Well aware of the severe image problems plaguing the mercenary industry, the IPOA has attempted to bring in representatives from Amnesty International and other respected human rights organizations as consultants. 61 The IPOA boasts of a “code of conduct” written with “the input of dozens of international and non-governmental organizations, human rights lawyers, and scholars.”62 In Congressional testimony in 2006, Chris Taylor pointed to his company’s membership in the IPOA as evidence that Blackwater is “committed to defining the standards by which our independent contractors are credentialed as qualified to work in the industry, improving the federal contracting and oversight process, providing increased transparency in business operations, and encouraging discussion of our industry so that it can become more fully integrated into the process of finding solutions to difficult challenges.”63 Taylor hads also suggested that “contracting agencies” use the IPOA as a “certification, somewhat like an ISO 9000 quality-management program.”64
The IPOA Code, which all member companies are required to sign, commits its members to “agree to follow all rules of international humanitarian law and human rights law that are applicable as well as all relevant international protocols and conventions.”65 It has sections on transparency, ethics, and accountability, and IPOA warns: “Signatories who fail to uphold any provision contained in this Code may be subject to dismissal from IPOA at the discretion of the IPOA Board of Directors.”66 But the IPOA Code is not a binding document with any legal weight whatsoever. In the aftermath of Nisour Square in 2007, Blackwater quietly withdrew from the IPOA, saying it was “pursuing other aspects and methods of industry outreach and governance.” Blackwater’s logo was swiftly scrubbed from the IPOA Web site.
The crucial role the IPOA has played in the rebranding campaign has been to lobby lawmakers, journalists, and human rights groups to support greater privatization of military and peacekeeping operations by promoting the idea that society stands to benefit from a regulated mercenary industry. At the same time, its completely unenforceable, nonlegal code of conduct is used by the mercenary companies as a talking point to show how responsible and conscientious they are—voluntarily.67 The IPOA has functioned as the political wing of the organized mercenary industry, which it has renamed the “peace and stability industry.”68
Despite the fact that there were an estimated one hundred eighty thousand contractors operating in Iraq as of spring 2008, there remained no effective oversight system in place, nor was there a legal body with effective jurisdiction over the contractors. Paul Bremer’s Order 17, which granted contractors immunity from prosecution in Iraq, remained the law of the land under successive puppet governments—from Iyad Allawi to Nouri al-Maliki—that ruled Iraq after Bremer departed and the CPA was dismantled. In theory, it is the responsibility of the home countries of contractors to police them. In reality, this has translated to impunity. That point was hit home in a dramatic way in one of the rare Congressional hearings on contractors in Iraq, which took place in June 2006. Representative Dennis Kucinich questioned Shay Assad, the Pentagon’s director of Defense Procurement and Acquisition, the department in the DoD responsible for contractors. Kucinich pointed out that U.S. troops are subjected to enforceable rules of engagement and have been prosecuted for violations in Iraq, while contractors are not:
KUCINICH: Do you know what the statute of limitation is for murder in the United States?
ASSAD: No, I don’t, Mr. Congressman.
KUCINICH: There isn’t—there isn’t one. Now, if someone connected with a private contracting company was involved in the murder of a civilian, would the Department be ready to recommend their prosecution?
ASSAD: Sir, I’m just not qualified to answer that question.69
Incredulous, Kucinich asked Assad and the other government officials on the panel, “Anybody here qualified to answer that, and if they’re not, why are you here, with all due respect?” Kucinich pointed out that as of the date of the hearing in June 2006, “no security contractor has been prosecuted” for crimes in Iraq (that remained the case as of spring 2008). He then directly asked Assad, “Would the Department of Defense be prepared to see a prosecution proffered against any private contractor who is demonstrated to have unlawfully killed a civilian?”
“Sir, I can’t answer that question,” Assad replied.
“Wow,” Kucinich shot back. “Think about what that means. These private contractors can get away with murder.” Contractors, Kucinich said, “do not appear to be subject to any laws at all and so therefore they have more of a license to be able to take the law into their own hands.” (In late 2006, Senator Lindsey Graham quietly inserted language into the 2007 defense authorization bill, which Bush subsequently signed, that sought to place contractors under the Pentagon’s UCMJ, but what effective impact—if any—this could have remains unclear, with experts predicting resistance from the private war industry.)
At that same hearing, Blackwater’s Taylor and IPOA founder Doug Brooks were the two primary defenders of the mercenary firms. “This industry is highly responsible,” Brooks told the Congressional hearing. “IPOA includes the most professional forward-thinking and ethical companies in the industry, and all members are always publicly committed to our code of conduct.” But while Brooks was preaching from the accountability gospel in front of the U.S. Congress, he was simultaneously fighting attempts to rein in mercenaries on the African continent, where the industry stands to make substantial money if allowed to operate in Sudan and other crisis zones.
The South African Example
Perhaps the most visible work the IPOA has done in recent years was not actually in the United States, though it has far-reaching implications for Blackwater and other U.S. companies—particularly when it comes to their aspirations for peacekeeping deployments on the African continent. Despite their rhetoric about supporting regulation of the industry, the IPOA and Brooks were deeply engaged in a coordinated effort to defeat South Africa’s groundbreaking antimercenary legislation, supported by the overwhelming majority of the country’s elected legislators.
South Africa—indeed, the African continent—has had a long, bloody history with white mercenaries. After the fall of the apartheid regime in the early 1990s, many white South African soldiers and police, who had spent the past years terrorizing black Africans, found themselves looking for new jobs. An unknown number of these soldiers farmed out their services to companies, governments, and counterrevolutionary causes, bringing yet more infamy to South Africa—this time as a base of operations for mercenaries. Among the most notorious South African companies, Executive Outcomes was founded in 1989 by a former apartheid-era commander and operated openly until it was shut down in 1998. Among its clients were the diamond giant DeBeers and the government of Angola, where EO was contracted in 1993 to retake strategic oil-rich areas on behalf of government forces. But EO is perhaps best known for its operations in diamond-rich Sierra Leone, where its forces were contracted to defend the government from a rebellion by Foday Sankoh’s Revolutionary United Front movement, which was committing widespread human rights abuses. The government paid EO approximately $35 million—a third of its annual defense budget—in 1995 to crush the insurgency after the U.S. and British governments and the UN declined to intervene.70 It took EO just nine days to stop the rebellion and two days to retake the prized Kono diamond fields. Supporters of the mercenary industry have held up the work of EO and Sandline (Tim Spicer’s old company) as evidence of the success of private forces.