Feral Jundi

“If Scahill and Klein have the resources, the capabilities, the equipment, to go in and do it themselves then more power to them.” -Doug Brooks, IPOA 

*****

     Your damn right, and good on Doug for calling it like it is. I read through these two articles below, thinking that the authors were actually going to present a convincing argument that what the IPOA and private industry is doing is a bad thing. In fact, I read through both of these articles and thought, ‘ private industry to the rescue’!  So thanks to Anthony Fenton and Jeremy Gantz for actually writing two articles that were inspirational to me, and did the exact opposite of what they intended to do. Critics are funny that way.

   I will explain.  You see all of these critics of the industry continue to complain that private industry is actually doing something about the rebuilding of Haiti.  At face value, that is just ridiculous. Who are they to say that the IPOA or GIS can’t help? Can they help if they are wearing a Che Guevera t-shirt?  Can they only help if they donate their entire savings to the Haitian government, and live on the streets of Vancouver BC begging for money for the rest of their lives?

    To me, the critics have actually taken a pretty immoral stance in my opinion.  If I am the public and reading this stuff, I am thinking ‘where the hell is the money supposed to go anyways’ and ‘who cares if private industry wants to help’?  The public wants action, and they want to make sure that Haiti is getting a good value for the dollar. The donations are supposed to be used for rebuilding and helping Haiti, not for paying aid agency salaries or for aid agency ad campaigns so they can make even more money.  Put that money to work, and lets get going on the rebuild.

   Also, all of these IPOA companies are specialists in rebuilding in the worst kind of disaster zones.  Namely, war.  They provide the specialists, and they also hire local Haitians, and get projects built.  Private industry will be helping government, but they will also be helping other private groups.  Who are the critics to say that private industry cannot participate in that process?  This is how the real world works, and I just shake my head every time I read this stuff.

   Klein is classic though.  The biggest disaster capitalists on this planet, are the media and aid agencies, and yet private industry is the bad guy here?  Pfffft. If anything, Klein lacks the courage to criticize the media or aid agencies, partly because most of her cheerleaders come from those two groups. Not to mention that the media and aid agencies both depend upon my industry to go on their little disaster crusades around the world.

    Naomi is also living in a fairy tale if she thinks that private industry can’t help, or that their ‘cookie cutter’ responses in Iraq or Afghanistan are not helpful to Haiti.  I am still trying to figure out what she means by cookie cutter response, because I have yet to see anything of the sort from any of the companies over in Iraq or Afghanistan.  Actually, they all do things quite differently and approach problems based on their personal experience and capability.  Most are pretty innovative and can certainly get things done.  They have to, if they want to survive in a war zone and be competitive in this market.

   Any way, I wanted to give kudos to the IPOA and GIS for putting the critics in their place, and for all the hard work they have done.  I also want to thank these two journalists for providing examples of what happens when criticism backfires. Especially when they are trying to attack those that are taking action to help Haiti. –Matt

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HAITI:Private Contractors ‘Like Vultures Coming to Grab the Loot’ 

Anthony Fenton

VANCOUVER, Canada, Feb 19 (IPS) – Critics are concerned that private military contractors are positioning themselves at the centre of an emerging “shock doctrine” for earthquake-ravaged Haiti.

Next month, a prominent umbrella organisation for private military and logistic corporations, the International Peace Operations Association (IPOA), is co-organising a “Haiti summit” which aims to bring together “leading officials” for “private consultations with attending contractors and investors” in Miami, Florida.

Dubbed the “mercenary trade association” by journalist Jeremy Scahill, author of “Blackwater: the Rise of the World’ Most Powerful Mercenary Army”, the IPOA wasted no time setting up a “Haiti Earthquake Support” page on its website following the Jan. 12 earthquake that devastated the Caribbean country.

IPOA’s director Doug Brooks says, “The first contacts we got were journalists looking for security when they went in.” The website of IPOA member company, Hart Security, says they are currently in Haiti “supporting clients from the fields of media, consultancy and medical in their disaster recovery efforts.” Several other IPOA members have either bid on or received contracts for work in Haiti.

Likewise, the private military contractor, Raidon Tactics, has at least 30 former U.S. Special Operations soldiers on the ground, where they have been guarding aid convoys and providing security for “news agencies,” according to a Raidon employee who told IPS his company received over 1,000 phone calls in response to an ad posting “for open positions for Static Security Positions and Mobile Security Positions” in Haiti.

