Navigating Sovereignty: The UN versus private military companies

On a recent research trip to a war-torn African state I was kindly invited to stay at the house of a senior UN official. The large house was not owned by the UN, but privately rented by the official, although certain features of the house were designed to comply with UN regulations for foreign staff. Metal shutters were fitted to all the windows and a heavy-duty security door separated the ground and first floors, all of which had to remain locked at night. The third notable feature was the 24 hour provision of security guards. In fitting with the rules governing UN security guards all over the world, the guards were unarmed. This is as true of UN headquarters in New York as of any other UN building.

Some would say that this is due to the necessity of the UN remaining neutral, but anyone with a basic understanding of the UN's role in conflicts knows that the UN does not always seek to remain neutral. For me, there is one very clear reason why UN security guards, as with any other staff directly employed by the UN, are unarmed. Arming such staff would constitute a global UN armed force. The consequences of this would be the same as those which prevented the creation of UN standing forces when they were called for from certain quarters in the 1990s. Despite the huge body of international law, and the expanding selection of regional organisations, which now exist, sovereignty still clings to its status as the primary principal of the international system. The existence of an officially recognised and widely supported armed force that was not directly commanded by the government (be it civilian or military) of a sovereign state would be criticised as undermining this primacy.

There is one major problem with this reasoning against arming the UN. One of the states which could be safely expected to oppose arming staff answerable only to the UN, the United States, openly allows and supports the creation of heavily armed forces, operating internationally, which are governed only by their private owners. Private military companies are big business in modern conflict. In researching a recent book about one such company, the US-based Blackwater, writer Jeremy Scahill discovered that publicly available figures do not exist to indicate how much of the US military budget goes on services provided by private contractors, but that some members of congress estimate it to be around 40%, with over 1000 PMC operatives estimated to have died in Iraq, although, again, no official figures are kept. More worryingly, continuing congressional investigations into these companies have discovered that those operating in Iraq are subject to neither Iraqi law, US military law nor US domestic law. Further, as Americans they are protected by the policy of the US government, spanning multiple administrations, to exempt its citizens from international law. In short, they are answerable to nobody except themselves while taking part in operations that involve regular heavy combat both alongside US forces and independently.

So here is the world we find ourselves in; the UN, an organisation made up of 192 sovereign states, is (rightly or wrongly) consistently denied the opportunity to build armed forces of any sort, no matter how small, for the purposes of protecting its staff and conducting peace support operations, while private companies are allowed to build up heavily armed forces of mercenaries, subject to no existing laws, in order to increase their profits.