Corporate Based Killers-Why The Adelaide Professor Died In Iraq

Foreign Affairs, after gagging his family via "security issues", said that incident highlighted the extreme dangers Australians faced in Baghdad.

The fact that an Australian-based mercenary company gunned down an 72 year old Iraqi academic as he drove home from a shopping outing, for fear he might be a suicide bomber, doesn't seem to be a factor in the minds of DFAT's spin-doctors.

For three months of the year Professor Kays Juma lived in the Adelaide suburb of Flagstaff HIll, a couple of miles from a university that had never heard of him. The bulk of his life was spent teaching animal husbandry at the University of Baghdad.

Maybe if the mercenaries who ended his life didn't belong to a company that had lost lives in a car bomb explosion two years back, when they were protecting water and electricity engineers, this tragedy might not have occurred.. All these armed men saw, as they guarded a convoy of contractors, was an old Iraqi getting too close for comfort.

Acting on the policy of "better safe than sorry" they shot him.

The mercenary managers, Unity Resource Management, have as a director the Sydney Olympic's chief of athlete security. He was also head of the SAS' Counter-Terrorism Unit until 1997. Unity Resource (whose motto is "In Strength Lies Unity" appear on the U.S Embassy in Bagdad's website under "Citizen Services" They joined the Iraqi-American Chamber of Commerce last year, and this year are a major sponsor (second on the list only to AEGIS)) at the Iraq Security, Technology and Communications Summit being held in the UAE. No doubt part of their sponsorship will be guarding the Ministers, Deputies and Secretary Generals of the Departments of Interior, Communications, Science and Defence.

This company seems to have strong views on the ethics of the participation of Australian Government representatives. Consider this article review by one of their senior employees:

The argument and thoughts put forward in the abstract are not only interesting however prudent to the evolving question as to whether the Australian Government agencies and defence force need to utilise the
established model that exists in the US and UK with companies such as Dynocorp, Blackwater and the UK firm Control Risks Group.

There are however a number of essential core issues that need to be
estabished and the major concern is the national interest. i.e. the companies involved in Aus gov work would need to be transparent with the other contracted work so that security and conflicts of interest on
a global scale are not raised. I look forward to further reading the remainder of the article.

Regards Shane Irving Unity Resources Group Aus, Asia, Middle East, Latin America

How a company with such ideals and aspirations managed to gun down Kays Juma is an important consideration. That a "legitimate" soldier in a declared war might perpetrate such an action in defence of his life might, however abhorrent the notion, be halfway understandable. That a gun-toting warrior bearing the insignia not of a nation but of a corporation can kill an old man because it's his job to do so is can only be labelled as the epitome of everything that is wrong with Western society.

How many innocent Iraqis, unreported through lack of connection to other countries, have died at the hands of corporate employees from "democratic" nations? Do the compilers of the Rand Corporation's Terrorism Database, who provided the Incident Report for the Unity deaths, keep statistics on civilians blown away by mercenaries?

Is this the active Democracy that Western society is so proud of? We should hang our heads in shame