Private military contractors (PMCs) are seeking to play a greater role in peacekeeping in Africa to make up for what they claim to be the inability of UN missions and state militaries to ensure the continent's security and humanitarian development.
During a three-day conference in Nairobi that brought together UN agencies, NGOs, officials of numerous governments and several private sector companies, PMCs said they had much to offer in terms of logistics, personnel and expertise. Doug Brooks, the president of the International Peace Operations Association (IPOA), an industry body for PMCs, said that while such contractors would not replace existing peace missions, they could enhance peace and stability in regions plagued by protracted conflict such as Sudan's Darfur and Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) North Kivu.
"The West has been an unreliable peacekeeping operations partner in Africa and this has made the peace missions diverse, unsupported and ineffective," said Brooks. "It is significantly cheaper to hire expertise and equipment from companies than it is for militaries to attempt to maintain them for years or decades." PMCs have seen their businesses grow considerably in recent years, thanks largely to contracts for work in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, they have recently suffered a barrage of bad publicity and criticism from human rights organisations. A recent Amnesty International report accused the Angolan government and PMCs of resorting to extreme violence to evict squatters from several suburbs of the capital, Luanda, over the last two years.
The source of this news has been published by thenewhumanitarian https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/fr/node/238937
