The Expendables: Neocolonialism in the World of Private Military Contractors
In 2017 Al Jazeera released a documentary that
investigated the hiring of former child soldiers by the private military
contractor (PMC) Aegis. The piece, entitled “Child Soldiers Reloaded: The
Privatisation of War”, is no longer available on YouTube or Al Jazeera’s website and
information about the PMC itself is scarce. In addition further details about
Aegis’ CEO, Tim Spicer, indicate a series of questionable endeavours that landed
his previous company, Sandline, in legal hot water. Despite its CEO’s dubious past, in 2004, Aegis won a
$293 million dollar contract with the US government.
Although it was acquired by GardaWorld in 2015, Aegis
continues to work as a contractor in Southern Iraq. This is concerning as
it is this continued reinforcement, through the provision of high profile
contracts, which condones, and even encourages, Aegis’ hiring of former child
soldiers. The rush to the bottom in bidding for contracts, and a focus on
profit, drives a need for cheaper labour.
So Why Is This a Problem?
For some, the idea of a large multi-national
corporation searching foreign lands for the cheapest labour is, in itself, an
ethically questionable act; whilst for others this is the reality of a global
market, one that provides jobs to a population for whom they are in short
supply. The reason this often not seen as exploitation, is partly due to this idea
of supply and demand, in which low wage employees would be otherwise unemployed.
In these instances individuals have the right to enter into, what others might
consider a bad deal, if they so choose. This premise relies on ones individual
agency in the absense of coersion. In this view it is only a paternalistic
on-looker who makes claims of exploitation on behalf of another.
Unfortunately, it is not all that simple. Whilst there
is something to be said for individual agency, and the deservedly inexaustable
emphasis we place on it, it is also important to recognise the ways in which this
logic fails to recognise certain nuances. Child Soldiers Reloaded, highlights
the power imbalance created and perpetuated by normative and historically
dependent rhetoric; and begins to ask the question, what drives people to
choose this ‘bad deal’?
“This is not my decision to hold weapon again, but only I survive my life in weapon” Osman Sesay- Former Child Soldier (14:37)
For more than a
decade Sierra Leone suffered a brutal civil war in which children became a tool
of combat. A Human Right Watch report in 2000 details the horrors that
took place as children were not only exposed to, but forced to participate in, rape,
murder and mutilation. This bloody instability is to some degree a reflection
of Sierra Leone’s past as a main port for slave trade, and as a home for repatriated
and freed slaves. Throughout this history of systematic violence the people of
Sierra Leone have had the humanity drawn from them, their bodies and their
labour used as tools by external actors.
This is an extreme
version of what Karl Marx called alienation. Alienation occurs when workers
only have access to the methods of production through ‘the capitalist’ and as
such must work for another, providing labour to produce a product that is then
sold by ‘the capitalist’. It is not unreasonable to correlate a lack of control
over ones own labour, (the activity that fills most of our days and from which
we often derive our identity) with feelings of dissociation. This critique
highlights the lack of agency that exists within nondemocratic forms of labour
in which those with power make decisions whilst those without are a means to an
end.
For former child
soldiers the lack of agency and feelings of dissociation have left both
physical and emotional scars. As a result this population is particularly
vulnerable as survivors often struggle with employment, PTSD symptoms and the
resultant poverty. According to the American Psychological Association, “untreated PTSD from any trauma is unlikely to
disappear and can contribute to chronic pain, depression, drug and alcohol
abuse and sleep problems that impede a person's ability to work and interact
with others”. Ismael Beah, a former child soldier who works for the United
Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) explains how these factors make unemployed
youth an easy target for PMCs.
“The guy hasn’t had anything to eat for today, so he
is not thinking long term, he’s thinking short term, about what he can eat
now,”
“I used to be in that position. You can’t expect
anybody with short-term thinking to think for the future if you can’t provide
them with the opportunity to have one.”
Hence, hiring former child soldiers based on their
right to individual agency fails to recognise that as a form of slavery, these children
were stripped of all agency over their bodies as those in power used them as a
means to an ends. The result of this abuse is that, as adults, former child
soldiers again have few options to make decisions for themselves.
The way these structures of power reinforce the status-quo via the body
is what Foucault calls Biopower. Rhetoric and punishment function to reinforce
the power of one and the subjugation of another. In a commission hearing at
Capitol Hill, Mr Thibault provides a snapshot of this as he asserts, in a
matter of fact tone that ‘you get what you pay for’ (when hiring contractors
from developing countries). This statement fails to recognise the human nature
of the labour suggesting it is measured on a quality scale, the same way that
goods are products are. Further, this statement reinforces the idea of western
superiority by suggesting that hiring of former child soldiers is not an issue
on ethical or moral grounds but rather than labour from developing countries is
simply not good enough.
Nowhere is this disregard for life more apparent than the refusal of
PMCs to take responsibility for the repatriation of the bodies of fallen
contractors. Mohamed Judeh Barrie was one such private contractor. Barrie died
whilst in Iraq but his body was not repatriated to his home in Sierra Leone,
instead, his family where told that all costs and arrangements where theirs to
organise. And so again we see that the bodies of those from poor developing
countries, once drained of all their potential labour, become insignificant,
not warranting even a fraction of the grace and heroism, which accompanies the
members of western state militaries.
So in answer to
our original question ‘why is this a problem?’, the most simple
answer is that it is both hypocritical and unethical to afford superficial
individual agency. The idea that the decision to risk one’s
life in a foreign land, is driven by a basic corporeal function, a need for
food, indicates a contextual coercion in which the individuals decision is
incredibly restricted. Therefore we must question the taken-for-granted
knowledge that allows for these contexts to be perpetuated. We must question
how our nations contribute to practices that marginalise such vulnerable groups.
We must condemn practices that strip away the rights of groups whose agency is
consistently removed from them, recognising how this might be repackaged as
opportunity.
A note from the author:
Please note that I recognise the inherent clash between the American Psychological Association (APA) and Foucault's theory of Biopower (which rejects medicalisation of mental health). In this context Biopower is a useful critical lens through which we can critique power imbalance as it acts on the body. By contrast APAs medicalisation of mental health is not the focus here, PTSD is simply a label given to the complex and diverse experiences that result from trauma (and one that most western societies rely on to understand trauma and its effects on one's life experience).
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