South African 'hired guns' in demand

Eeben Barlow, one of the founders of EO, in 1998 told WorldNet, a news website, that his company could fill the "void" and was "able to provide private counterinsurgency operations, peacekeeping forces, and the muscle for corporations to control gold and diamond mines, oil and other natural resources, in a variety of failed states which stretch to the four corners of the world".

32 Battalion

EO shot to fame during the 1990s when it assisted the Angolan government against the rebel movement, Unita, and helped the Sierra Leone authorities beat back the brutal Revolutionary United Front. The organisation drew heavily on members of the notorious 32 Buffalo Battalion of the South African special forces (made up largely of dissident Angolan recruits) and included operatives of the Civil Co-operation Bureau, which was allegedly responsible for the deaths of several anti-apartheid activists.

EO closed shop when South Africa's Regulation of Foreign Military Assistance Act came into effect in 1999. Many of the alleged mercenaries arrested earlier this month in Equatorial Guinea and Zimbabwe have been linked to EO.

Besides reportedly being able to field 500 military advisors and 3 000 highly trained multinational special forces soldiers, EO also owned helicopters, tanks and Soviet-era combat aircraft.

http://www.news24.com/News24/South_Africa/News/0,,2-7-1442_1505056,00.html

He was an retired American Army captain with a bad case of post-traumatic stress disorder, living in Germany. He couldn't hold on to a job and missed combat (if you can believe that . . .) and told me that he was offered a chance to move to South Afrika to join this private para-military organization. The way he was talking, it sounded like they wanted to overthrow Nelson Mandela and his government and restore apartheid.

Apparently this group had good funding and was attracting a lot of retired military from around the world.

According to ICIJ, since 1994, the U.S. Defense Department has entered into 3,061 contracts valued at more than $300 billion with 12 of the 24 U.S.-based PMCs. More than 2,700 of those contracts were held by just two companies: Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR), a subsidiary of Vice President Dick Cheney's former employer, Halliburton Corporation, and Virginia-based management and technology consulting firm, Booz Allen Hamilton. The ICIJ report could not determine what percentage of these contracts was for training, security or logistical services because of the breadth of the services offered by the larger companies and the paucity of information provided by the Pentagon.

The Pentagon does not even know how many contractors it uses. According to U.S. News and World Report, a preliminary report to Congress in April 2002 guessed that the Army contracted out the equivalent of between 124,000 and 605,000 persons in 2001. It is also hard to estimate how many people are working for PMCs because many of them are freelance contractors who may work for more than one of the PMCs. Often, it's hard to tell where the U.S. army ends and a private company begins, as certain training programs run by PMCs allow retired military personnel to put their uniforms back on. One of the best known, privately held MPRI, based in Alexandria, Virginia, with over 700 full-time employees boasts of having "more generals per square foot than in the Pentagon."

Some question the propriety of selling military services for profit, particularly because of the strong links that exist between the U.S government and the PMCs that contract with them. As Defense Secretary, Dick Cheney helped command the Gulf War and launched into one of the largest privatization efforts in the history of the Pentagon. The Pentagon, under his leadership, also paid KBR (then known as Brown and Root Services) $3.9 million to produce a classified report detailing how private companies, like itself, could help provide logistics for American troops in potential was zones around the world. Soon after he left his federal job, Cheney joined KBR parent Halliburton. More recently, as the war on terrorism has brought significant additional business for KBR, the company categorically stated that Mr. Cheney played no role in helping the company win the contracts.

http://www.corp-research.org/dec02.htm



World: The Jobs of War


Companies such as Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of oil service giant Halliburton, carry out a vast range of services that once were performed by military personnel. They have supported US forces in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo during the 1990s and have had a huge role in the recent US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

KBR has been serving the US military since the second world war. But its role has expanded in the past decade since it won a mammoth contract from the US government known as Logcap. The open-ended contract, introduced after the first Gulf war, called for Halliburton to handle a whole range of the Pentagon's logistics, from base construction and laundry services to airfield maintenance.

The latest Logcap contract was awarded to KBR as a 10-year deal in 2001 and has served as a springboard for its involvement in Iraq. Among other things, it operates the largest truck-stop in the world in the Kuwaiti desert, ferrying supplies to Iraq. It delivers soldiers' mail in Iraq, does their laundry, provides them with clean water and even helps boost their spirits through "morale welfare programmes". The death of a KBR employee delivering mail in Iraq last week drew attention to their presence. KBR also serviced Patriot missile batteries in Jordan.

Halliburton has come under intense public scrutiny because Dick Cheney, its former chief executive, is now US vice-president. But it is one of the few companies able to take on such projects and would probably get the business even without its formidable political connections.

It is the companies in the middle of the industry - neither at the combat end of the "spear", nor involved in huge, run-of-the-mill logistical operations - that have best managed to avoid public scrutiny so far. But in some ways the tasks they perform are the most interesting and morally ambiguous. These "military consulting firms" - including DynCorp, Vinnell and MPRI, another US company with close ties to the Pentagon - provide the training, expertise and strategic analysis vital for waging war. They say they do not participate in battle and are at pains to distance themselves from mercenaries - MPRI, for example, maintains that its personnel do not carry guns. But such a claim may be beside the point. As Mr Singer points out, it is a rather antiquated distinction in an era when "a person pushing a computer button can be just as lethal as another person pulling a trigger".

http://www.corpwatch.org/news/PND.jsp?articleid=8088

I have heard many rumors over the years about these things. There is that old dirty intelligence/military establishment in South Africa, the same one that ran the right-wing insurgencies in Angola and Mozambique. It's still there, and racist elements think they can wait for the right moment to strike. But their numbers are small and I think they'd be wiped out in an instant. The danger is that this would provoke a racial conflict that would degrade the society.