Ugandans Serve as Private Mercenaries in Iraq

Corporate globalization gone haywire

UGANDA/IRAQ: Why 10,000 Ugandans are eagerly serving in Iraq

by Max Delany, Christian Science Monitor
March 6th, 2009

Under a relentless equatorial sun and the gaze of her Zimbabwean instructor, Juliet Kituye quickly reassembles her AK-47. Next to her, a young man in a ripped red T-shirt discharges imaginary rounds at an invisible target.

On a disused soccer pitch in the suburbs of the Ugandan capital, Kampala, 300 hopefuls are being put through rudimentary firearms training. Many of the recruits are raw and their drills occasionally lurch towards slapstick. One trainee lets the magazine slip out of his automatic rifle and onto the red earth, someone else about turns right instead of left. All of them share the same dream, however: going to Iraq.

As President Barack Obama announces plans to withdraw US troops from Iraq, thousands of young Ugandans are increasingly desperate to be sent to the war-torn country. Already, the Ugandan government says there are more than 10,000 men and women from this poverty-stricken East African nation working as private security guards in Iraq. Hired out to multibillion-dollar companies for hundreds of dollars a month, they risk their lives seeking fortunes protecting US Army bases, airports, and oil firms.

The war in Iraq is the most privatized conflict in history. Since the invasion in 2003, the US Department of Defense has doled out contracts worth an estimated $100 billion to private firms. Covering a vast range of services from catering to dry cleaning to security, one in every five dollars the US spends in Iraq ends up in the pockets of the contractors, according to a report by the Congressional Budget Office. Increasingly these jobs have been outsourced to developing countries.

It is clear why the US contractors came to Uganda. As an impoverished former British colony, the country is awash with unemployed and English-speaking potential recruits. Its pliant government was an early member of President Bush's "coalition of the willing," and with a lingering 20-year insurgency, it also has a glut of experienced army veterans, who made up the initial contingent of Ugandans in Iraq.

More important, hiring Ugandans is cheap. Since the first Ugandans were sent to Iraq in late 2005, competition from other developing countries in Africa and the Indian subcontinent has seen the government cut the minimum wage from $1,300 to $600 a month. That compares with the $15,000 that one industry insider estimated an American guard could make each month. Nevertheless, competition is fierce, and for those Ugandans who land a job, Iraq can prove a bonanza.

Paul Mugabe is back in Uganda for a month. For the past year, the sinewy, nervous young man has been guarding the American Camp Diamondback at the airport in the northern Iraqi town of Mosul, and soon he will be heading to Baghdad.

"It's not like Uganda. You sweat and sweat and sweat," says Mr. Mugabe, a former soldier in the Ugandan Army. "It is the most dangerous place in the world. It's even worse than Congo."

With the money he's earned during those 12 months, back in his village Mugabe has built himself two houses, bought a bar, and increased the herd of cows his father left him to 30.

"You should see the size of my banana plantation," he smiles. When he returns from another year in Iraq, he should have saved enough money to cover a wedding and the traditional bride price needed to find a pretty wife, he says.

But despite his nascent business empire and hopes of love, the fact that he is putting his life on the line to help US companies make massive profits is not lost on him. "If I am earning $600 a month and these companies are making billions, it is not fair," he says.

For Uganda, however, another country's war on a continent far away has proved to be lucrative. "The Iraq opportunity brings in about $90 million dollars, whereas our chief export, which is coffee, brings in around $60 or $70 million a year," says the former state minister for labor, employment, and industrial relations, Mwesigwa Rukutana, now minister of higher education. That figure is mostly made up of remittances.

But domestic criticism has been fierce, with some equating the system to human trafficking or slavery. Reports of abuse, ranging from poor conditions and changeable contracts to sexual assault, have appeared in the media.

"Unlike in the past when there was the slave trade, no company comes here and recruits anyone against their wishes. It is willing worker, willing employer," Mr. Rukutana says. "If anyone thinks the conditions there are bad or that he is going to be exploited, no one is compelling him to go." Rukutana says that only one Ugandan has been killed in Iraq, while others say more have died.

If anyone understands some of the hardships of working in Iraq and the industry it's spawned, then it is Moses Matsiko. Mr. Matsiko has spent nearly four years working for a US firm in Afghanistan and Iraq. In late 2006, a convoy he was escorting through the town of Fallujah was ambushed. He was shot seven times but survived. Two American colleagues he was with were killed.

But far from shy away from the dangers of Iraq, Matsiko has embraced its opportunities. In 2007, he started his own company to train and send guards to Iraq and now has over 1,200 in the country.

"My experience in Iraq is that despite having been shot seven times, it is very great," he says. President Obama's withdrawal plans have cast a shadow of doubt over his future business plans. But that has just forced Matsiko to start looking opportunities elsewhere.

