The recent deaths of four Nepalese ex-Gurkha soldiers during a mortar attack in Baghdad's Green Zone has once again highlighted the role of mercenary armies in Iraq. The soldiers were employed by a UK-based private company, Global Risk Strategies, which claims that it is "Working together with the US Government, UN and key commercial clients" in Iraq.
There are tens of thousands of Nepalese people in Hong Kong, and many of them are ex-Gurkhas and their families. This latest news is sure to be a shock to many over here, but could also be used to highlight the "predatory role", as a friend called it, of private security and mercenary companies in their community. Indeed, Global Risk Strategies advertises Hong Kong as an area of operation on its website (though there is no further information on its activities here).
A few days ago, I posted something about a similar Hong Kong-based company, Loki Risk Management, that had advertised for "high risk bodyguard positions in Iraq and Afghanistan".
The company has now removed the section of its website dealing with "Iraq and Afganistan [sic]", and there is no mention of assignments in those countries. I don't really know what this implies. Was there a business decision to not do business in Iraq and Afghanistan anymore? A business decision to not openly advertise their sending of bodyguards to Iraq and Afghanistan anymore? A reflection of the fact that they were never sending bodyguards to Iraq and Afghanistan in the first place and were only riding on the marketing value of these places as brandnames in the global mercenary industry?
Anything I say now would be largely speculation, of course, so the only thing to do is some more research and investigation on this issue.
Incidentally, I happened to have the original webpage saved on my computer, so you can click on the link to see what was being advertised...
The position of Nepalese people as cheaper mercenaries than their Western counterparts in a sense brings up a feature about occupied Iraq that is not discussed too often: the role of a migrant labor force made up of working-class people from countries in Asia and other parts of the global South that responsible for carrying out a lot of the work being done there.
Though usually attracted to Iraq because of the higher wages relative to other jobs they could get as migrant workers, their dreams are often unrealized, and many end up coming home empty handed. In any case these people are still paid considerably less than US or European workers would be, and are often given the most dangerous tasks to perform. The Washington Post, for example, reported earlier this year on the "underclass of workers" being created in Iraq.
Cases of working-class migrants being targeted by insurgents have made the papers here in Asia, both famously and infamously. The kidnapping of Filipino migrant Angelo de la Cruz, for example, prompted a massive grassroots movement in the Philippines that succeeded in pressuring President Arroyo's government into withdrawing the country's troops from Iraq. But the inexplicable and unannounced killings of 12 Nepalese migrants shocked the country and prompted rioting and attacks on mosques in Kathmandu.
Of course, it is not just the insurgents in Iraq that are a danger to migrants, as the very nature and method of their employment-- organized by institutions such as the US military, multinational corporations, and Asian governments-- is dangerous, leaving them vulnerable and subject to exploitation and abuse. The stories of Indian migrant workers trafficked by corporations and employment agencies, for example, made the international media earlier this year. Many of the cases of such outright exploitation were directly linked to such US corporations as the Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg Brown and Root:
For an $1,800 fee, the recruiter promised to get the two young south Indian men jobs as butchers on a military base in Kuwait for two years, they said. With salaries of $385 a month, a small fortune by Indian standards, they would join more than three million Indians already working in the Persian Gulf and enriching their families back home.
They mortgaged a relative's house and land, paid the fee and flew to Kuwait in August with two of their friends. What they say they encountered when they got there landed on the front pages of Indian newspapers this week, with one headline declaring "Indians Abused in Iraq" in "U.S. Slave Camps."
Within days, the brothers said, they and their friends found themselves on an American military base in northern Iraq working for a Saudi subcontractor of Kellogg, Brown & Root, or KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton. They said their supervisor, who had taken their passports in Kuwait, told them they were obligated to work on the base for six months and could not leave.
Working alongside 200 other laborers, from India, the Philippines and Sri Lanka, they first cleaned American latrines and then washed American dishes, the brothers said. Their pay was roughly $150 a month, they said, less than half of what the recruiter had promised.
"We were in hell," said Shahjahan, who returned here with his brother last week. "I told my wife over the phone, `If God wills us, we will meet again.' "
In a ZNet Commentary from earlier this year, Vijay Prashad wrote about the "Abu Ghraib jobs" given to working-class migrants from Asia:
An article in India Abroad newspaper by George Iype (July 16) offers us the testimony of a man from Kerala, Peter Thomas, who worked in Iraq and then returned home empty-handed after six months. Recruited in his home-town to go do catering work in Jordan, Thomas was taken by his sub-contractor against his will to work in the laundry section of a US camp in the so-called Sunni Triangle of Iraq.
Indeed, like the inmates at Abu Ghraib, Asian migrants seem to be regarded as less than human by the US military, and many examples of direct physical and psychological abuse of migrant workers by US soldiers in Iraq have been reported:
Mr. Antony said his Government had taken up the issue of ill-treatment of Indian workers, including Keralites, in the American army camp in Iraq with the Centre. Serious violations of human rights of the workers had occurred. The details had been sent to the Prime Minister, A. B. Vajpayee.
Migrant support organizations and NGOs often use the term "3-D" to jobs carried out by migrant workers: "dirty", "dangerous", "disdainful". As for the Asian migrants in Iraq themselves, it seems just one 'D' would suffice- 'disposable'.
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