private military
companies - as they prefer to be called - would be contracted by the
UN, etc, to do a specific job and would be subject to the same
penalties as anyone else who breaks the law. The threat of losing
future contracts would be a strong incentive to stay
legal.
The South African anti-mercenary legislation could be
amended to outlaw South African mercenary activity only when it is
not sanctioned by a UN or other official contract.
As it stands,
this law, like many others placed on the statute book since 1994, is
a little too fastidious for the harsh realities of
Africa.
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