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Contributions from
the Column
Focus
Interview with Development Minister Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul:
“Financial resources must not be pooled”
Bastian Loges and Ulrich Menzel:
State disintegration and humanitarian intervention
Anne Jung:
Neither war nor peace in Sierra Leone
Interview with UNDP-Administrator Mark Malloch Brown:
“Aid needs to be more evenly spread”
Sheila Mysorekar:
DynCorp and the privatisation of wa
4/2004
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DynCorp and the privatisation of war
The US government deploys private military personnel in crisis zones and countries embroiled in civil war. This outsourcing reduces reporting on interventions abroad, side-steps parliamentary control and throws a veil over involvement in war. The political advantage for the US government is obvious. If regular troops were sent to intervene in Colombia’s civil war instead of DynCorp personnel, there would be a public outcry.
[ By Sheila Mysorekar ]
The rumours in Colombia are rife – but hard evidence is hard to find. Armed gringos, white foreigners, are said to be in the country. But
the farmers in the southern province of Putumayo keep their heads down and keep quiet. They are accustomed to constant terror: their home region has been a war zone for forty years. Involved in the struggle for control are two left-wing guerrilla groups with a total of 30,000 fighters, paramilitaries paid by big landowners and the Colombian armed forces.
Santa Ana is a tiny place strung along a dusty main street with a few bars and general stores. The local military base is bigger than the village. At the corners of the base are watchtowers; gun-barrels protrude from slits in the walls. From the high security fence, a large expanse of grass can be seen – and a runway. “Sometimes more than three helicopters arrive at the same time; then I know the gringos are coming, the big, blond men,“ says a man from the village. He insists on remaining anonymous and only meets with the foreign journalist in secret. “Then I see the bodies being unloaded, wrapped up in plastic sacks.”
This man is not talking about the regular US troops stationed in Arauca Province to protect the oil installations. He is talking about armed civilians – working for the government. According to Myles Frechette, a former US ambassador to Colombia, it is very practical to have people involved who do not belong to the US armed forces because in the case that someone gets killed, nobody can say it was an American Soldier.
People on the payroll of private military companies (PMCs) are operating on Colombian soil. These 21st century mercenaries are officially described as “security service providers”, they are employed by companies based mostly in the United States or Britain. PMC managers also call their line of work “military consulting” or “security technology”. Their staff are largely ex-servicemen; their clients are governments, companies and private individuals with demand for security personnel, engineers – and soldiers.
Business is booming. Private military companies have operatives in more than 100 countries, generating 100 billion dollars in revenues a year. That is what the Financial Times estimated in August 2003. PMCs offer a full range of services –simple plant protection, the supply of munitions, radar surveillance and even full campaign logistics. The acknowledged market leader is DynCorp, a company based in the USA. Employing 26,000 people, the global security service provider reported revenues totalling 2.3 billion dollars in 2002. In March 2003, DynCorp was bought by Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC). According to the parent company’s website, DynCorp gets half of its income from Pentagon contracts. Peter W. Singer (2003) has drawn up a list of activities: armed DynCorp personnel form the core of the Bosnian police force, protect the president of Afghanistan and train police officers in Iraq.
Since 1991, the company has also worked for the Narcotics Bureau of the US Department of the Interior. As part of what is known as the Plan Colombia to combat illicit drug production, DynCorp pilots are sent to Colombia to spray illegal coca fields from the air with powerful pesticides. DynCorp’s people are actually forbidden by contract to carry arms in Colombia. According to human rights organisations such as Ruta Pacífica, however, bursts of machine-gun fire are often heard coming from the crop-spraying planes.
Indirectly, DynCorp press spokesman Charles Wilkins admits as much. He is so reticent on the phone that one can’t help wondering why the company bothers to have a press spokesman at all. But persistent questioning does draw answers. DynCorp pilots are “armed in Colombia according to what is customary in the area”. In some places, though, what is customary is a machine-gun. Pressed to be more precise, Charles Wilkins says: “They carry handguns, for their own protection.” After all, they might be shot down over the jungle and encounter wild animals, he says. Anyone familiar with the country, however, will tell you that they would be much more likely to run into guerrilleros. Would DynCorp people draw their guns in that event? Wilkins laughs: “If someone starts shooting at me, I shoot back. What would you do?”
