When recently in Baghdad, employees of the U.S. American enterprise Blackwater shot seventeen Iraqis in the open street and injured an additional 23, suddenly a topic managed to get into the public limelight that up to now had only been very little present in the media: the activities of soldiers and private security firms in war-type conflicts world-wide. Therefore, it is more than urgent to deal with the effects and consequences of an increasing privatisation of military services.


For a long time, people, be it out of constraint or out of economic hardship, sometimes simply out of thirst for adventure, have been forced to put themselves at the service of warlords in order to represent their masters' interests, but risking their own lives, on the battle fields. Not without reason do they say that mercenaries are the world's second-oldest profession. What is new, however, is the dimension by which today private security companies are directly implicated in wars, in what key areas they work and what they earn with it. Mercenaries have become "big business", and the war economy booms like never before. According to estimates of the US American Brookings Institute, in the meantime about 180,000 private collaborators are active for the U.S. Army in Iraq (among them also several thousand Europeans) – and that way surpass the number of the 167,000 U.S. soldiers. This is not only a matter of direct security personnel, but also of drivers, translators etc. - with indistinct boundaries. Official data on how many persons are active in the immediate security area for the U.S. military don't exist, as U.S. defence minister Robert Gates needed to admit after the Blackwater incident.


It is a fact that great – and very sensitive – areas in Iraq and in other crisis areas lie in the hands of private firms – and that that way these have an enormous power position. A war like the one in Iraq would not have been possible without the mercenaries involved. Blackwater with its about 1000 collaborators in Iraq who are among other things responsible for the protection of the U.S. ambassador and other US Americans, is only the tip of the iceberg, there are hundreds of firms that in Iraq and elsewhere sell security or are responsible for basic logistics. Leading on the market of the security companies are the USA and Great Britain, who are said to account for 70% of global business with security among the two of them. Overall, the Brookings Institute estimated that, already in the year 2004, more than 100 billion US dollars from governments were flowing into the pockets of private security firms; this sum is likely to have risen considerably during the last years. Added to that are the payments that companies make that are active in conflict areas. A very lucrative area thus for the security firms.

The US foreign ministry, following its own data, since the year 2001, has paid 1.2 billion dollars to Blackwater alone. For the year 2008, the US government – according to the former special envoy of the Austrian EU Council presidency, Gudrun Haarer - has
already planned for 500 million Dollars for private security protection. The sum is immense, but only very little surprising if you consider the fact that a daily rate for body guards lies in between 1,000 and 2,000 Dollars. At least half of the money is kept by the company, the other half is received by the body guard himself – if he is from the West – the rates for local people are drastically lower. Only in the light of these sums is it explicable that personnel is still as plentiful for suicide squads such as the mission in Iraq.


On the contrary, the share of "private military contractors", as they like to call themselves, is rapidly growing. The bestselling author Naomi Klein points to the fact that the US government in the year 2003 had concluded 3,512 contracts with private security firms, however, this number in the two following years had already risen to 115,000. This has to do not only with good earning possibilities which exist in this area – be it at the highest risk – and which precisely are interesting when other professional perspectives are lacking. The enormous increase of private security personnel is mainly also a consequence of the fact that ever more areas that were formerly in state hands are yielded by way of outsourcing to private companies – and this is part of a targeted strategy.


There it is, on the one hand, a case of the recycling of public money, and this mainly into pockets that are one's own. The enormity of the sums in question becomes clear if you consider that the Iraq war up to now has cost 463 billion Dollars. It is well-known that it is members of the U.S. government who are linked very closely with the firms that profit from the war. Thus, the firm Halliburton, whose head was US vice-president Dick Cheney had made billions of profits. Blackwater also belongs to a friend of the Bush clan. The much cited argument that privatisations for some reason save money can hardly be supported. What is clear, however, is that the money spent serves to buttress the profit of individual companies.


An at least equally weighty reason for the increased relocation of formerly private expenditures, however, is another: the lack of control from outside. In contrast to the military, the legal situation in the case of private companies is ambiguous. For governments, this leads to the comfortable possibility that it can, for instance, better disguise activities contrary to international law, and beyond that can claim considerably lower numbers of soldiers (and numbers of dead or injured) which is a not inconsiderable factor if it is a matter of consent to participations, as among others, the journalist Rolf Uesseler explains in his book on the privatisation of law. Also the criminal relevance in the matter of crimes committed by private security people is unclear: In Iraq, a decree by the former head of the US transitional government Paul Bremer from the year 2004 grants to all security firms of the coalition forces criminal immunity, so that nobody may be taken to account for the fatal aimless shooting by the Blackwater collaborators. As a result of the most recent incident, this is now supposed to change – earlier deeds, be it with few casualties, however, had provoked no such outcry up to now.


All in all, this adds up to a disastrous balance sheet. Maybe the most sinister is the fact that hardly any one of the partipants is likely to have an interest that a war comes to an end: neither the companies that offer private security, nor those who dispose of company participations in armament, personnel and logistics, nor the mercenaries, who for the lack of better possibilities secure their livelihood that way. The victim is once more the civilian population that is confronted with ever more unclear lines of conflict and must try to organise its survival in between these.


The dangers of this development are immense: in spite of their increasing acceptance of key positions in armed conflicts, private security companies as well as suppliers of logistics are in positions that offer them a big and democratically uncontrollable potential for pressure face to their employers, meaning a war party, because the conduct of the war depends on them to a large extent. At the same time, private security companies on the basis of their uncear legal situation and the constant peril are more at risk to commit violence in an inappropriate way, because the probability to have to confess to it, is small. Since also very explictly shady individuals commit as mercenaries (for instance, former members of Latin American death squads, former South African pro-apartheid fighters and similar people), the risk increases even more. Added to that is the fact that the loyality of the security personnel develops on the basis of a financial promise and for that reason may quickly change again. All that represents a high risk for the perspective of stabilisation in a conflict region.


Developments in Iraq – but not only there – outline the paths of the new wars that have ever more obscure structures and become ever more incalculable. Europe must also be blamed for this problematic development. Also the EU engages to limit state influence in defence policy ever more and that way advocates an ever less controllable privatisation policy. It was only recently that the arms market was liberalised, a step that might draw others behind – in the EU Reform Treaty and not only there, the area of foreign and security policy is accorded huge space. Already today, also EU countries use private security services abroad, thus for instance, the Federal Army for the protection of its logistics in the Afghanistan intervention. Not to speak of the EU states implicated in the Iraq war. This tendency threatens to get even worse due to the global will to shape things claimed by the EU that manifests in widening uses of foreign missions as well as the ever closer connections of EU foreign and security policy with the USA and NATO. All the more urgently required it is to struggle against privatisation efforts and the loss of democratic control in this highly sensitive area that follows in their wake.