Just over a week following the earthquake, the IPOA teamed up with Global Investment Summits (GIS), a UK-based private company that specialises in bringing private contractors and government officials from “emerging post-conflict countries” together, to host an “Afghanistan Reconstruction Summit”, in Istanbul, Turkey. It was there, says IPOA’s director Doug Brooks, that the idea for the Haiti summit was hatched “over beers”.

GIS’s CEO, Kevin Lumb, told IPS that the key feature of the Haiti summit will be “what we call roundtables, [where] we put the ministers and their procurement people, and arrange appointments with contractors.” Lumb added that his company “specialise[s] in putting governments together [with private contractors].”

IPOA was “so pleased” with the Afghanistan summit, says Lumb, they asked GIS to do “all the organising, all the selling” for the Haiti summit. Lumb pointed out that all of the profits from the event will be donated to the Clinton-Bush Haiti relief fund.

While acknowledging that there will be a “a commercial angle” to the event and that “major companies, major players in the world” have committed to attend, Lumb declined to name most of the participants.

One of the companies Lumb did mention is DACC Associates, a private contractor that specialises in management and security consulting with contracts providing “advice and counsel” to governments in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

DACC President Douglas Melvin, a former Special Forces commander, State Department official and director of Security and Administrative Services for President George W. Bush, acknowledged that “from a revenue perspective, yes there’s wonderful opportunities at these events.”

Melvin added that he believes most attendees will be “coming together for the right reasons,” a genuine concern for Haiti, are “not coming to exploit” the dire situation there, and does not expect his company to profit off of their potential contracts there.

Naomi Klein, author of “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism”, is concerned that the thesis of her best-selling book will once again be tested in Haiti. She told IPS in an e-mail, “Haiti doesn’t need cookie cutter one-size fits all reconstruction, designed by the same gang that made same such a hash of Iraq, Afghanistan and New Orleans – and indeed the same people responsible for the decimation of Haiti’s own economy in the name of ‘aid.'”

Unhappy with critics’ characterisation of the IPOA, Brooks said, “If Scahill and Klein have the resources, the capabilities, the equipment, to go in and do it themselves then more power to them.”

University of California at Los Angeles professor Nandini Gunewardena, co-editor of “Capitalizing on Catastrophe: Neoliberal Strategies in Disaster Reconstruction,” told IPS that “privatisation is not the way to go for disaster assistance.”

“Traditionally, corporations have positioned themselves in a way that they benefit at the expense of the people. We cannot afford for that to happen in Haiti,” she said, adding that “any kind of intermediate or long-term assistance strategy has to be framed within that framework of human security.”

This, according to the U.N-.based Commission on Human Security, means “creating political, social, environmental, economic, military and cultural systems that together give people the building blocks of survival, livelihood and dignity.”

Denouncing the “standard recipe of neoliberal policies,” Gunewardena said, “If private corporations are going to contribute to Haiti’s restoration, they have to be held accountable, not to their own standards, but to those of the people.”

Reached by telephone, Haiti’s former Minister of Defence under the first presidency of Jean Bertand Aristide, Patrick Elie, agreed. He’s worried about the potential privatisation of his country’s rebuilding, “because these private companies [aren’t] liable, you can’t take them to the United Nations, you can’t take them to The Hague, and they operate in kind of legal limbo. And they are the more dangerous for it.”

Elie, who accepted a position as advisor to President Rene Preval following the earthquake, added “These guys are like vultures coming to grab the loot over this disaster, and probably money that might have been injected into the Haitian economy is going to be just grabbed by these companies and I’m sure that they are not only these mercenary companies but also the other companies like Halliburton or these other ones that always [come] on the heels of the troops.”

In its 2008 report, “Private Security Contractors at War: Ending the Culture of Impunity,” the NGO Human Rights First decried the “failure of the U.S. government to effectively control their actions, and in particular the inability or unwillingness of the Department of Justice (DoJ) to hold them criminally responsible for their illegal actions.”

The IPOA’s Brooks told IPS that members of the Haitian diaspora and Haiti’s embassy have been invited and are “going to be a big part” of the summit.

While stressing that it’s impossible to know the exact details of an event that is planned outside of public scrutiny, Elie countered that if high-level Haitian officials were to participate, “It’s either out of ignorance or complicity.”

Worried that Haiti is already seeing armed contractors in addition to the presence of more than 20,000 U.S., Canadian, and U.N. soldiers, Elie says he has seen private contractors accompanying NGOs, “walking about carrying assault rifles.”

