(Bloomberg) -- Colombia’s president called last week for hundreds of mercenaries from the South American country fighting in Sudan to return home, a sign of how private military contractors have proliferated across Africa to lead the fight against armies, rebel groups and Islamist insurgents.
Popular disillusionment with long-running United Nations missions that have in many cases presided over worsening insecurity has led to tens of thousands of peacekeepers leaving in recent years. At the same time, the preference of newly installed military juntas for security partners that don’t scrutinize their democratic bonafides or human-rights records has spawned a slew of mercenary contracts, with fighters from Russia, Turkey, France and elsewhere involved in conflicts across Africa.
“Mercenarism should be banned in Colombia,” President Gustavo Petro said on X on Thursday, citing a report by Colombian news outlet La Silla Vacia that hundreds of Colombians had been duped into fighting in Sudan by a United Arab Emirates-based private security company. “I asked the Foreign Ministry to look for ways in Africa for the return of our deceived young people.”
Thousands Killed
Sudan’s civil war has raged for 19 months, leaving tens of thousands of people dead and 11 million more displaced. UN investigators have accused the UAE of backing the Rapid Support Forces militia that is fighting the army — charges that the UAE has long denied.
“The UAE strongly refutes any media allegation regarding the involvement of the country in the war in Sudan,” the UAE’s Foreign Ministry said in response to an emailed request for comment.
Last week, social media videos circulated purporting to show Sudanese soldiers detaining mercenaries with Colombian passports fighting alongside the RSF.
That came weeks after a Turkish defense company posted footage of its staff training an elite military unit in Mali, where Russia’s Kremlin-linked Wagner Group is struggling to confront multiple Islamist insurgencies.
Sign up here for the twice-weekly Next Africa newsletter
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, contractors from France and Romania have filled a void left by departing UN peacekeepers. Contractors from US-based Bancroft Global Development train Somalia’s army in the fight against al-Shabaab militants. The Kremlin-linked Africa Corps’ fighters are deployed to Burkina Faso.
“We keep the UN for humanitarian reasons so they can help fund elections and humanitarian responses,” said Fidèle Gouandjika, an adviser to the president of the Central African Republic, which hired the Wagner Group in 2018 to help fight rebels. “But for the military part, we have chosen mercenaries. We pay them and if we pay them they have to do the job we want them to do.”
Troop Withdrawals
This year UN and the African Union are reducing their peacekeeping missions in eastern Congo and Somalia. A 12,000-strong UN force in Mali left last year along with thousands of French troops that have withdrawn from across the Sahel region. Somalia has requested a new mission, but with fewer soldiers and a goal to hand over security responsibilities to the state.
The number of UN troops in Africa will fall to 35,000 by the end of 2024, down from 88,000 a decade ago, according to UN data.
“It’s a bloated infrastructure,” Caleb Weiss, a research analyst at the Long War Journal, a project that analyzes the global war on terror, said of UN peacekeeping forces. “It’s not necessarily bad news. Some of these peacekeeping missions are not really doing much.”
But the mercenaries that have been brought in to replace them and Western forces are also not improving the situation — and in many cases are making things worse. Deaths in the Sahel region have surged in the years since the juntas that seized power in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger kicked out French troops and brought in Russian fighters.
Civilian fatalities from conflict in the Sahel hit 3,064 in the first six months of 2024, compared with 2,520 in the whole of 2023 when the last French forces left the region, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project.
--With assistance from Katarina Höije.
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.
