Erik Prince, the founder of the international security giant Blackwater Worldwide, now named Xe, has been linked to efforts by a controversial South African mercenary firm to insert itself into Somalia’s bloody civil war.
Saracen International, the mercenary outfit at issue, is based in South Africa, with corporate offshoots in Uganda and other countries. The company was formed with the remnants of Executive Outcomes, a private mercenary firm composed largely of former South African special operations troops who worked throughout Africa in the 1990s.
Saracen makes little public about its operations and personnel, but it appears to be run by Lafras Luitingh, a former officer in South Africa’s Civil Cooperation Bureau, an apartheid-era internal security force notorious for killing opponents of the government.
American officials have said little about Saracen since news reports about the company’s planned operations in Somalia emerged last month. Philip J. Crowley, a State Department spokesman, said in December that the American government was “concerned about the lack of transparency” of Saracen’s financing and plans.
For now, the Obama administration remains committed to bolstering Somalia’s government with about 8,000 peacekeeping troops from Burundi and Uganda operating under a United Nations banner.
Revelations regarding Erik Prince’s involvement comes on the heels of his sale off of interest in Blackwater, the company he built into a behemoth with billions of dollars in American government contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and work that mired him in lawsuits and investigations amid reports of reckless behavior by his operatives, including causing the deaths of civilians in Iraq. His efforts to wade into the chaos of Somalia appear to be Mr. Prince’s latest endeavour to remain at the centre of a campaign against Islamic radicalism in some of the world’s most war-ravaged corners. Prince moved to the United Arab Emirates late last year.
In Somalia
With its barely functional government and a fierce hostility to foreign armies since the hasty American withdrawal from Mogadishu in the early 1990s, Somalia is a country where Western militaries have long feared to tread. The Somali government has been cornered in a small patch of Mogadishu by the Shabab, a Somali militant group with ties to Al Qaeda.
This, along with the growing menace of piracy off Somalia’s shores, has created an opportunity for private security companies like the South African firm Saracen International to fill the security vacuum created by years of civil war. It is another illustration of how private security firms are playing a bigger role in wars around the world, with some governments seeing them as a way to supplement overtaxed armies, while others complain that they are unaccountable.