PRIVATE SECURITY COMPANIES IN THE FIGHT AGAINST PIRACY IN ASIA

Abstract

We live in an increasingly privatised world. Today, private companies offer services for every aspect of life, including the security and military sector. It should, therefore, be far from surprising that so-called Private Security Companies (PSCs) are also employed to secure the world’s oceans. In fact, in the last ten years an increasing number of private companies offering anti-piracy services have surfaced and expanded. Despite their growing numbers, there is a number of problems and controversies surrounding the services offered and the organisation and characteristics of these companies. PRIVATE SECURITY COMPANIES The recent war in Iraq has brought to world attention the existence and involvement of private companies in wars and post-war reconstruction efforts and heightened public awareness of the nature of work conducted by the private military industry (Singer 2004b). While the outsourcing of military services is hardly a new phenomenon, the latest kind of `private actor , the PSCs, evolved only in the past fifteen years, with the number of PSCs and the variety of services they offer growing rapidly in the post-Cold War environment. Conducive to the growths of the privatised military industry was the changing nature of conflict after 1989, (Singer 2005: 50-53) the downsizing of major armies, and the employment of PSCs in Iraq and in the War against Terrorism (Isenberg 2004a). Active throughout the globe, PSCs offer services ranging from logistics support, risk analysis, training of military units, and intelligence gathering, to the protection of assets and people in conflict zones. While the employment of PSCs has been controversial, they are today employed by various governments, the UN, humanitarian NGO s and multinational corporations, but have also been known to assist rebel groups and international criminal syndicates (Singer 2003:52; Singer 2004a). Even though most PSC operations are often thought to be largely confined to Africa and the Middle East, many PSCs are active in Asia. In Southeast Asia, increasing globalisation and the intensification of the global economy have brought about many changes in the post Cold-War era, which has increased demand for services offered by PSCs. These include not only the transformation of economies and polities, but also the development and dissemination of radical political and religious ideologies into and within the region. In this period, the region experienced a resurgence of religious fundamentalism together with a sharpened sense of maintaining ethnic identities and boundaries, enhancing previous regional conflicts in several Southeast Asian nations (Chalk 1997: 7-11). With the beginning of the war against terrorism and the more recent terrorist attacks in the region— including the October 2002 bombings on the Indonesian island of Bali—the feeling of insecurity and the sense of threat, especially to foreign interests, have increased significantly. PSCs IN THE MARITIME SECTOR The demand for PSCs in Asia came in part from the maritime sector, and PSCs are today widely employed to secure the world’s oceans, or more precisely, commercial vessels, yachts, cruise ships, offshore energy installations, container terminals and ports. To address these security challenges, PSCs offer a wide range of services. These include risk and vulnerability

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