Few in that South Pacific. Nor could one blame bystanders, halfway across the. Yopal in the Andean foothills of. Colombia, for overlooking two black boxes carried by another. Brits. Like their colleagues in PNG, these men were not your average. A blood or conflict diamond is one whose sale has financed war or conflict. Diamonds mined in Africa are prone to being traded in exchange for arms which are used in civil wars, coups and cruel. From Internet Movie Firearms Database - Guns in Movies, TV and Video Games. Diamond Dogs was a private military company led by Venom Snake around the 1980s. It was created as a result of the devastation of the Militaires Sans Fronti. Like piracy, the mercenary ethos resonates with idealized adventure, mystery, and danger, and appears frequently in popular culture. Many are called adventurers, filibusters, soldiers of fortune, gunslingers, gunrunners, ronin. The Role of Private & Mercenary Armies in International Conflict. Private Military Companies are subject to even fewer restraints than traditional mercenaries are, given that their services are rarely. Directed by Guy Green. With Charlton Heston, Yvette Mimieux, George Chakiris, France Nuyen. Rich Hawaiian pineapple grower and US Senatorial candidate Richard Howland tries to control everything and everyone around him. All were former members of the Special. Air Services (SAS), an elite British fighting force. Several had. participated in covert assassination operations against the Irish. Republican Army (IRA) in the 1. These men are part of a growing number of slick new corporate. In unholy. alliance, they go into battle for new bosses: the mineral industries. Elizabeth Rubin, a contributing editor of Harper's. Behind it is the. Sat phones instead of. Jeeps and parasols. The advent of new technologies such. The collapse of the Soviet empire and the signing. Angola that were previously off- limits to Western multinationals. They are. eager to provide cash and political risk insurance for private. Tim Spicer, one of the two former SAS men in the South Pacific. Peninsula Hotel. Less than a month later, dressed. Spicer was led into a Papua New Guinea court. His mission had been to defeat. When news of Spicer's contract became public. The rioting closed shops, banks and schools and sealed. The two unnamed former SAS officers in Colombia fared better. All three mercenaries. BP to help train the Colombian police- notorious. Dele- B oil rig. The. According to. a recently surfaced report commissioned by the Colombian government. BP collaborated with local soldiers involved in kidnappings, torture. The unpublished document alleges that the oil company. Colombian military, which then arrested or kidnapped demonstrators. SAS officer Anthony Buckingham, the second man at. Peninsula Hotel meeting in February. Buckingham is one of. Plaza 1. 07, 5. 35 King's Road in the up- market south London. Chelsea. The Colombian deal was assigned to another security firm. Defense Systems Limited (DSL), a slightly more upscale operation. Buckingham Palace. DSL has a contract. British Petroleum's security division, which in turn is run. Mark Heathcote, a former Bntish. Tony Ling, a former SAS commander. Heathcote. Ling, and Nixon all worked undercover in Northern Ireland, where. SAS specialized in assassinating Irish Republican Army guerrillas. Today, men like these provide . Many of these recruits are veterans of South. Africa's Battalion and Civil Cooperation Bureau, which were the. Recolonization. There is little evidence (other than slick public relations. In the 1. 95. 0s, for example, Harry Oppenheimer. South African chair of De Beers, defeated his competitors. Sierra Leone by enlisting Sir Percy Sillitoe, one of Bntain's. World War Il. Sillitoe hired. The mercenaries laid. De. Beers buyers. Military action, private or public, to support mineral extraction. Americas. From the devastation of. Inca in Peru by Pizarro in his search for gold in the 1. US Army massacres of the Sioux in South Dakota in the 1. Navajo from Arizona to New Mexico at the same time; to the. Peruvian military bombed the Matses indigenous. Amazon on behalf of Mobil, the pattern remains. Jeff Moag, from the Washington- based National Secunty. News Service, says that the financing of the mercenaries by the. He argues that conventional nation- states are disappearing. But EO's most famous. Sierra Leone in May 1. Sierra Rutile, an. Ohio- based titanium company, and Branch Energy, one of Buckingham's. The EO mercenaries arrived in Sierra Leone better equipped. Africa, with Russian helicopter gunships. Boeing 7. 27s to transport troops. Andover casualty- evacuation aircraft, and fuel- air. Used with devastating results by the US in the Gulf. War, fuel- air explosives- one step below nuclear weapons in power. The pilots, according to Martha Carey, an American who worked. Doctors Without Borders, . And indeed. the operation left EO with a lucrative security contract financed. The G. O. D. s of Greed: Gold, Oil, and Diamonds. Violent scenes like the ones that horrified Carey accompany. But to understand the forces. The first man, a quiet, urbane, Cambridge graduate, left Britain. Stanford in the late 1. John Browne grew. Iran and other countries where his father worked for BP. Over the last. two decades, Browne slowly but surely worked his way up in BP. Alaska and then the North Sea. In 1. 98. 