Category Archives: Mercenaries

Arab Politics, Arab Revolutions, Arabian Peninsula, Britain, Corruption, Mercenaries, Weapons deals

Gulf Arms Race: the Best Armed Foreign Mercenaries, it is the Commission, Stupid!………

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      BFF

“At the Defence Security and Equipment International arms fair in London’s Excel Centre, there is no shortage of options for dishing out bad days, weeks, months and whole lifetimes. The Defence Secretary, Liam Fox, addressed the delegates yesterday morning, extending a warm welcome to the various invitees, among them military procurement officers from Angola, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. The 65 national delegations asked to buy weapons in London include 14 regimes defined as “authoritarian” by human rights groups, who have highlighted the use of British arms in suppressing opposition movements in the Middle East……….. Saudi Arabia is by far the biggest buyer of British weapons and also the largest importer of arms globally. Saudi contracts earned the UK about £300m last year, according to arms trade analysts the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute……………”

So, all this means that the citizen of the UAE and Saudi Arabia is the best armed citizen anywhere in the whole wide world. Funny, they don’t look it: I suppose I should correct and say that the UAE foreign mercenary is the best armed foreign mercenary anywhere in the world.
According to SIPRI, it now looks like Saudi Arabia is the biggest arms importer in the world. The United Arab Emirates was the biggest Arab arms importer and the second largest arms importer in the world for several years, but no more. The UAE has less than one million citizens (plus a few million temporary foreign laborers) while Saudi Arabia probably has some 15 million citizens (plus millions of temporary foreign laborers). Now the potentates in Abu Dhabi will try harder to surpass the potentates in Riyadh. They certainly can afford it more than Riyadh can. That also means that some Saudi prince(s) will collect billions in commissions (called bribes in impolite and crude company, but I won’t stoop to that), much more than their Emirati (Abu Dhabi) potentates who will collect less in arms commissions (also called bribes in impolite and crude company, but I won’t stoop to that either).
Now we will have a race: the UAE potentates will seek to regain their position in weapons imports and, not incidentally, in the size of commissions their potentates receive. These fat bribes commissions are paid by the oh-so-generous Western arms exporters, who will then add the cost to the export price. Almost like money laundering: well, it is a way to launder the public money of these Gulf states back to the potentates with the help of the exporting companies. Remember the British BAE Systems and the scandal of the US $2 billion weapons deal bribe to Prince Bandar Bin Sultan (allegedly)? That was the investigation by the Serious Frauds office (SFO) that Tony Blair killed. It was called the al-Yamama deal. A lot of laundering there, more than the proverbial but real Chinese laundry in my neighborhood.

Maybe there are good honest reasons for amassing and storing all these weapons in desert warehouses. Maybe it is the fear of the scowling Iranian mullahs across the Gulf, maybe it is some mistrust of the resolve of the Western allies whose fleets fill my Gulf. In at least two cases it is the fear of the people, which explains the foreign mercenaries. Yet somehow I can’t shake off this nagging feeling that “It is the commissions, stupid!”
Cheers
mhg


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Arab Counterrevoltion, Arab Politics, Culture, Mercenaries, UAE, Weapons deals, WTF

UAE: Politics, Devilish Violent Crimes, Generals and Potentates with Missiles……..

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      BFF

The following were recent headlines of the “Courts” page of a daily newspaper in the United Arab Emirates:


  • “Man says devil made him molest girl”
  • “
    Boys accused of raping man”

  • “Fake officer kidnapped, raped woman, court told”

  • “Army clerk forged signature of Chief of Armed Forces, court told”

  • “Student claims cousin raped her”

  • “Former footballer appeals against conviction in Dh5.5m citizenship scam”  

  • “Man threatened to drink woman’s blood, court told. She says he was trying to force his way into her apartment”

  • “Woman charged with illicit sex says partner was husband”

These are all ‘exotic’ crimes by any standard I can think of. This is what happens when there are no real politics to keep them busy, as in the UAE. The next most exciting thing apparently is violent sex and murder and robbery. Which reminds me: there is even less politics in Saudi Arabia, and I wonder what their police reports are like.

