|
 Peace
Keepers, LTD
The
internationa! Peace Operations Association was founded to
represent and regulate private military industry; critics
consider it a friendly cover for bad behavior
By
Bruce Falconer
On
Sept. 19, amid news that Blackwater USA security contractors
had killed 11 Iraqi civilians and wounded 12 others in a Baghdad
firefight, members of the antiwar group Code Pink gathered
outside the Washington office of the International Peace Operations
Association, a trade group that represents a who’s who of
the private military industry. There to greet them when they
arrived was Doug Brooks, the IPOA’s founder and president,
who’d been tipped off to the protest earlier that day by an
anonymous caller.
“He
was on the street with an assistant with an armful of IPOA
magazines,” said Code Pink’s Gael Murphy, who heads the group’s
Washington office. “He had a smile on his face the entire
time as though it were some kind of industry expo day, and
he kept [smiling], even as we were asking him about some pretty
dreadful matters.” Brooks spent about an hour fielding questions
and even escorted some of the protesters upstairs to see his
office. I asked Murphy if Brooks had managed to change any
minds. “No,” she said. “We were not fooled just because [Blackwater]
has a network to cover them—that they’re somehow more legitimate
than they were the day of the killings.”
Doug Brooks tells a different story.
The day after the protest I met him at a bar near his office.
He wore a dark suit and wire-frame glasses. “I think we developed
some fans,” he said, still smiling. “One guy, for example,
said, ‘I don’t like the concept, but I guess if we’re going
to have companies doing this stuff, we need this kind of organization
doing the oversight.’ ”
Brooks seemed energized by the experience, which, despite
its being a protest, he treated as an opportunity to convert
the opposition. “Their questions were really good,” he continued.
“We gave them paperwork. We gave them journals. A couple of
them even took away IPOA pins.” He pulled one from his bag
and placed it in my hand. It bore the image of a sleeping
lion, the IPOA’s logo. “Just got a new batch in,” he said.
The son of a history professor, Brooks grew up in the college
town of Bloomington, Ind. “God’s country,” he says. Although
he’s lived in Washington for much of the past decade, he retains
a disarming Midwestern charm, a quality he deploys to great
advantage as the friendly, public face of a secretive, multibillion
dollar business.
His organization currently represents 42 companies—among them,
Blackwater, DynCorp, and MPRI—that belong to what Brooks describes
as the “peace and stability industry.” The IPOA’s mission,
according to its website, is “to promote high operational
and ethical standards of firms active in the Peace and Stability
Industry; to engage in a constructive dialogue with policy-makers
about the growing and positive contribution of these firms
to the enhancement of international peace, development, and
human security; and to inform the concerned public about the
activities and role of the industry.”
The latter had consumed most of Brooks’ time over the past
week; he gave close to 40 interviews in three days to reporters
seeking comments on Blackwater’s Baghdad shoot-out. Wasn’t
he uncomfortable being the private military industry’s unofficial
spokesman when one of its most prominent players stood accused
of murdering civilians?
“No,
not at all,” Brooks said. “What it’s given us the chance to
do is get out the point of what IPOA is about, to paint a
larger picture, put it in context. Yes, we do have contractors
working around the world, doing stuff that’s dangerous. Sometimes
they’re armed, and sometimes innocent people get killed.”
Brooks first became intrigued by private military contractors
as a doctoral candidate at the University of Pittsburgh in
the late 1990s, where he indulged his childhood interest in
military history by studying Vietnam and Southeast Asian security.
Realizing he was “writing papers that could have been written
20 years earlier,” he soon tired of the subject. He began
reading newspaper articles about Executive Outcomes, a private
mercenary company operating in Africa. He changed his academic
focus and managed to win a fellowship to the South African
Institute of International Affairs, where he began churning
out papers extolling the promise of “private military companies”—a
controversial term he has since abandoned—and their potential
use in international peacekeeping operations.
Executive Outcomes is widely considered to be the forebearer
of the modern private military industry. Founded in 1989 by
former members of the Apartheid-era South African Defense
Force, the company, working under contract for various embattled
African governments, fought bush wars throughout the continent
for much of the next decade, most notably in Angola and Sierra
Leone, where they orchestrated the defeat of anti-government
forces—allegedly in exchange for diamond and oil concessions.
Despite its success on the battlefield, the Pretoria-based
company was forced to shut down in 1999 with the passage of
an anti-mercenary law by the South African government. The
negative stereotype it left behind—that of white soldiers-for-hire
attacking impoverished black rebels in order to plunder the
host country’s natural resources—is one the industry has been
trying to escape ever since.
Brooks doesn’t shy away from Executive Outcomes’ controversial
legacy. While he says that Executive Outcomes-style offensive
operations no longer have a place in the industry—”none of
the companies do it”—he credits the company with saving thousands
of lives in Sierra Leone and even points to it as a model
for the future of international peacekeeping.
In 2000, while conducting field research for his doctorate,
Brooks traveled to Sierra Leone, where he stayed in the capital
city of Freetown with Neall Ellis, a South African helicopter
pilot and former Executive Outcomes operator.
“He
was hired by the Sierra Leonean military to fly their Mi-24
helicopter gunship,” Brooks told me. “For months, he was the
only thing between the RUF”—a rebel faction—“and Freetown.
Neall had the most amazing intelligence network in the world,
so he knew where the RUF were. So he’d go out there and shoot
them up wherever they were advancing on Freetown. Well, one
day, one of his engines went out. It took months to get a
replacement, to get the right part. Meantime, the RUF marched
right through the peacekeeper lines. January 6, 1999, they
marched into Freetown. Ten thousand people killed. One guy,
one helicopter.”
