Some further evidence for that buzz I thought I detected a while ago in favour of re-conquering Africa.
A consortium of mercenary groups has made the UN a deceptively simple proposal: give us $200 million, and we’ll help bring an end to the war in the Congo.
Tribal militias are running rampant in the eastern part of the central African nation, slaughtering hundreds of villagers at a time. Since 1998, the violence there has claimed 3.3 million lives.
The world’s response has been, to say the least, underwhelming. A few thousand UN peacekeeping troops have been stationed there since 2001. But these brave souls watched helplessly last month as the militias murdered 430 innocents in the provincial capital of Bunia.
The killings shamed the European Union into sending 1,400 French and British soldiers into the area. But they’ll operate only in Bunia — no matter how bloody things turn in the countryside. And on September 1, the troops are going home. End of story.
What happens then? The UN Security Council is trying to decide that now. …
Personally I would be amazed if anything as sensible and humane as this were actually to happen in the near future. I mean, think of the embarrassment that would be unleashed if such an operation were to be triumphantly and quickly successful. The private sector, even if only as a World Government contractor, succeeding where the World Government itself had failed? This would never do. Next thing you know, they’ll be cutting out the middle man, and just going around rescuing countries anyway, whether the UN approves or not, and then just bullying the UN into approving it afterwards. Unthinkable. Couldn’t happen.
And since most of that money would eventually come from the Americans, why not ask them to pay for it direct, instead of if being fed through all those sticky fingers at the UN? And although two hundred million dollars is quite a lot compared to what I have in the bank, it doesn’t sound like much for liberating and pacifying an entire resource-rich country. Before you know it, regime change could become a profitable business, financed, as they say at the RNLI (a not entirely dissimilar operation by any means), “entirely by voluntary contributions”.
Impossible. Couldn’t have that. Far better to let the Africans go on killing one another and spray the mess with bank notes and food parcels, paid for by the resigned taxpayers of the West.
So it may all stay at the level of talk for some time yet, but I can see all sorts of people getting behind such talk and bouncing it around, if only to embarrass the United Nations.
Why are these mercs going to the losers at the UN for funding? They should be asking average citizens for donations. I’d chip in a hundred bucks, and I bet Perry and Scott would too.
Sure sounds like a better use for the money than giving it to the RNC, DNC, or even LNC.
Mercenaries?  I don’t see it happening either.  The UN is trying to figure out how to change the mandate, but that doesn’t look like it’s going very well.
Put me down for a $100.
They should suck up to Congress, and lobby for a privateers commission, with the amount deducted from the US dues to the UN. 🙂
Pledge drive, anyone? (Although the govt would probably shut down any attempt to collect money for something like this).
Who could we trust to hold the money in escrow, anyway?
People who have hired these mercenary groups have often found themselves employing people who worked for dubious South African security forces under apartheid. Not perhaps the people you want to try to sort things out in the Congo.
Let’s hear it for letters of Marque and Reprisal! Perfectly legal, at least under the US Constitution, and the holders may finance their efforts from the spoils of their war. Back in the bad old days banks and venture capitalists used to finance such efforts. . .
Nah, never happen.
I was floating the idea last week of auctioning a franchise to run places like the Eastern Congo, although with a somewhat different perspective that in many resource rich parts of Africa like the Eastern Congo, it would not only be self-financing it would have the potential to be highly profitable and hence attract risk capitalists.
The real problem in Africa is a lack of people with the kind of know-how to organize and run things. There are plenty of people who can (including Africans), all that is needed is the right kinds of incentives and safeguards.
And yes it will need what Rudgard Kipling called the ‘violent men’ many of whom have unsavoury backgrounds. But who are we to say that the honest citizens of Bunia or Monrovia have no right to sleep safe in their beds at night, because we find these people unsavoury.
The main problems are legal jeopardy – not just from international institutions, and it probably needs some one to guarantee (underwrite) the deal.
Then go sell it to the Congolese government. The main reason why the Eastern Congo is such a mess is that there is lots of money sloshing around from the resources there. I’m sure the Congolese government would love to get its hands on some of it.
I doubt it will happen, but just maybe, the neocons in the USA might come up with a radical solution like this in Liberia. There is no guarantee it will work, but anyone care to suggest a feasible alternative?
One problem with the letters of marque – I think the US has to be in a state of war with the target country to issue them. I can’t see how that could happen against a rebel force that is not a recognized government in the first place.