As for that army clerk who forged a general’s signature: I hope he has no access to all those fancy missiles the Abu Dhabi has been buying from around the world. The UAE is the second largest importer of weapons in the whole wide world and aims to be the first largest importer of weapons in the whole wide world. The import-deprived Iranian IRGC generals probably drool every time they read about all these advanced Western goodies landing in the warehouses of Abu Dhabi (I assume the mullahs also drool, just like all clergy including the Catholics). Now we don’t want some dipshit army clerk to start a missile war across the Gulf, do we? Only dipshit generals and potentates should be able to start a missile war.
Cheers
mhg


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Apartheid, Arab Counterrevoltion, Arab Revolutions, Bahrain, ethnic cleansing, Gulf states, Human Right, Mercenaries, Saudi Arabia

The Battle of Bahrain, the Battle of Algiers…………

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      BFF

“It’s become a nightly duel in Bahrain: Security forces and anti-government protesters waging hit-and-run clashes in one of the simmering conflicts of the Arab Spring. So far, the skirmishes have failed to gel into another serious challenge to the Gulf nation’s Western-backed monarchy after crushing a reform rebellion months ago. But there are sudden signs that Shiite-led demonstrators could be poised to raise the stakes again on the strategic island, which is home to the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet. Hundreds of demonstrators Wednesday made their boldest attempt in months to reclaim control of a central square in the capital Manama, which was the symbolic hub of the protest movement after it began in February. Riot police used buses to block roads and flooded streets with tear gas to drive back the marchers before dawn. Hours later, mourners gathered in a Shiite village in another part of Bahrain for a 14-year-old boy they claim was killed by security forces. Clashes flared until early Thursday across the oil hub area of Sitra before the boy’s burial. “Down with the regime,” chanted some of hundreds of people…………Bahrain remains the outlier of the Arab revolts. Its Sunni rulers have managed to hold their ground – and even tighten their grip with military help from neighboring Saudi Arabia……….”

It is not exactly a Battle of Algiers, mainly because the violence is decidedly one-sided. But it is as persistent as the struggle of Algeria, understandably so given that the same principles of equality and justice and freedom are at stake. And it is bloody, involves attacks on civilians and their neighborhoods, and midnight raids, and arrests, and torture, and threats of, and actual, assault on men and women. And so it continues, until the system of Apartheid is dismantled, the original constitution is restored, the foreign mercenaries and occupation forces sent packing. It is a tall order. A tough one for an island that is now effectively a Saudi province.

Cheers
mhg


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Arab Counterrevoltion, Arab Politics, Arab Revolutions, France, India, Mercenaries, US Foreign Policy, Yemen

Africa, the Arab World, the (New) New Colonialism………….

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      BFF

“The African strongmen are going the way of Nkrumah, and in extreme cases Gaddafi, not Nyerere. The societies they lead are marked by growing internal divisions. In this, too, they are reminiscent of Libya under Gaddafi more than Egypt under Mubarak or Tunisia under Ben Ali. Whereas the fall of Mubarak and Ben Ali directed our attention to internal social forces, the fall of Gaddafi has brought a new equation to the forefront: the connection between internal opposition and external governments. Even if those who cheer focus on the former and those who mourn are preoccupied with the latter, none can deny that the change in Tripoli would have been unlikely without a confluence of external intervention and internal revolt. The conditions making for external intervention in Africa are growing, not diminishing. The continent is today the site of a growing contention between dominant global powers and new challengers……. The contrast with Western powers, particularly the US and France, could not be sharper. The cutting edge of Western intervention is military. France’s search for opportunities for military intervention, at first in Tunisia, then Cote d’Ivoire, and then Libya, has been above board and the subject of much discussion. Of greater significance is the growth of Africom, the institutional arm of US military intervention on the African continent………………” China and India intervene in Africa in an economic and commercial capacity. They are militarily to weak (compared to Western powers) and too ‘distant’. And they are too ‘new’ to the region, as world powers and not ethnically. The West, especially the French have always intervened militarily in Africa, except for a hiatus of a couple of decades. That hiatus was only Anglo-American: the French never stopped, as French presidents continued to send expeditions to prop up their favorite dictators. The West is back in force now, from Somalia, to Libya, to Cote D’Ivoire, to other spots overtly or covertly. Is it a new age of colonialism for the “Dark Continent”?
And speaking of Western intervention: the Arab World is not exactly free of it. From Iraq to Libya to Yemen to Lebanon to Sudan to Somalia and other places, the West is engaged against a host of foes, real or perceived. Like Africa which it overlaps, the feeble and corruptly managed Arab world can’t seem to get its (shit) act together, persistently inviting outside intervention: intervention from the West, Israel, Turkey, and Iran. The whole region is like a vacuum wittingly or unwittingly begging for intervention (prostrate and legs wide open, I’d say if I were rude and crude, which I ain’t). Some of the potentates even hire foreign mercenaries from South Asia and form foreign legions of Colombians and Australians and Blackwater denizens, among others. The Arab world is supposed to have been educating at least three generations since the wave of independence in the 1940s. Yet in the past several decades the Arabs have never been less independent than they are now and arguably never less ably led.
Cheers
mhg


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Arab Counterrevoltion, Arab Revolutions, Bahrain, GCC, Mercenaries, Occupied Bahrain, Persian-American Gulf

A Gulf of Mercenaries: Arab Potentates Discover the Joys of Hired Foreign Guns……….