Operation poison rain
Colombia is the third-biggest recipient of US military aid, after Israel and Egypt. Since the Plan Colombia was launched around five years ago, the United States has pumped some 2.7 billion US dollars into Colombia, originally declaring it as money for the fight against drugs. Millions more go into protecting oil pipelines, equipping radar stations, providing reconnaissance facilities.
Adopted while Bill Clinton was still at the White House, the Plan Colombia is described in Washington and Bogotá as a strategy for curbing coca-growing and thus reducing cocaine production. However, critics like Sanho Tree of the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington think tank, challenge the claim that it is a plan to destroy drugs. According to him, the US mercenaries’ real mission is to fight rebel forces. Colombia is an important supplier of oil, with as yet untapped reserves. The undeveloped resources are presumed in areas, which are at present controlled by the guerrillas.
However, no majority in the US Congress would send troops to Colombia. To prevent being dragged into a new Vietnam, Congress has set out clear limits: only 400 US military personnel and 400 US-financed civilians are allowed to operate in Colombia at any given time. Out of the public eye, however, the number of private security service providers is being secretly increased. Colombian parliamentarian Gustavo Petro complains that there are no clear control mechanisms for private military companies. The men, he says, are flown in directly to military bases in Hercules transport planes, without visas or entry permits. Neither the Colombian Congress nor the US Congress are said to know deployment details. Last August, the Miami Herald wrote that the US General Accounting Office was aware that the Pentagon could not say exactly how many private security company personnel it had hired.
The public only gets to hear about the activities of PMC personnel when mistakes are made – when bombs are dropped on the wrong target, for example, when mercenaries are taken captive or a civilian plane is mistakenly brought down by a missile. DynCorp, the leading player in the security business market, keeps a similarly low profile. The “Global Violence Group”, as DynCorp has been dubbed by Dieter Drüssel of Zentralamerika-Sekretariat Zürich, was established in 1946 by retired US military pilots and won its first big contracts during the Korean war. Initially, assignments merely involved cargo flights, but gradually the company expanded, moving into electronics, IT services and front line logistics. CSC/Dyncorp receives a great deal of the contract work outsourced by the US government. CSC’s German subsidiary takes on IT work, and other assignments, for the German armed forces.
DynCorp is not just a specialist in military missions; it also – like other security service providers – caters to the IT requirements of US government departments and agencies. Drüssel reports (in Azzellini and Kanzleitner, 2003) that the company is responsible for the databases of the Defence Department, the State Department and the Department of Justice, the Internal Revenue Service, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Drug Enforcement Administration; it is also responsible for the computers of the FBI. DynCorp thus has access to every bit of important – and even highly confidential – political and military information.
US security service providers are under no official supervision; they are monitored by neither the US nor any other government. Reports of criminal incidents are starting to mount up. DynCorp employees, for example, have been found engaged in child prostitution in Bosnia. Whereas soldiers are governed by military law, mercenaries are not. They work in a legal grey area. There is no public debate about this state of affairs; privatisation in the United States is considered positive per se.
Outsourcing of force is a worldwide phenomenon. Herbert Wulf of the Bonn International Center for Conversion (BICC) calculates that around 30 billion dollars – eight percent of the US defence budget – went to private companies last year. In the United States, this development started in the 1990s, when the army was trimmed from 790,000 service personnel to 480,000 and the resulting gaps were plugged by security service providers.
