Mercenaries: Scourge of the Developing World (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780312222031)

Mercenaries have been employed as auxiliaries since early times, but in the post-1945 world they have operated, almost exclusively, in weak Third World countries. From Columbia to the Congo, Angola to Papua New Guinea, Cambodia to Nicaragua, they have appeared: training the drug cartel armies, assisting rebellions or civil wars, acting as the agents of the major powers. In the Congo crisis (1960-1965) they earned an especially unsavory reputation for greed, brutality and racism; it is a reputation that has stuck to the mercenary and on the whole justly. During the 1990s a new phenomenon has emerged in the form of the mercenary corporations such as Executive Outcomes or Sandline. These corporations offer a range of military expertise and weaponry, have the covert support of governments in the countries from which they come and are rapidly becoming a power to themselves, ultimately far more dangerous than the individual freebooters of the past.

Author: Guy Arnold
ISBN-10: 0312222033
ISBN-13: 9780312222031
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Language: English
Published: 11/25/1999
Pages: 198
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 0.95lbs
Size: 9.42h x 6.20w x 0.77d