If the U.S. military pulls out and hands over the armed presence to private contractors, “It opens the door to all kinds of abuses. Let’s face it, the Haitian state is too weak to really deal efficiently with this kind of threat if it materialises,” he said.

The history of post-disaster political economy has shown that such a threat is all too likely, says Elie. “We’ve seen it happen so many times before that whenever there is a disaster, there are a bunch of vultures trying to profit from it, whether it’s a man-made disaster like Iraq, or a nature-made disaster like Haiti.”

Story here.

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Helping Haiti, for a Price

Private security contractors begin to capitalize on the disaster.

By Jeremy Gantz

Haitian private security personnel guard a road near the national bank in Port-au-Prince on January 22, 2010, following the massive 7.0-magnitude earthquake that shattered the country on January 12. (Photo by: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images)

‘There’s not a lot we can do from a corporate standpoint,’ says Donna Smith, president of Florida-based All Protection and Security.

Within hours of the earthquake that caused the deaths of an estimated 200,000 Haitians on January 12, U.S.-based private security firms sprang into action.

On January 13, as stories of looting and lawlessness in Port-au-Prince began appearing in news reports, the private security industry member organization the International Peace Operations Association (IPOA) created a new page on its website listing companies “prepared to provide a wide variety of critical relief services to the earthquake’s victims.” Listed firms include Triple Canopy, which last year took over Blackwater Worldwide’s (now called XE) contract to protect U.S. diplomats in Iraq.

On January 15, Florida-based All Protection and Security registered the web domain www.haiti-security.com to assure “companies considering a Haiti project that professional security”—including armed guards to deal with “worker unrest” and “high threat terminations”—”is available.” The firm has since secured multiple contracts to protect representatives of U.S. companies looking to build textile and food processing facilities there, All Protection President Donna Smith told In These Times.

While Smith’s company and many IPOA members can provide services and items vitally needed in Haiti—such as temporary housing, cargo transport, and medical supplies—some question whether a growing industry that annually rakes in tens of billions of dollars in contracts with governments, corporations and nongovernmental organizations ought to profit off a natural disaster that has devastated the poorest country in the western hemisphere.

With the U.S. government already pledging more than $183 million in aid to Haiti as of late January, it’s “inevitable” that long-term relief efforts will end up being contracted out to private U.S. firms, says David Isenberg, an independent analyst of private military and security contractors and the author of Shadow Force: Private Security Contractors in Iraq. The government agency that will manage relief efforts, the U.S. Agency for International Development, now has little internal capacity, so private companies will step in to do the job.

Given this rosy outlook for the private sector, Isenberg says, security firms should consider offering services pro bono during the short term. “There’s only so much they can do for free,” says Isenberg, who last year ran the Norwegian Initiative on Small Arms Transfers project at the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo. “But on the other hand, we know you’re going to get paid in the end. You can afford to do something for free.”

Doug Brooks, founder and president of IPOA, says some of the organization’s member companies have begun operating in Haiti since the earthquake. Brooks said that IPOA companies have offered free disaster-zone services in the past, but he was unable to name specific firms that have done so thus far in Haiti. In March, the association will co-sponsor a conference in Miami aimed at NGOs with “stability operations” in Haiti, Brooks said. “We would hope to get some business out of it,” he added. All conference profits will be donated to relief efforts.

But Brooks takes issue with the notion that private security companies with unique disaster relief capabilities ought to donate those skills and services. “You don’t just say that because a doctor can cure cancer, that the doctor should do it for free for the rest of his life,” he says. It costs money for companies to deploy their “enormous” and “cost-efficient” resources, he said.

Smith says All Protection has given to charities and offered any religious organization free security during religious services. “There’s not a lot we can do from a corporate standpoint,” she says. The company has also sponsored a training program to help Haitians become guards and know “how to make an American company happy with your services.”

Smith is unapologetic about her decision to market her company’s services by creating www.haiti-security.com after the earthquake, saying people should know that safe travel to Haiti is possible because security is available. “When there’s another disaster [in another country], I’ll be putting up that website too,” she says. “That’s business.”

While mindful of security companies’ valuable capabilities, Isenberg remains skeptical about their generosity. “For years, people in industry on the trade advocacy side…have talked about the wonderful things the private sector can do in conflict-torn or unstable countries,” he says. “But by and large, you don’t see them doing a lot before having a contract in hand first.”

Story here.