Eurasia Press & News
Mercenaries thrive while democracy dies…
Last week, Russia claimed to have taken control of the city of Bakhmut after an eight-month battle with Ukrainian forces – the longest and bloodiest fight of the war so far. The assault was not carried out by the Russian armed forces, however, but by a private army that has been fighting alongside regular Russian troops since the invasion: the infamous Wagner Group.
The Wagner group has always been shrouded in mystery. In the early days of the war, reports pointed to the covert nature of his military operations, including a plot to assassinate Zelensky and his cabinet. Until recently the very existence of a company registered under the name “Wagner” was unclear.
Everything changed in September 2022, when Yevgeny Prigozhin, a close ally of Putin, released a statement claiming that he had founded the group in 2014 to “protect Russians” when ” the genocide of the Russian population of Donbas began ” . . Then, in January of this year, he decided to make things official, registering Wagner as a company and opening his “PMC Wagner Center” headquarters in St. Petersburg. He did not hide his activities: as the name of the company, which also appears on the group’s logo, clearly indicates, the Wagner group is a PMC: a private military company, also known as a group of mercenaries . The Russian government was forced to recognizehis existence. The clandestine status of the Wagner group was officially abandoned.
In many ways, Wagner’s stepping out of the shadows symbolizes the changing nature of modern warfare, in which the traditional Clausewitzian paradigm – based on a clear distinction between public and private, friend and foe, civilian and military, combatant and not -combatant – has given way to a much messier reality, in which state armies now routinely fight alongside private and/or corporate paramilitary and mercenary groups . Today’s conflicts, even when violent in nature, often take place in a ” grey zonebelow the threshold of conventional military action; adversarial states are increasingly fighting through proxies or surrogates – including private armies – rather than through their own armed forces. And it’s not just a Russian problem: the increasingly central role of private military and security companies (PMSCs) in modern warfare is a global phenomenon.
Private armies have been around for centuries . In recent decades, the use of mercenaries was particularly widespread during the Cold War, especially in Africa, in the context of decolonization and the civil wars that followed. Between the 1960s and the early 1980s, the West made extensive use of mercenaries to prevent colonies from achieving independence or to destabilize or overthrow newly independent governments, such as in the Democratic Republic of the Congo , in the Republic of Benin and the Republic of Seychelles .
At the time, there was virtually no international legal framework regarding mercenary activity. It was not until 1977 that the Geneva Conventions provided an international legal definition . A mercenary is a person recruited to fight in an armed conflict, who takes an active and direct part in the hostilities and who is neither a national of a party to the conflict nor a resident of a territory controlled by one of them. they. This was a very narrow definition, but one that, at the request of newly independent nations, was specifically designed to address the West’s use of mercenaries against post-colonial governments.
This led to the appointment, in 1987, of a special rapporteur on the use of mercenaries, and then, in 1989, to the International Convention against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of Mercenaries, which entered into force in 2001 and added a clause specifying that mercenaries were persons who undermined legitimate governments – another clause which implicitly reflected the concerns of post-colonial countries. To date, the Convention – which essentially reproduces the wording of the 1977 definition – represents the international legal definition of mercenary activity.
As a result, during the 1990s the number of private military and security companies increased dramatically. They have sought to distance their activities from the legal definition of mercenary by presenting themselves as official business entities offering “legitimate” security and defense services, allegedly distinct from those of rogue mercenary groups. And, on the whole, they succeeded. In this decade alone, PMSCs are said to have trained the armies of 42 countries and taken part in more than 700 conflicts.
This growth is also part of a broader context. The growing influence of the neoliberal logic of economic rationalization and deregulation during the 1990s also pushed states to privatize and outsource many government functions and services – including warfare . Security came to be seen as a commodity, a service like any other that could be sold and bought in the marketplace. This development is also part of a broader trend to transfer national prerogatives to supranational actors or, as in the present case, to non-state actors, in order to move the decision-making process away from democratic institutions. This trend has been aggravated by the reductionof national armed forces globally, which has also broadened the recruitment pool for PMSCs.
Although PMSCs began by selling their services primarily to developing countries and so-called failed states facing political crises, Western governments, particularly the United States, began to use them as well in the mid-1990s. By tasking them with supporting, training and equipping the military and security forces of friendly governments, notably in the former Yugoslavia, Western powers were able to further their foreign policy interests and agendas ., while avoiding getting involved in unpopular conflicts, or even circumventing national or international constraints on the deployment of troops. By the end of the decade, NGOs (such as Oxfam) and even the United Nations came to rely heavily on PMSCs for their own security and even for peacekeeping missions .
