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http://home.comcast.net/~RtPriceTag/PrivateMilitary.htmlREGULATING THE PRIVATIZATION OF WAR: HOW TO STOP PRIVATE MILITARY FIRMS FROM COMMITTING HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES
Nathaniel Stinnett*
Abstract: Private Military Firms (PMFs) have recently stepped in to fill the growing global demand for temporary, highly-specialized military services. These private corporations can be a blessing to their client countries in that they offer many economic, military, and political benefits not ordinarily found in standing armies. However, PMFs fall within a gap in international law, which presumes and prefers a monopolization of force by state actors, thereby leaving no effective way to deal with those PMFs that commit human rights abuses. This Note traces the history of private militaries and the applicable legal standards and argues for a coordinated domestic approach among a handful of countries to legitimize and regulate PMFs.
I. History and Background
A. A History of Private Militaries
“As long as humanity has waged war, there have been mercenaries.”10 Indeed, the history of private militaries can be traced back at least 3,000 years, when Numidian mercenaries played a large role in Ramses II’s attack on Kadesh (1294 B.C.), and biblical King David’s mercenaries drove the Philistines from Israel (1000 B.C.).11 The ancient Greeks and Romans also relied heavily upon mercenaries, as did Emperor Justinian and William the Conqueror.12
<*PG213> The use of mercenaries continued unabated up through the modern era. In the Middle Ages, companies of fighting men offered their collective skills to whomever would hire them.13 During the Renaissance, Italy’s city-states contracted with freelance military commanders, or condottieri, so as to deny military power to potential domestic rivals and to avoid disrupting “the productive economy by forcing normal citizens into military service.”14 Most of the forces used in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) were privately contracted,15 and the British Crown famously hired Hessian soldiers to fight against George Washington’s troops in the American Revolutionary War.16 Indeed, “not until the Franco-German War of 1870 did the ‘nation-in-arms’ concept gain predominance in the world’s militaries,” after which armies built upon national loyalties quickly became the international norm.17
Throughout the twentieth century, the international community further curtailed organized private armies.18 In particular, there was an extraordinary backlash against the individual, ad-hoc mercenaries, commonly known as les affreux (“the dreaded ones”), who threatened the stability of many mineral-rich, post-Colonial African regimes.19 Indeed, during the 1960s and 70s, the governments of Zaire, Nigeria, Sudan, Guinea, Angola, Benin, the Comoro Islands, and the Seychelles were all seriously threatened by such mercenaries who usually hailed from these countries’ previous colonial occupiers.20 It is largely because of the abuses committed by these mercenaries and the significant threat they posed to post-Colonial independence that an international consensus developed condemning mercenarism.21
http://www.bc.edu/schools/law/lawreviews/meta-elements/journals/bciclr/28_1/07_TXT.htm
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