The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order (16 page)

To be clear, neomedievalism is not necessarily a negative phenomenon, nor is contemporary Africa analogous to medieval Europe. In fact, Africa is home to five of the world’s fastest-growing economies.
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However, extreme examples are often the most illustrative, and both cases demonstrate all five characteristics of neomedievalism: the disintegration of states, the regional integration of states, the rise of transnational organizations, the technological unification of the world, and the restoration of private international violence. These cases also offer strategic insights into the future of the private military industry, which is important, because private warfare has the power to shape international relations and the world.

He killed my Ma, he killed my Pa, I’ll vote for him!

—Charles Taylor’s presidential campaign slogan

In 2005, I joined an assemblage of diplomats, UN officials, local politicians, and reporters at the Liberian presidential palace, once occupied by Charles Taylor, the notorious warlord-turned-president. Bullet holes pocked the walls, and a generator powered the palace. Fourteen years of civil war had left the small West African country of Liberia little but ashes and scars, and it was now home to the largest UN peacekeeping mission in the world. At the time, I worked for a major PMC called DynCorp International.

The new president walked across a makeshift stage and made a declaration that few African heads of state would dare to make: the national army would be demobilized. The army was complicit in the mass atrocities during the war, and a new military was needed if the country wanted a future free of civil war. However, the only thing more dangerous than a rogue military is a threatened one. Similar attempts to decommission army units in neighboring countries such as Côte d’Ivoire triggered more bloodshed, and many feared the same fate in Liberia, a still brittle society.

To great fanfare, ironically provided by the Armed Forces of Liberia (AFL) band, the president made his proclamation, followed by applause. He then stepped off the dais and walked out of the hall to his waiting motorcade. As it pulled away, the band switched its tune from the Liberian national anthem to “Que Será Será.”

Razing and raising armies is serious business. Those who wield violence in failed states such as Liberia are de facto authorities, since such a country has no monopoly of force to enforce its rule of law. Warlords are a law unto themselves, and telling them to lay down their AK-47s and become unemployed farmers
who obey another’s authority is not just political, but it is also extremely dangerous, as they might violently disagree.

However, the Liberian government need not worry about this problem, because the private sector was asked to handle it. The United States paid DynCorp International tens of millions of dollars to demobilize the old army and raise a new one “from the ground up” (the actual language taken from the US government contract), which was why I was there.

DynCorp’s contract with the US government in Liberia is a good illustration of how today’s private military industry functions within the emerging neomedieval order. The restoration of international private violence is a US-driven phenomenon; hence it makes sense to examine an example of this. Iraq and Afghanistan make poor case studies because such massive undertakings—where the United States pumped billions of dollars into the market for force—are rare. Future contracts will probably occur on a smaller scale, like DynCorp’s in Liberia. Also, the private sector took the lead in creating Liberia’s military, unlike elsewhere, better demonstrating the benefits and risks of contracting. Lastly, Liberia remains a success story compared to Iraq and Afghanistan, offering important lessons.

DynCorp functioned not as mercenary
condottieri
but rather as a military enterpriser in the tradition of Count Ernest Mansfeld, Louis de Geer, Marquis of Spinola, and Count Albrecht von Wallenstein during the Thirty Years War. Just as these military enterprisers mark the median point in the transition from medieval free market for force to the states’ monopoly of it, perhaps DynCorp in Liberia denotes the reverse of this process: it was the first time in two centuries that one sovereign nation hired a private enterprise to raise another sovereign nation’s armed forces.

This case has several other merits, too. Liberia is a microcosm of neomedievalism (albeit a worst-case scenario); the case reveals how the United States contracts PMCs; DynCorp is an excellent example of how PMCs provide services under contract to the US government; Africa is a useful location, since the industry will likely seek new markets there once the Iraq and Afghanistan market “bubbles burst”; and building armies is an area that the industry seeks to enter, because it is more profitable than simple executive protection and convoy security. The case exposes some of the inner workings of private military industry, how these companies function, how they alter international outcomes, and how the industry will behave in a larger neomedieval setting in the years to come.