Funny old thing, but wasn’t the big Congolese civil war from 1960-1965 sorted out by a bunch of mercenary groups, notably “Mad Mike” Hoare’s 5 Commando? Many of them also had experience with the South African forces (a great many were ex-British Army as well) but they did a bloody good job.
One reason might be that they weren’t obsessed with how their actions would look in the media, which now seems to class a standard military tactic like the ambush as “murder” (fancy shooting them without any warning! Shame!). Hoare’s men, and those of the French-speaking Commandos that fought with them, were there to do a job and get paid. And by the time the leftist media came along to complain about their tactics, they’d won the war and were busily spending their money in a whole bunch of grotty, violent pubs from Glasgow to Cape Town where no UN tribunal would dare to tread.
I say give it a go. I mean, $200,000,000 is about what we spend on the NHS in three months, and I bet we’d get much more for our money giving it to the Wild Geese.
Hmmm, methinks perhaps we should hit up, of all the strange people, the Japanese, to help fund it. They want to swing their economic equivalent in world affairs, but currently are only in the domestic defense business (that constitution we Yanks wrote them, ya know).
They wouldn’t be directly physically involved, so no negative “Japan’s being Imperial again!”
They have no history in the area, so they can be more objective as to things.
They were most successfully rebuilt in America’s image, and so have a very good view of where to do things even better with nation building.
Get uncle sam to bless it with high level involment, and US mercenaries to form cadre for whatever force is recruited.
They gain massive face, influence and good will.
Where’s the good example in a mercenary force in the 1960s delivering the Congo to the Mobutu kleptocracy? Sounds more as if that’s part of the history of the problem than a plausible solution.
Japanese colonial history and endemic racial attitude doesn’t really recommend itself either. (I’m not entirely convinced that they were “rebuilt in America’s image”.)
America should keep away from Africa, they are not good imperalists, they have historically behaved pretty badly towards black people, one of the worst places in Africa (Liberia) is an American Colony, and one of the pillers on which the country was built on was slavery (they were worried the British would ban it).
As for the suggestion that Japan should have anything to do with it: Are you mad? Are you of aware of the terrible bloody swathe they cut through Asia when they were being imperialists? for example to punish Chinese for helping about 10 American airmen in the first raid on Japan they killed 250,000 people.
I really don’t think we British should reinvade Africa, but perhaps one thing we might consider is readmitting countries to the British Empire if they ask to be readmitted. For example the President of Sierra Leone asked to be readmitted to the empire, and opinion polls in the Bahamas and Jamaica have both shown majority support for reentry to the empire recently. Black countries that are currently in the empire are doing very well, the GDP per capita in Bermuda (65% black) is $42,830, the second highest in the world, the British Virgin Islands (83% black) GDP per capita is $16,000, which is very respectable by world standards, although could do with some improvement. To give you a sense of the difference the GDP per capita of Sierra Leone is $530
I made a mistake with the GDP per capita of the British Virgin Islands, it must be much higher than what I said because in 1997 the GDP per capita was US$28,434 according to British goverment figures. I seem to remember reading somewhere recently it was in the low 30 thousands.
Could that be, Della, because we kept those bits that weren’t much trouble and divested the rest? That they’re still British possessions at least partly because they weren’t likely to cost us much.
(When defending Hong Kong started to look troublesome, it was soon abandoned.)
Guy,
From what I understand of the process of decolonisation every part of the empire that wanted to leave left, some parts seem to have been kicked out because we thought it would be a good idea at the time though. I think in a lot of cases the people who wanted to leave before are now regretting the decision, one only needs to read Iraqis waxing lyrical about how life was so much better under the British before to understand that.
Hong Kong left the empire because the lease on the land ran out, not because it was difficult to defend, it was much more vulnerable to being invaded by China in the 1970s (cultural revolution time) than the 1990s when China was starting to rediscover capitalism. I think one of the most dissapointing racist things Mrs Thatcher did was to remove the full British passports from empire citizens shortly before she announced she was going to give up Hong Kong, that was really uncalled for. British passports were only given back to empire citizens a few years ago.
Della,
Just a point of information. Only Hong Kong’s new territories were leased. The rest we could have kept. Whether that would have been practical I couldn’t really say.
The 1842 Treaty of Nanjing ceded Hong Kong island to Britain in perpetuity. The Peking Convention of 1860 ceded the Kowloon area, on the mainland opposite Hong Kong island, to Britain, also in perpetuity. The Peking Convention of 1898 gave Britain a 99-year lease over the New Territories, comprising an additional mainland area and additional islands.
