Locke Keith: Mercenary Activities (Prohibition) Bill — First Reading 
Locke Keith: Mercenary Activities (Prohibition) Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:613;Page:9772] 
KEITH LOCKE (Green) 
: 
 The Green Party will be supporting this bill. It is about time that this Government took action in this way because there has been a very serious problem with mercenaries around the world for many years particularly in Africa where the operations of mercenaries have caused political crises and undermined the ability of the peoples of those countries to determine their own future in a proper manner. We can go back to the early 1960s when the mercenaries were very involved in the Congo leading to the overthrow of the Lumumba Government and for many years to great chaos and death particularly in eastern Congo which has not really recovered since. There is ongoing violence in the eastern Congo today and I think that the actions of the mercenaries 40 years ago contributed to that situation. 
There are a number of mercenary organisations around the world one of the two best known perhaps being Executive Outcomes based on South African military officers who served the apartheid regime in South Africa for many years and then engaged in mercenary activities as the apartheid regime went down. Another firm Sandline International is notorious for its activities firstly in Africa. It is led by a chap called Tim Spicer. I have just been reading an article on him and he does not like the term “mercenary”; he prefers the term “contract soldier”. I think that would also fit the definition of “mercenary” in this bill—somebody whose primary purpose is private gain. I think that would fit contract soldiers. 
Not only did Sandline International develop its operations in Africa and cause havoc and distress there in its pursuit of money using its military capability; it then moved into our region in the 1990s into Papua New Guinea. Its activities there caused a military coup when the army got upset about the Government of the day hiring Sandline to move into Bougainville to take charge there and smash militarily its independence movement. 
 We all know that the proper solution to that problem in Bougainville was a peaceful one. New Zealand to its great credit initiated the peace process there and we did that by bringing all the parties for a start to Burnham military camp getting them sitting down and talking to each other and out of that evolved a very successful peace process. The very people whom Sandline International was brought in to smash like Joseph Kabui are now the leaders in Bougainville in a very peaceful situation. It is great credit to New Zealand that it went down that track as opposed to the mercenary track that others were promoting. 
We have had problems in New Zealand with mercenaries that perhaps this bill would cover. I remember back to 1989 when there were advertisements in the New Zealand newspapers—the Christchurch  
Press  
is an example I think it was in July 1989—by the Papua New Guinea Government for New Zealand helicopter pilots to fly helicopters on service in Bougainville for the Papua New Guinea army. I complained at the time but there was no avenue for rectifying that complaint. In fact New Zealand pilots were hired much to the discredit of New Zealand because there were rumours about very bad things done in those helicopters including throwing people out of those helicopters while they were on operational missions—that is people who had been captured in Bougainville. New Zealand was associated with that; there is no definite proof that a New Zealand pilot was flying the helicopter at the time that someone was thrown out of the window but there were helicopters flown by New Zealanders in Bougainville for Papua New Guinea for money at that time. They would be defined as mercenaries under this bill and rightly so. 
Also we have a case of a chap called Alen Robbie who was working for a group in Auckland called Group 4 Security Ltd back in the late 1990s and he was recruiting for Sandline International. That was a very bad thing. Again at the time I complained to the Minister who has presented this bill but there was no redress at the time that a New Zealander in Auckland was involved in recruiting for Sandline International. This bill will help deal with that particular problem too. 
The definition in the bill is very appropriate: that is that one has to have the primary purpose of private gain but some companies around the world do fit into a bit of a grey area in this respect. Some of them are American companies which may have something to do with why some Governments that other speakers referred to have not gone along with this international approach of putting a ban on mercenaries. 
We have companies like Military Professional Resources Inc. that have been involved in what we might call training but it is a bit more than training in places like Croatia. This group was very much involved in training Croatian soldiers prior to enduring the Kryena campaign back in the 1990s where the Croatian Government in those areas that had a lot of Serb civilians in them launched a big operation and hundreds of civilians were killed and some 170000 people were driven from their homes. There has been a lot of concern about that operation ever since. 
As an article in the  
Nation 
 magazine indicates there is a sort of grey area here between what is training and what is participating in a war. As Phil Goff pointed out the definition is that one has to actually participate in a war. This article says that in a sense whether Military Professional Resources Inc. directed the campaign is secondary: “Once you provide training there is no way to control the way the skills you have taught are used.” said Loren Thompson a military specialist at the conservative Alexis de Tocqueville Institution. Given Croatia’s record he thought that training that Military Professional Resources Inc. did in that case could have helped prosecute that slaughter of many innocent people and the evacuation of 170000 people from their homes. Technically while training is not covered under this bill and there is an exemption as Phil Goff pointed out for agencies that are involved just in security operations there is a bit of a grey area there so that in practice we might find it difficult to work out where the start and finish point is in terms of whether a person or group is mercenary in practice. That is something we will work together on within the international community. It is good that New Zealand in this bill is being a good international citizen working with others around the world to get rid of the scourge of mercenaries of people who for money go around killing other people. 
Debate interrupted.