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      BFF
“Mercenaries from Indonesia, Malaysia and Pakistan are being recruited by officials in Bahrain to help restore security to the country, a Saudi scholar claimed. Bahrain is under increasing scrutiny for the response by the Sunni minority leadership to a Shiite uprising in the country. Doctors without Borders claimed that Bahraini security officials were using hospitals as torture chambers as part of a crackdown. Ali al-Ahmad, director of the Institute for Gulf Affairs, told Radio Australia’s Contact Asia program that the royal family was recruiting mercenaries from Asia to help with its crackdown. Ahmad said there were no Shiites in the national security forces. Given the fact that Sunnis are in the minority, he said, the country has a “need to import mercenaries” from other places. He claimed “the majority of them” are coming from Pakistan, though he said he’s seen reports of some from countries such as Somalia, Malaysia and Indonesia……..” U P I News

The hired guns and killers are pouring into the Gulf region: it is a gold rush for the dogs of war, mangy or otherwise. Bahrain has been hiring foreign mercenaries for some years: Pakistani newspapers often have advertisements for interviews with Bahrain National Guard officials (some al-Khalifa or another). The ruling Bahraini clan is now expanding the field of mercenary recruitment. They used to focus on Pakistan and a few Arab countries. Now they are expanding it to Indonesia and Malaysia, more impoverished Islamic countries that already have expressed some support for the Saudi role in Bahrain in exchange for a consideration (truly a coalition of the hired and the paid). The United Arab Emirates is already forming a large mercenary force of foreigners from as far away as Colombia, South Africa, and Australia, among other places, to keep its people from thinking rebellion. All under the leadership of Blackwater veterans. I once recommended that the ruling al-Nahayan clan of Abu Dhabi ought o consider hiring their killers and thugs from among the extremely ruthless Mexican drug cartels. I was not kidding: once you have no morals, why pretend to have limits? A hired killer is a hired killer, as the al-Khalifa of Bahrain have discovered. Meanwhile, Western media report that the al-Saud are arranging for Pakistani, Malaysian, and possibly Indonesian forces to help the regime in case of a serious uprising. If this continue I may change the name of my Gulf: from the Persian-American Gulf to the Gulf of Mercenaries and Hired Thugs.
Okay, these potentates should be ashamed of themselves for hiring foreign mercenaries to suppress their people, but they are not. Especially those in occupied Bahrain who use foreign money to buy foreign protection.
Cheers
mhg


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Arab Counterrevoltion, Arab Revolutions, Bahrain, GCC, Iraq, Mercenaries

GCC Expansion: Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, Malaysia……….

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      BFF
“Pakistan today stressed the importance of re-enforcing trade and defense relations with Bahrain, as well as in labor and work fields. The Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari held talks with the commander of the national guard in Bahrain Shaikh Mohammed Bin Issa Bin Salman Al Khalifa in which they discussed regional developments and cooperation in defense and regional matters…….…”

Pakistan is effectively a member of the Gulf Cooperation Council, GCC. The Pakistani military, retired or on active duty, have for years operated the armed forces of some Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. Pakistani military and police personnel have been important in the repression of the people of Bahrain. Bahraini officials fly regularly to Pakistan to hire more ‘security’ agents even as they deny security jobs to most Bahraini citizens. Top Saudi princes like Bandar Bin Sultan Bin al-Yamama Bin BAE Systems Bin Commission is reported to have flown to Pakistan to make deals on stationing or preparing Pakistani forces to defend the regime if and when needed. Reports also indicate the same can be said of Malaysia: its government officials recently expressed willingness to send forces to defend the regime in Bahrain.
Now on the Arab side, the GCC has sought to form alliances with the monarchies of Jordan and Morocco. The last GCC summit made a surprise announcement of welcoming membership for Jordan and Morocco. Now we have the nucleus of a new group of states: the GCC, Jordan, Morocco, Malaysia, and Pakistan. That means the rich GCC states and three or four poor relations that are far away enough (Morocco, Malaysia, Pakistan) or small enough (Jordan) to be manageable. Clearly the potentates of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and others, are looking for cheap bodies, impoverished mercenaries willing to do what it takes. The UAE is ahead of the game: the al-Nahayan are forming foreign legion of Latin Americans, Australians, disgruntled white Africans and others to keep the people at bay.
I was going to suggest that the GCC look at closer countries, like Iraq which is a Gulf country, and perhaps Yemen which is close enough ad has had deeper cultural, ethnic, and other ties (as does Iraq). Then there are Turkey and Iran, both closer than Malaysia and Pakistan and Burma or WTF. What about Egypt? Then I remembered: with none of these excluded countries can the al-Saud rule the roost. They would be dominated rather than dominate.
Cheers
mhg


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