"If all goes well, then I hope to be sending people to Afghanistan in the near future," he smiles.

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Is Yemen Chewing Itself To Death?

By ANDREW LEE BUTTERS (for Time Magazine)

By 4 in the afternoon, most men walking the streets of Sana'a are high, or about to get high - not on any sort of manufactured narcotics, but on khat, a shrub whose young leaves contain a compound with effects similar to those of amphetamines. Khat is popular in many countries of the Arabian peninsula and the Horn of Africa, but in Yemen it's a full-blown national addiction. As much as 90% of men and 1 in 4 women in Yemen are estimated to chew the leaves, storing a wad in one cheek as the khat slowly breaks down into the saliva and enters the bloodstream. The newcomer to Yemen's ancient capital can't miss the spectacle of almost an entire adult population presenting cheeks bulging with cud, leaving behind green confetti of discarded leaves and branches. (Read "Can Amphetamines Help Cure Cocaine Addiction?")

For its many devotees, khat is a social lubricant on a par with coffee or alcohol in the West. Indeed, because chewing the leaf isn't forbidden by Islam, "khat is alcohol for Muslims," says Yahya Amma, the head merchant at the Agriculture Suq, one of the largest khat markets in the city. "You can chew it and still go to prayers." The leaf's energy-boosting and hunger-numbing properties help university students focus on their homework, allows underpaid laborers to work without meals and, according to local lore, offers the same help to impotent men that Westerners seek in Viagra. Evening khat ceremonies - regular salon gatherings (usually only of men) to chew and chat about matters great and small - are the country's basic form of socializing. (Read "U.N. World Drug Report.")

But khat's detractors say the leaf is destroying Yemen. At around $5 for a bag (the amount typically consumed by a single regular user in a day) it's an expensive habit in a country where about 45% of the population lives below the poverty line. (Most families spend more money on khat than on food, according to government figures.) A khat-addled public is more inclined to complacency about the failings of the government, khat ceremonies reinforce the exclusion of women from power and, as is obvious to anyone finding a government office nearly empty on a weekday morning, khat is keeping the country awake well past its bedtime.

"You sit up discussing all your problems and think you've solved everything, but in fact you haven't done anything in the last four hours, because you've just been chewing khat and all your problems actually got worse," says Adel al-Shujaa, a professor of political science at Sana'a University and the head of the Yemen Without Khat Association. Plus, he says, "all the decisions you've made are bad because you've made them while on khat."

But the worst thing about khat may be that it is sucking Yemen dry.

The plant thrives in the high hill country outside Sana'a, where nearly every patch of irrigated land is covered in khat. Unlike coffee, which Yemenis claim was first cultivated here, khat is easy to grow and harvest. And though cultivating and dealing the leaf doesn't generate the kind of instant wealth associated with growing poppies in Afghanistan or coca in Colombia, it certainly provides a steadier income than growing vegetables does - that's why nearly all of the country's arable land is devoted to khat. And khat needs a lot of water, which is scarce in Yemen.

Khat fields are typically flooded twice a month, consuming about 30% of the country's water - most of which is pumped from underground aquifers filled thousands of years ago, and replenished only very slowly by the occasional rainfall that seeps through the layers of soil and rock. A recent explosion of khat cultivation has drawn water levels down to the point where they are no longer being replenished. The option of pumping desalinated water over long pipelines from coastal plants is too expensive for such a poor country. Yemen is in real danger of becoming the world's first country to run out of water.

"I tell UNHCR that they should start buying tents [for the communities that would be forced to move in search of drinking water]," says Michael Klingler, a hydrologist and the local director of GTZ, the German government's technical-assistance team, which is advising Yemen on water-management issues.

A massive drought - accelerated by khat cultivation - and the resultant population displacement could have a devastating impact in one of the most fragile countries in the Middle East. A separatist insurgency in the south is threatening to break the country apart, while pirates from Somalia are menacing the coast. Al-Qaeda, meanwhile, has long seen the lawless tribal lands in the northern mountains as a potential sanctuary.

Quitting khat would double the amount of household water available, says Klingler, but that may only slow the onset of crisis. The hydrologist argues that Yemen needs to revert to consuming only as much water as it collects from rains - and to import most of its food from abroad.

Despite the danger, Yemen isn't about to go cold turkey anytime soon. Not only are most of the country's leaders landowners deeply involved in khat production, the leaf may be one of the few things still holding Yemen together. Says Ashraf Al-Eryani, one of GTZ's local program officers, "Khat plays a big role in keeping people calm, and keeping them off the streets. But it's also delaying change. It's hard to convince people to act now."

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