[...]
Armed guards are Uganda’s top export. Mercenary remittances surpassed coffee exports in 2009, according to the Ministry of Gender, Labour, and Social Development. Interpol’s Kampala bureau conducts roughly 1,000 background checks on Ugandans heading abroad for security jobs every month, “just to make sure we are not sending foreign fighters,” says Asan Kasingye, Interpol’s local chief. (By “foreign fighters,” he means international Islamic State recruits.) That figure doesn’t count the guards working in countries that don’t require checks nor guards who secure bogus credentials, fail to renew their Interpol-issued permits, or are illegally trafficked. A conservative estimate is 20,000 Ugandan mercenaries working abroad right now, according to Interpol figures and industry insiders.
[...]
Ugandans are influential in the business on other continents, too. Sisto Andama, a nephew of Amin, was early to the guard trade. After politically connected rivals undercut his business in 2006 and engineered his arrest the following year, Andama fled the country. He now lives in Maryland, where he’s the director of African operations for Beowulf Worldwide, a security subcontractor based in Valparaiso, Ind. He handles 750 men, mostly in Afghanistan, and hundreds of contractors working for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Africa Command across the continent.
Since the hiring boom began during the Iraq War, Ugandan newspapers have made much of the fortunes being made. Returning guards use earnings to buy land, build homes, and start small businesses. Thousands of young men—some army veterans but also civilians, from janitors and taxi drivers to unemployed university grads—swamp recruitment offices with their credentials stuffed in brown paper envelopes.
As Islamic State loses ground, Ugandan subcontractors hope to send men to Iraq to protect diplomats, patrol nongovernmental organization compounds, and guard oil fields. Crumbling security situations in South Sudan and Libya look promising, too. U.S. government contracts are the real payday, though. Wherever the Pentagon next marshals a shadow army of security contractors, an overwhelming number of those hired guns will likely be recruited from the trash-strewn streets of Kampala.
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in: http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-uganda-mercenaries
P.s: Est-ce que le président des Etats-Unis ne pourrait pas commenter en ligne sur cette question? Chez GOOGLE. Ici. Même en anglais.
Est-ce que les journalistes font bien leur travail en Europe? Ici, GOOGLE travaille un peu pour les journalistes du Monde en particulier et son conseil de surveillance. Il donne des idées.
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