Ah yes, but without the new Territories it would have been impossible to feed and more importantly water Victoria. Though I agree with Della, the only time I had a serious disagreement with Tebbit was on the issue of passports to the Hong Kong Chinese. A better idea I thought at the time was to offer themm Benbecula (Big airstrip, deep water anchorage – allow the islanders to charge the rents they could get, sit back and in ten years Scotland would have had one of the worlds greatest trading economies. I remember Mad Dog Pirie at the ASI laughing at the idea, but (wistful look) it might have worked.
On the mercenaries idea, yes it would probably work, but who would set limits, who would oversee? More Kipling.
That line about never getting rid of the Dane.
Gosh, Mark Holland. I didn’t know that. I thought the lease on the whole kit and caboodle was up. I had no idea it was just the New Territories. The trouble-maker was a nitwit governor called Sir Murray Maclehose.
The only thing that Margaret Thatcher ever did that I disapproved of strongly was ceding Hong Kong and then, having ceded it, failing to give the Honkies (as they are called in Asia) British passports.
One bright spirit in Britain suggested that we actually give them a self-governing Scottish island roughly the size of Hong Kong and welcome the lot of them. Had Thatcher had the vision to agree to this, today Scotland would have been rolling in gravy. Their Scottish island would have been completely duty free, like Hong Kong, and there would have been a flat tax rate of 6%, as in Hong Kong. Can you imagine five million industrious, ambitious, energetic Chinese transforming a northern island into a vigorous, unimaginably wealthy economy? I can! Having visited Hong Kong many times, I can assure those who haven’t been that when you leave, you feel as though you’ve been electrified. It’s the most invigorating place on earth. And of course, now Guandong Province is a mirror image. Hong Kong still has the most Rolls Royces per capita of anywhere in the world, but I’ll bet Guandong’s second.
Anyway, apart from this, it was a horrible injustice to deny those people British passports. They were British, for god’s sake!
Gawain, we must have posted at the same time. I didn’t know the name of the island we could have offered.
As well as the water, the trouble with keeping Hong Kong Island and Kowloon would have been that a border would have to have been drawn at Boundary Street, and those on one side of it would have become Chinese and those on the other side would have stayed British.
And I am entirely in agreement with Della amd Liberty Belle. The people of Hong Kong should have all been given full British passports.
The mercenaries in 1964-65 were contracted by the Congolese Prime Minister, Moise Tshombe; Mobutu was at that time commander of the Congolese Army. When he seized power in a coup in 1965, and the mercenaries realised what he was like, they attempted to depose him and bring back the civilian government which had contracted them.
Sadly, many of their best officers had already left the country and the attempt failed.
On the mercenaries idea, yes it would probably work, but who would set limits, who would oversee? More Kipling.
That line about never getting rid of the Dane.
That was my point about needing a party to guarantee, which applies to both parties to the contract. You can forget about any institution of international law, which all seem to be hijacked by the Left. So this in practice means the USA, backed up by the USMC of course.
Prior to the 1997 handover of HK, I advocated giving any HKers who wanted to come residence in a slice of NW Australia, which for those of you who haven’t been is a stunningly huge and empty place. This idea was seriously floated in Western Australia. And the WA government is still looking for ways to populate the NW.
An alternative would have been to give HKers Christmas Island (the one south of Java) and then hand it over to Singapore, which would have had a nice symetry, as it was for a long time part of the Straits Settlement (Singapore). I don’t think the Australians would be too bothered about loosing it as the Brits only gave it to them 20 years earlier.
I didn’t suggest that a single Japanese set foot in Africa, just that we get them to bankroll such a thing. Extreme way of saying: why just have the UN or US bankroll any such mercenary “nation saving/rebuilding” operations?
>The private sector, even if only as a World
>Government contractor, succeeding where the
>World Government itself had failed? This would
>never do. Next thing you know, they’ll be cutting
>out the middle man, and just going around
>rescuing countries anyway, whether the UN
>approves or not, and then just bullying the UN
>into approving it afterwards. Unthinkable.
>Couldn’t happen.
Private Military Corporations as an arm of “World Government?” I don’t think so.
PMCs as an arm of the _American Government_ is a horse of a different color.