It is not only the “war on drugs” that provides private military companies with a steadily growing market; it is also the “war on terror”. The massive increase in business volume is reflected in stock market performance: PMC share prices in the ‘90s showed a much sharper increase than prices in more traditional sectors. The companies are duly registered and they pay taxes. This, the Harvard International Review wrote in January 2002, seems to sanitise the work they do. According to the journal, mercenaries still work for money, but in the context of global capitalism some groups have become morally less objectionable having been organised as consultancy companies, a method that creates a distance between the firms and their activities. Consequently, the corporate image of mercenary enterprises is said to make it easy for governments to use PMCs as policy instruments.
DynCorp leads a security service market bristling with other providers, most of them registered in the United States: MPRI (Military Professional Resources, Inc.), for example, or Vinell Corporation, a subsidiary of the Northrop Grumman arms group. Another major player in the military services market is Kellogg Brown & Root, an arm of oil giant Halliburton. In recent months, Kellogg Brown & Root has made headlines because of billion-dollar contracts in Iraq (for logistics and the repair of oil production facilities) and multi-million dollar accounting irregularities. US Vice-President Dick Cheney is a former chief executive of Halliburton.
During the first Gulf War in 1991, one in 50 US personnel stationed in the Gulf was employed by a private military company. In the recent war in Iraq, the figure was more like one in ten. TV news always carries reports of the US soldiers killed in Iraq. Mercenaries who lose their lives receive no such mention, although the Christian Science Monitor reported in September 2003 that PMCs had deployed some 10,000 people in Iraq. Sanho Tree of the Institute for Policy Studies comments: “If those mercenaries get killed, they are simply recorded as civilian victims of industrial accidents. So no one asks any awkward questions.”
General Néstor Ramirez, a former commander in the Colombian army, agrees: “The American public reacts sensitively to the number of soldiers that are killed.” In his view, the Plan Colombia would be terminated immediately, if dozens of US soldiers were to die instead of mercenaries. According to official figures, 14 US citizens – PMC employees – have been killed in Colombia since 1997, five of them in 2003. But the real death toll must be much higher. US-contracted mercenaries who possess neither US nor Colombian nationality are not covered by official statistics.
Dubious death certificates
Daniel Lora knows all about DynCorp deaths in Colombia. He runs the Cristo Rey funeral parlour in Bogotá. Questions about DynCorp seem to make him uncomfortable. He has nothing to do with the company’s activities, he says, his job is just to dispose of the dead; his funeral parlour is perfectly legal. To prove the point, he pulls out a sheaf of death certificates: “Here, these are the DynCorp people who have died – the ones we’ve flown out, at any rate.” He tosses the papers onto the table, inviting a closer look. The dead are of various nationalities: United States, Central American, even Argentina.
Mario Alberto Alvarado, for example: Costa Rican national, DynCorp pilot, crashed at Catatumbo, northern Colombia, on September 21, 2003. The death certificate records that only scattered remains of his body were found. Alvarado was flying a OV-10 Bronco. The manufacturer describes this combat aircraft as “multi-functional anti-guerrilla” weapon. OV-10 Broncos were first used in Vietnam. According to official sources, such airplanes are modified to serve as crop-fumigation carriers for DynCorp.
Whether DynCorp pilot Alvarado was spraying a coca-field or attacking guerrillas – he was apparently shot down by the FARC. His remains were flown to Costa Rica on September 26, 2003 – at the expense of the US government, in a State Department plane. That is standard procedure when DynCorp personnel die, says funeral director Daniel Lora. He then declares the interview over.
Websites:
Center for International Policy, Washington D.C.: www.ciponline.org
Transnational Institute, Drugs and Democracy Programme, Amsterdam:www.tni.org/drugs
Washington Office on Latin America, Washington D.C.: www.wola.org
Literature:
– Dario Azzellini and Boris Kanzleitner (eds.), 2003: Das Unternehmen Krieg, Berlin: Assoziation
– Mary Kaldor, 1998: New and old wars, Cambridge: Polity
– Peter W. Singer, 2003: Corporate Warriors, Ithaca: Cornell University Press
Sheila Mysorekar
is a freelance journalist based in Cologne and Buenos Aires.
ShMysore@aol.com
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