“It was really like a fourteenth-century siege. The two rebel armies had surrounded Monrovia with the government’s troops inside of Monrovia and the two rebel armies pressing hard outside.”
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This is how John W. Blaney, the US ambassador to Liberia, described the final days of the war in Liberia’s capital.
Much of the embassy had been evacuated, mortar fire rained down on the city, and bodies lay strewn in the streets. Packs of child soldiers fought one another, and hapless victims were run down and tortured.

Liberia’s war was neomedieval, fought between warlords rather than states. Civilians were both the primary actors and the targets of armed conflict, displacing nearly half the population and destabilizing the region. National armies were either absent or co-opted by warlords, and the Westphalian laws of war were flouted as massacres, torture, rape, child soldiers, looting, and fratricide were the tactics and strategy of war.

At the time, Liberia was more of a kingdom than a state. Beginning with the first coup d’état in 1980, national authority—if it even existed—rarely extended beyond Monrovia. Institutions were anemic, and those who possessed the means of violence served warlords such as Taylor rather than the state. As one Liberian put it, “Ghankay [Charles Taylor] is our law. He understands that the man with the gun is a strongman.”
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Taylor seized power in 1989, when his troops captured, tortured, and killed the Liberian president, himself a former warlord who came to power in a coup d’état, on international television. A bloody war ensued, claiming hundreds of thousands of lives and displacing 1 million people in a country of about 3 million. The human toll of the fourteen-year war is estimated at 270,000 dead, 320,000 long-term internally displaced people, and 75,000 refugees in neighboring countries. Almost everybody in Liberia was touched by the war: a recent poll shows that 96 percent of respondents had some direct experience of the conflict, and of these, a shocking 90 percent were at one point or another displaced from their homes.
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The war also spread to its neighbors, and Taylor tried to unseat the president of Sierra Leone, sparking a parallel eleven-year neomedieval war that left 50,000 dead.

Taylor acted the depraved king during his reign. He regularly murdered and mutilated civilians, illegally trafficked “blood” diamonds to enrich himself at the expense of the state, abducted women and girls as sex slaves, and forced children and adults into slave labor and soldiering during the war in Sierra Leone. His militias chased down civilians and asked them if they wanted a long-sleeve or a short-sleeve shirt. For people who said long sleeves, the fighters hacked off their hands at the wrist with a machete. People who said short sleeves had their arms hacked off closer to the shoulder. To this day, people missing one, two, and even four limbs lie on the streets in Monrovia begging for money.

By 2003, the
Economist
predicted that Liberia would be “the world’s worst place to live” that year.
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They were right. That summer, two rebel armies surrounded and sealed off Monrovia. Inside the city, remnants of the AFL still loyal to Taylor ferociously defended it. The fighting was fierce, and all sides committed atrocities. Child soldiers were commonplace, the line between combatants and civilians was blurred, and the laws of war were utterly ignored. Monrovia
lay on a small peninsula and was protected on three sides by water, as if by a moat. The battles over the bridges into Monrovia were so intense that the road was paved in blood and brass shells; lampposts, road signs, and nearby buildings were riddled with bullet holes. The siege would not break.

Frustrated by the AFL’s resistance, rebels started indiscriminately shelling the overcrowded city with mortars, killing more than one thousand civilians. Liberians described the situation as “World War III” and began piling their dead at the gates of the US Embassy in a macabre plea for help. Monrovia was already a humanitarian disaster, as hundreds of thousands of people had fled the fighting in the hinterlands for the capital, which could not accommodate them all. With no electricity, water, sewage, police, food, or any other accoutrement of modern life, the city became a massive slum of tin shacks, garbage, human waste, disease, and lawlessness. Liberia was once the jewel of West Africa, with three direct Pan Am flights a week from New York City. Now it was apocalyptic.

With global pressure intensifying and rebels at the gates, Taylor finally yielded on August 11, 2003, and fled to Nigeria. He blamed Liberia’s problems on foreign meddling and cast himself as the martyr: “Because Jesus died, we are saved today. I want to be the sacrificial lamb. I am the whipping boy. It’s easy to say ‘It’s because of Taylor.’ After today, there will be no more Taylor to blame.”
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A few days later, the rebels lifted their siege, and international peacekeepers entered the city, ending the war.