In this sense, PMSCs have not replaced the role of states, but rather integrated it. In some cases, they have even enhanced the military power of the state, allowing governments to engage in forms of warfare they otherwise could not undertake for fear of provoking a conventional military response from the part of more powerful States, while escaping the control of public opinion. The activities of the Wagner group in several countries in Africa and the Middle East – such as Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic and Mali – are a good illustration of this, insofar as they enabled Moscow to deny plausibly his interventions abroad and the alleged human rights violations committed by Wagner.
Over the years, various efforts have been made to regulate this new phenomenon at the international level, culminating in the establishment of a United Nations Working Group on the Use of Mercenaries in 2005. But these organizations have, on the whole, failed. Today, the sector remains largely unregulated and operates in a de facto legal vacuum. PMSCs cannot be considered soldiers or support militias within the meaning of international humanitarian law, since they are not part of the army or the chain of command, but they also generally cannot be considered mercenaries within the narrow legal definition adopted by the United Nations. In the current conflict in Ukraine, for example, the Wagner group cannot be considered a group of mercenaries under legal standards, for the simple reason that its members are nationals of one of the parties to the conflict.
These private military companies are largely unaccountable and characterized by a “ fundamental lack of transparency and oversight [of their operations] , ” as the UN Task Force noted in 2021. Indeed, he suggested that this is sometimes ” done precisely with the disturbing objective of providing ‘plausible deniability’ of direct involvement in a conflict “. Better regulation would of course be welcome, but it would not change the fact that corporate militaries inherently undermine democratic accountability – arguably one of the reasons that make them attractive to states in the first place.
More fundamentally, we are dealing here with the legalization and normalization of mercenary activity. The only real difference between traditional gun rental companies and SMSPs is that the latter are often legally incorporated businesses with organizational structures. This gives them legitimacy and, theoretically, facilitates the control of their actions and legal proceedings. But in the end, they remain, for all intents and purposes, “new modalities of mercenary activity,” as the UN General Assembly even asserted a few years ago.
The UN report acknowledges that the private military and security industry is a growing global phenomenon. While the focus today is on the Wagner affair , the real rise of mercenaries occurred during US-led military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. In both cases, the United States relied heavily on SMSPs such as DynCorp and Blackwater (now known as Constellis). At times, the number of contractors in the field even exceeded that of American troops. In 2006, it was estimated that at least 100,000 SMSP employees in Iraq worked directly for the US Department of Defense.
And like Wagner today, they have been implicated in several human rights abuses in the country. Blackwater, for example, the best-known SMSP in Iraq, was implicated in the 2007 massacre of 17 Iraqi civilians (which led to the conviction of four Blackwater employees ) , while other SMSPs have been implicated in the Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison scandal (although none were prosecuted) and allegedly participatedthe CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program – the abduction and forcible transfer of individuals to places known to practice torture. Despite these obvious failures, in the summer of 2020 the United States had more than 20,000 contractors in Afghanistan, about twice as many as American troops. Before that, in 2017, Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater, proposed to fully privatize the war effort in this country.
What could possibly inspire such audacity? Well, while the Iraq and Afghan conflicts are generally considered a strategic blunder for the United States, not to mention a humanitarian tragedy, they have been a boon for the PMSC sector: until 2016, the Department of The US state spent $196 billion on contracts with PMSCs for the Iraq war, and $108 billion for the war in Afghanistan. And business hasn’t slowed down: in 2022, the PMSC sector – whose largest companies are now American or British – was valuedat $260 billion and is expected to reach a value of around $450 billion by 2030. The world’s largest SMSP, UK-based G4S, alone employs over 500,000 people and operates in more than 90 countries.
Should we be surprised? Ultimately, the growth of the PMSC sector is just one more example of how the economic transformations of recent decades have blurred the boundary between the public and private spheres to the point of making it indistinguishable.The result has been the rise of a corporate, statist Leviathan that has taken over every sector of the economy – health care, banking, energy, technology – and has now taken over the realm of war, to the detriment of democratic control and oversight. This applies to Russia as well as to Western countries. If the conflict in Ukraine has taught us anything, it’s that war is bigger business today than it ever was. It’s no wonder, then, that peace – in Ukraine or elsewhere – seems constantly out of reach.
