By P.K.Balachandran/Daily Mirror
Colombo, December 12: In these days of economic downturns and rising unemployment, it is not surprising that Sri Lankans and Nepalese with a military background are finding jobs in their line of expertise in the Russo-Ukrainian war theatre.
While retired Sri Lankan military men are finding opportunities in the Ukrainian Foreign Legion (UFL), the Nepalese are heading for Russia to serve as auxiliaries in the armed forces of that country.
Recruitment of foreigners by these countries should not come as a surprise because even Western governments have been supplementing their standing armies with privately recruited, trained and maintained military units.
Outsourcing of military functions relieves governments of the responsibility to recruit, train, discipline and pay military personnel. States also find mercenaries to be more deadly, besides being cheaper. And companies and individuals who take up such contracts find them to be profitable. Some of the leading Western military companies are listed in the stock market.
The men of these privatized military units do not fight out of patriotism or nationalistic impulses but only for money and fortune. Though this may sound crass to those who consider soldiering a noble profession, it cannot be denied that many, if not most, recruits to standing armies join mainly for the steady income and pension that military service gets.
In his 2019 paper Mercenaries and War: Understanding Private Armies Today, Dr.Sean McFate of the US National Defence University (NDU) points out that it is only in the last 200 years that mercenaries (or those who are basically motivated by pecuniary considerations) have acquired an odium. For hundreds of years before that, being a mercenary or a “soldier of fortune” carried no odium.
Major Role in History
“The word mercenary comes from the Latin merces (wages or pay) and is no different from the world solde or pay due to fighters, from which the word soldier is derived. For much of the past, mercenaries and soldiers were synonymous,” says McFate.
Further, much of military history is about mercenaries for the simple reason that rulers in the past found that renting a force was cheaper than owning it. Naturally, military history bristles with mercenary involvements. When Alexander invaded Asia in 334 BC, his army included 5,000 foreign mercenaries, and the Persian army he faced contained 10,000 Greeks. Rome used mercenaries throughout its 1,000-year rule.
In 18 th and 19th.Century India, Col. James Skinner, a Eurasian freelancer, raised the Skinner’s Horse in Hansi (Haryana), a cavalry regiment which fought for any ruler who could pay. It was finally absorbed in the Indian army and was commanded by Lt.Col.Michael Skinner, a descendant of the founder, in 1960.
The Portuguese, the Dutch and the British in Ceylon used mercenaries recruited both locally and from neighbouring India. These “Lascarines” were recruited for particular campaigns and were discharged upon the conclusion of the campaigns. The Dutch East India Company in Ceylon (VOC) used the Regiment de Meuron, a body of Swiss mercenaries under Col. Charles-Daniel de Meuron, to fight their wars in the island. After the British took over from the Dutch in 1796, they found it less expensive to use the Regiment de Meuron than requisitioning troops from Madras.
Lankan historians, W.I.Siriweera and Sanath de Silva point out in Warfare in Sri Lanka, that Sinhalese and Tamil kings also recruited mercenaries both locally and from India. While the locals were paid in land rights, outsiders were paid wages (padi).
Major Companies
Some mercenary groups are big. According to the Indian magazine Outlook, the big ones are: the Wagner group, Olive group, Academi, G4S Security, and Erinys.
The Wagner Group, controlled by Yevgeny Prigozhin, is a vehicle the Kremlin uses to recruit, train, and deploy mercenaries, either to fight wars or to provide security and training to friendly regimes abroad. The Group is used in Ukraine. The Olive group has protected oil firms from suicide bombers and other attackers in Iraq since 2003. It recruits mainly from members of UK’s Special Air Service (SAS) at high wages. Started by Harry Legge-Burke, the Olive Group is a member of the International Peace Operations Association.
Formerly known as Blackwater, Academi was found in 1996 by an ex-US Navy man. The group boasts an army of 20,000 men. Blackwater is known for its involvement in the killing of 17 Iraqi citizens in Baghdad. G4S is the biggest private military group in the world, with around 620,000 employees. It operates in over 120 countries providing routine support to airport security, night-time patrolling, and so on. It does not engage in heavy combat.
Erinys is a UK firm engaged in guarding oil pipelines and energy assets in over 280 countries but mainly in post-war Iraq. Erinys was accused of torturing prisoners in custody. The group also maintains a presence in Africa.
When Mahinda Rajapaksa was Sri Lankan President, the government set up a joint venture company the Avant Garde Maritime Services (Pvt) Ltd., to provide Sea Marshals to ships operating in the piracy-infested seas off Somalia and the Gulf. The company earned a lot of foreign exchange, said the then Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa.
Mercenaries in Africa
Recent years have seen a major involvement of mercenaries in Yemen, Nigeria, Ukraine, Syria, and Iraq, Dr.McFate points out.
“Kurdistan is a haven for soldiers of fortune looking for work with the Kurdish militia, oil companies defending their oil fields, or those who want terrorists dead. The capital of Kurdistan, Irbil, has become an unofficial marketplace of mercenary services,” he says.
“The United Arab Emirates secretly dispatched hundreds of special forces mercenaries to fight the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen. Hailing from Latin American countries like Colombia, Panama, El Salvador, and Chile, they were all tough veterans of the drug wars, bringing new tactics and toughness to Middle East conflicts. The Emirates hired 1,800 of them.”
African mercenaries are also fighting in Yemen for Saudi Arabia. They come from Sudan, Chad, and Eritrea.
The mercenaries are deadly fighters too. “Many of these for-profit warriors outclass local militaries, and a few can even stand up to America’s most elite forces, as the battle in Syria shows,” McFate says.
Nigeria hired mercenaries to tackle the deadly Boko Haram. The mercenaries arrived with special forces and Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunships and drove out the Boko Haram in a few weeks. The Nigerian military could not achieve this task in 6 years!
Humanitarian groups and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) such as CARE, Save the Children, CARITAS, and World Vision are also increasingly turning to the private sector security companies for protection in conflict zones, McFate says. Large military companies like Aegis Defense Services and Triple Canopy advertise their services among NGOs.
Even terrorists hire mercenaries. Malhama Tactical, based in Uzbekistan, works only for Jihadi groups. McFate warns that Jihadis may hire mercenary special forces for precision terrorist attacks.
Rewards
The Emirates pay their mercenaries two to four times their old salaries. The Russians are offering US$ 4000 per month and the Sri Lankans are said to be getting more than LKR 1 million (over US$ 3000) per month in Ukraine.
McFate says that Syria rewards mercenaries who seize territory from terrorists with oil and mining rights. The Russian company Evro Polis employed the Wagner Group to capture oil fields from the Islamic State (IS) in central Syria. Ukrainian oligarch Igor Kolomoisky employed private warriors to capture the headquarters of oil company UkrTransNafta.
Heavy Casualties
Mercenaries have taken heavy casualties. Robert Lawless, writing in the website of the Lieber Institute West Point in March 2022, said that 200 Russian mercenaries were killed in February 2022. Still, 40,000 Syrians were registered to join the Russian side in 2022.
Three Sri Lankans with the Ukrainian Foreign Legion, including Capt. Ramish Hewage, were killed recently. Foreign Minister Ali Sabry said that government would prevent the recruitment of mercenaries by local agents. Anticipating this, local agents had been taking them to India as tourists and then on to Ukraine.
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