MPRI was an instrument of American policy in the Balkans and effectively replaced American ground Forces for the Clinton Administration in dealing with the Bosnian Serbs.
Given the lack of American occupation ground forces, an American PMC approach to dealing with African disorder seem to me to be inevitable.
Tyranny anywhere is a threat to Americans everywhere and no pirate/terrorist bases will be allowed in Africa to support Al-Qaeda or its mind children.
Er. In the former Yugoslavia, what MPRI did was deal with the CROATIAN Serbs. Sadly, the troops trained by MPRI then went on to commit genocide in the Serbian Krajina – most of the Serb residents of Sisak, Petrinja and Glina, for example, were either displaced or murdered.
As a result of my personal involvement in the Yugoslavian war, what I would much rather see is a force of foreign mercenaries, contracted by a legitimate government to accomplish a mission, who just get in there, do what they’re paid for and go home.
I really don’t like the idea of a PMC training a genocidal local militia like the Croatian Army to kill more effectively. That’s why I prefer PMCs like Sandline and EO, who do the job themselves.
I hope that I’m not too incoherent anyway 🙂
Sorry, will try continue trying to be less elliptical in future.
Fergus: point taken!
Fergus,
Please.
Calling ‘ethnic cleansing’ genocide instead confuses the issue and cheapens the meaning of the latter. Doing so is a halmark of the ‘loonie left.’
Most of the Serbs cut and ran the moment they heard the Croation Army broke through. They feard the Croats would do to them what they did to their non-serb neighbors.
Those Serbs that did not run were in the main the elderly who did not want to move.
From what I read later, it was the follow on forces of Croat internal security thugs who made examples of several elderly Serbs to get the balance to run.
Trent
I take your point, but ethnic cleansing and genocide can be quite difficult to tell apart on the ground. The Croat killings of Serbs in 1995 weren’t on the same scale as those ordered by Ante Pavelic in 1942, but they were extensive and many were carried out by the first Croatian Army (HV) troops into the area. You are right in saying that Croat militias carried out further killings after the attack, in an attempt to expel the remaining Serbs, but this doesn’t change the fact that HV units did a lot too.
The reason that the Krajina Serbs fled when their army (the VRSK) collapsed was that they feared the Croats would do to them what they had already tried to do twice in the past 100 years – i.e. wipe them out.
I’m sorry that this is getting bogged down a little bit, anyway. The point I was really trying to make is that it would have been better all round if Operation STORM had been conducted by a PMC rather than the HV. Given that the VRSK had been weakened by NATO air strikes and the withdrawal of regular Yugoslav troops, a few hundred men from EO or someone like that could have forced them to withdraw without the unpleasantness that actually occurred. They could then have set up a temporary administration in the area until it could have been integrated with either Croatia or Bosnia, ideally after a referendum. Ah well, all water under the bridge now.
Another thing, I suppose, is that this is a perfect illustration of the uselessness of UN peacekeeping forces. I didn’t actually get to this corner of the place until December 1995 (four months after Operation STORM) but when I turned up there were refugees everywhere: Serbs displaced from the Krajina, Sarajevo and Western Bosnia; Croats leaving central Herzegovina and, in a huge squalid camp just inside Croatia, 15,000 Bosnian muslims driven out for the crime of supporting a different political party. All of them forced to move while UN observers sat about and drank coffee.
“they feared the Croats would do to them what they had already tried to do twice in the past 100 years – i.e. wipe them out.”
*Twice*, Fergus? When exactly do you figure the second time was?
And the first time around rather more Croats
were fighting side by side with those Serbs than
were trying to wipe them out. If we are to go off on tangents, wouldn’t it be better to stick to historical facts rather than necessarily incorrect sweeping generalisations?
But yes, the UN troops were a joke. Their mandate was a joke. A very bad one.
Having talked to a Dutch soldier who has been in Bosnia in the 90´s, he told me that the massacre a Sebreniza happened because the heaviest weapon the UN forces there were permitted to bring by the that time UN mandate ( as not to create facts for the diplomats) was a jeep with a .50 HMG. There was no chance of defending against Mladic´s Serb forces, who attacked with tanks, let alone the Muslim refugees.
I thought back then, about the same time when several Gurkha regiments in the British Army were disbanded, that the Gurkhas should be made to give the UN an efficient, independend set of teeth. Nobody will accuse Nepal of harbouring imperial intentions and the Gurkhas are a proven military force. Put them under the direct command of the security council.
Jan