One guy, one helicopter. The anecdote, which he made a point
of telling me on two separate occasions, was meant to amplify
the larger point of why he thinks the private sector should
take a prominent role in peacekeeping: It’s cheap, it’s efficient,
and it’s adaptable. And in places where the United Nations
refuses to act, private companies can fill the void, assuming
a government entity is willing to pick up the tab.
“This
is the reason we created IPOA, really, because of ‘Western-less’
peacekeeping,” Brooks explained. “The reality was that the
West wasn’t going to support humanitarian operations in places
they don’t give a shit about.” He cited Congo and Darfur.
“What would have happened if they had used ArmourGroup in
Rwanda?”
Brooks launched the IPOA in April 2001, shortly after his
return from Africa. It started small, with only six member
companies, and for Brooks it continued to be more of a hobby
than a career until the contracting bonanza that resulted
from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Since then the IPOA’s
ranks have swelled with companies seeking to burnish their
images with the private military industry equivalent of a
Good Housekeeping Seal of approval.
Brooks now manages a staff of full-time employees and interns.
Members pay annual dues ($5,000 for logistics contractors,
$15,000 for private security companies), which account for
some 60 percent of the IPOA’s annual operating budget. In
return, members receive permission to display the IPOA logo
on their marketing materials. As a condition of membership,
the companies must agree to adhere to the association’s code
of conduct—stressing concepts like human rights, ethics, transparency,
and accountability. If violations occur, they are subject
to the IPOA’s “enforcement mechanism.” This is composed of
a complex, multi-tiered system of committees that review potential
infractions and determine what, if any, penalty should be
imposed. It sounds much tougher than it actually is. After
all, the worst punishment the IPOA can dole out is expulsion
from the association, which Brooks calls “the commercial kiss
of death.” This has yet to happen, which probably speaks less
to the good behavior of private military contractors than
to an inherent conflict of interest in the association’s oversight
process: The organization is financially dependent on the
companies it claims to be overseeing.
I asked Brooks if the IPOA would ever really expel one of
its members. “If a company does something to sully the reputation
of the association, it’s not a big deal,” he responded. “A
company either sorts itself out or, if it’s that bad, you
get rid of them.” What about Blackwater? Could last week’s
shootout lead to its expulsion? Brooks was noncommittal, saying
only that “the mark of a good company is how they deal with
the problem.”
But the fact that, as yet, no companies have been kicked out
has invited outside skepticism.
“Doug
has a great series [of] codes, [and] a lot of them make a
lot of sense,” says Peter W. Singer, a senior fellow at the
Brookings Institution and author of Corporate Warriors:
The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry. “But at
the end of the day they’re trying to deal with issues that
are criminal, so you can’t merely have a market solution to
them.”
Moreover, Singer continued, “Being kicked out of IPOA is not
the proper punishment for a criminal action. It’s great that
an organization is willing to do that, but it’s sort of like
kicking O.J. out of the country club.”
Deborah Avant, a political science professor at the University
of California-Irvine and author of The Market for Force:
The Consequences of Privatizing Security, agrees. “I think
there is a fair amount of skepticism about the degree to which
he is able to stand up to the industry as opposed to being
a front for it.”
Brooks acknowledges these shortcomings, at least to a point.
“There’re
limits to what we can do, and people have to recognize that,”
he told me. “There are things we can do to put some constraints
on companies that otherwise wouldn’t be there, but we are
not a government nor should we be, I would argue. Ultimately,
if you don’t have an effective legal accountability system
that’s by a government agency, you lose a big chunk of your
capability to control these companies.” He went on, though,
to say there’s “too much bullshit” being written about the
dangers of “rogue” contractors. “The reality is, you stop
paying a company and it goes away; it doesn’t take over the
government.”
Brooks, who insists that his goal is “to help end wars,” brims
with excitement about the private sector’s potential to save
lives in conflict zones around the world. But the conduct
in the Iraq War of companies like Blackwater, an IPOA founding
member accused of multiple indiscriminant shootings, has proven
to be a distraction, as have accusations against other companies
(not all of them IPOA members) of human trafficking, overbilling,
corruption, and shoddy work. Though at times Brooks can make
hired guns sound like U.N. peacekeepers, few people doubt
his good intentions.
“I’ve
known Doug for a while, and I take him very seriously when
he talks about his focus on private peacekeeping. It’s not
just marketing,” says Singer.
The reality, he adds, is that ever since the Iraq invasion
the IPOA “has been forced to steer in a completely different
direction. You can see that in the press inquiries that Doug
is having to answer all the time. He’s doing a lot more talking
right now about Blackwater and Baghdad than about using contractors
in Congo or Darfur.” It’s a conflict that is perhaps unavoidable
as Brooks struggles to ensure that recent contractor scandals
“don’t hamstring the humanitarian potential” of the IPOA’s
member companies.
But according to Avant, the Iraq War has made it harder, not
easier, for Brooks to promote standards in the private military
industry. She points out that, especially early in the war,
companies that bent the rules typically did better for themselves
than companies that followed them. The premium placed on good
behavior was weakened as a result. Still, she says, IPOA standards
are a good first step. “The industry does have an incentive
to say, ‘Look, we’re not just a group of cowboy mercenaries.
This is the law we operate on; these are the standards.’“
Bruce
Falconer is a reporter at Mother Jones magazine, where
this article first appeared. Source: Featurewell.com.
|
Site
Search 