9, he became. BP, steering the company to successful. Caspian Sea. The second, Robert Friedland, a charismatic young student. Chicago, got an early start in dubious trafficking at Bowdoin. College in Maine in the late 1. LSD smuggling. business out of a college dormitory until he was busted by local. He later moved to a hippie commune in Oregon. But. I grokked it immediately- Gold! Two decades. later, another of Friedland's mines in Colorado was the site of. Alamosa river. The third man was a Mauritian- born diamond buyer, Jean- Raymond. Boulle, who was working for De Beers, the South African multinational. Sierra Leone and the Congo at the end of the 1. The Congo. which had just been renamed Zaire (and had since taken the name. Democratic Republic of Congo), was being run by the iron hand. Mobutu Sese Seko. The US- backed dictator had taken over the. South African mercenaries. CIA. While Browne climbed the corporate ladder, the other two men. Friedland spent time in India, Switzerland. Canada, Singapore, and finally Australia, while Boulle lived in. Belgium, Texas, Minnesota, Arkansas, Belize and eventually Monaco. In Indonesia, he established joint ventures. Indonesian dictator Suharto; in Burma, he linked. Reggie Tun Maung- the vice president of his holding companies- who. Maung Maung Khin. China. Friedland donated a tenth of the assets of his joint venture to. Deng Pufang, the son of. Deng Xiaoping, the late Chinese premier.'For his part, Boulle also courted power. During his stay in. Arkansas, when he was beginning to explore in the Crater of Diamonds. State Park, he met with the governor. Clinton explaining to him that this could be important. They struck it. big time in January 1. Labrador. A year and a. Friedland and Boulle sold this property- which turned. Inco, the world's largest. Canadian. In the next 1. Meanwhile, in April 1. Browne was. appointed chief executive of British Petroleum under chairman. Peter Sutherland, the former Irish head of the World Trade Organization. As they gained wealth, the three mineral barons had more to. At about the same time, they all started hiring men like. Buckingham, Spicer, and Nixon to put down local protests that. On April 3. 0, 1. BP finalized a deal with DSL to dispatch. Colombia to help the local police . The. West African facility, a major source of titanium dioxide, had. January 1. 99. 5. The company used this. World Bank. the London- based Commonwealth Development Corporation, and two. US federal agencies- the Overseas Private Investment Corporation. Export- lmport Bank- to pay EO to quell the troubles. The other major backer of EO in Sierra Leone was Branch Energy. Anthony Buckingham. Already an old Africa hand, the. Bnt had spent the previous ten years helping the Canadian company. Ranger, run oil exploration operations in Angola. Michael Grunberg, Buckingham's financial adviser, introduced. Friedland just before Friedland began to withdraw. Boulle. In September 1. Buckingham and Friedland announced their. Diamond. Works. That collaboration set the stage for the. Angola. in Southern Africa and Sierra Leone in West Africa, the Venezuelan. Amazon and Southern China. Some of the stories of the many military campaigns currently. There are at. least a few dozen others in the mineral industries, men like . No less a luminary than Kofi Annan. United Nations secretary general, has consulted DSL on how. Zaire and Rwanda. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Pentagons spy. Tony Spicer and other EO figures to a major conference. June 2. 4. Many activists, however, have taken an opposite stance. In. June, the London- based Africa Research and Information Bureau. ARIB) launched a campaign against new mercenary operations in. Angola, Sierra Leone and Sudan. We must get rid of the mercenaries. Africa. Indeed. if history is any thing to go by, inviting private armies into. Africa will only serve the interests of those who hire them: the. Other activists say that those concerned by cultural, economic. Danny Kennedy, an activist. Berkeley- based environmental and human rights group. Project Underground, says: . Only by building a movement of affected communities. Here in the United States. Meanwhile, ivory tower economists argue about. When both are armed to the. Angola. In the 1. Portuguese colony in Southern Africa. Portuguese master. The. war between the Cuban/Soviet- backed MPLA and the US/South Africa- backed. UNITA and FNLA was fueled by covert financial assistance and continued. By the time the US finally recognized. Angolan government in 1. In September 1. 99. Angolan government hired. EO for an initial contract of $4. Branch Energy put up. Lunda. Norte and the coastal oil fields of Soyo where Heritage Oil and. Gas has concessions. Heritage, like Branch Energy, is controlled. Buckingham. The EO mercenaries launched a series of attacks. UNITA rebels in the north eastern part of the country. Branch Energy and EO, however, immediately. EO simply set up new shell companies. Angolan ministry of defense. The company put in additional strategic. Johannesburg telephone exchange. Meanwhile, the Upper Cuango diamond concession in UNITA- held. Dutch- based. International Defense and Security (IDAS), another mercenary army. Jean Raymond Boulle. The government has also begun talks with UNITA to convince. Angolan diamond trade is estimated to be worth $1 billion a year). Elisabeth Rasmusson. United Nations Department of Humanitarian Assistance, warns. Without Cuban and Soviet military support- and with the US. Angola defeat an outlawed Cold War relic such as UNITA? Developing. countries are faced with a dilemma. A conventional standing army. On the other. hand, resorting to mercenary armies in time of crisis risks encountering. The increasing. cost of arms expenditures and the permanence of armies for hire.
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