Africa-Press – Lesotho. Four news items have caught my attention in the last couple of days. The first was about the rebellion by ‘soldiers’ of the Wagner Group, the Russian mercenary contractor fighting the war in Ukraine, alongside Russian troops. The Wagner chief, seen as an ally of President Vladimir Putin, was obviously working for money.
While there might be some truth in reports about his frustration with delayed supply of military hardware and demand for ousting of the Defence Minister, the fact remains that, unlike the state forces, this man was running a business enterprise which profits from war.
He hired convicted criminals and renegade soldiers to create a fighting machine which sold its services for a price. The corollary was that it could switch loyalties for better returns.
Did it? So far we don’t know but a deal was apparently struck to hold him up in Belarus, while the fighting men were disarmed. Wagner fighters in the center of Rostov-on-Don, Russia, last Saturday. Pic – Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Why was the Wagner Group so much in the news while we got to hear so little about the Blackwater, Halliburton, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Northbridge and many other similar groups which fought dirty wars, or provided logistics for dirty wars, in many other countries being destroyed by long-drawn wars? Yes, if these companies are profiting from war they will perpetuate the strife for as long as they can.
They will do everything, contrived intelligence et al, to keep the profit-making wars go on. Their fighters are contract workers, who need to keep fighting to keep their jobs.
The Russian fiasco, which forced the state to negotiate with criminals, has shown up that mercenary soldiers cannot replace a trained army of disciplined men and women fighting for their country, willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for the security of their motherland.
If we accept that outsourcing of wars to contractors is good state policy, we might as well say goodbye to negotiations and peaceful coexistence of nations.
Who starts many of these wars is another matter. The citizens obviously have no say in these decisions, whether it is in the world’s oldest democracy or a dictatorial regime.
The second news was about British PM Rishi Sunak’s former close ally and Deputy PM, Dominic Raab, calling on the PM to “up the government’s game to reap the full dividends of a closer partnership with India”. Raab, unabashedly, spoke of Sunak’s Indian roots and heritage, as an advantage which should be leveraged to the UK’s gain.
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