http://www.ipsnews.net/print.asp?idnews=50396

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.”