Liberia’s violent fall and fragile resurgence illustrate all five characteristics of neomedievalism and shed light on the mechanics of the emerging world order. Liberia is a stark example of state disintegration; as Africa expert Peter Pham observes, “tragically, the recent history of Liberia has been a case study
par excellence
of a failed state.”
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In 1975, Liberia’s per capita GDP was greater than those of Egypt, Indonesia, or the Philippines and double that of India. By 2003, it was one of the poorest countries in the world and has remained at the bottom of most international health and development indexes. From 2000 to 2008, 83 percent of the population subsisted on less than $1.25 per day, and in 2008, Liberia had the second-lowest gross national income in the world.
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By the time Taylor left the country, Liberia’s economic collapse was complete and had been replaced by an illicit economy dominated by warlords trafficking in diamonds, timber, and other natural resources for personal gain at the country’s expense.
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After the war, foreign aid jumped from $106 million in 2004 to $1.25 billion in 2008; Liberia’s GDP that year was only $843 million.
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The country remains totally dependent on global largesse for its survival: five years after
the ceasefire, foreign aid still accounts for a stunning 771 percent of government expenditure—the highest percentage of foreign aid to government spending in the world, with Guinea-Bissau a distant second at 221 percent.
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Not surprisingly, corruption is ubiquitous and so institutionalized that Liberians even have a verb for it—
chopping
—as ministers and executives are expected to chop money off budgets to feed their families and patronize their tribes.

However, Liberia’s economic woes are only a fragment of its statehood challenges. There are no functioning public utilities, and most Liberians have no access to electricity, water, sanitation facilities, or health care. Basic infrastructure such as roads and bridges—which aid workers, entrepreneurs, peacekeepers, and Liberians themselves all need, especially in rural areas—are in dire need of repairs. Years of civil war have left a generation of Liberians without a formal education and with a brain drain of those who do. Liberia has no effectively functioning judicial system, leaving it with a culture of impunity: most courts have been destroyed, and trial by ordeal is not unheard of outside the capital.

In another sign of the move toward neomedievalism, states did not manage the situation in Liberia; international organizations did. Liberia’s rescuers were not other states, as the Westphalian order demands, but the United Nations and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), a regional organization. Notwithstanding Blaney’s efforts to secure a battlefield ceasefire, the role of the United States was minimal. Its three warships and twenty-three hundred Marines sat off the coast of Liberia and did nothing to stop the fighting; a mere two hundred troops intervened only after Taylor departed. No other state military came to Liberia’s aid. By contrast, the ECOWAS peacekeeping mission provided security and humanitarian assistance in the immediate aftermath of the war and was replaced by a larger UN force a few weeks later.

The UN Security Council established an interventionist Chapter VII peacekeeping mission called the UN Mission in Liberia (UNMIL). It was authorized to use “all necessary means” to support the implementation of the ceasefire agreement and the peace process. Led by Jacques Paul Klein, UNMIL was the largest peacekeeping mission in the world at the time, with fifteen thousand blue-helmet peacekeepers. A transitional (and kleptocratic) government was put into place to sate the Westphalian bias for national rule, but in reality, the UN administered the country. Taylor was eventually put on trial for war crimes but not by Liberia. In 2012, an international court at the Hague sentenced him to fifty years in prison for massive human rights violations.

As international organizations rescued Liberia, transnational actors keep it alive on life support. More than four hundred NGOs provide the bulk of services normally associated with the good governance of states: health care, food, shelter, education, security, water, sanitation, sewage, infrastructure, job creation, and general administration. For example, Save the Children provides free
health care for 102,399 people, has vaccinated 40,670 children against deadly diseases, has sheltered 15,182 children from violence and abuse, and has helped 56,094 children receive an education.
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As NGOs provide substantially more public services than Liberia’s own government, many on the ground at the time quipped that it was a “republic of NGOs.”