Com­ment: The U.S. is not the only coun­try man­i­fest­ing pri­vate secu­ri­ty out­fits, such as the much-pub­li­cize Black­wa­ter firm. A Ger­man company–Asgard Ger­man Secu­ri­ty Group–is deploy­ing a “triple dig­it” detach­ment of high­ly-trained Bun­deswehr vet­er­ans on behalf of a Soma­lia war­lord, who has declared him­self to be the coun­try’s pres­i­dent.

“Dis­crete Inter­ven­tions”; German-Foreign-Policy.com; 5/26/2010.

The scan­dal caused by the planned dis­patch­ing of more than 100 Ger­man mer­ce­nar­ies to Soma­lia, is fur­ther evi­dence of the expan­sion of Ger­man pri­vate secu­ri­ty com­pa­nies. The CEO of the Asgaard Ger­man Secu­ri­ty Group (based in Tel­gte, close to Muen­ster in North Rhine West­phalia) has con­firmed that the com­pa­ny plans to dis­patch a triple-dig­it sized group of armed per­son­nel to Soma­lia to sup­port a local war­lord, who has declared him­self the coun­try’s pres­i­dent. Where­as the Ger­man for­eign min­istry dis­so­ci­ates itself from the action, demands are grow­ing in the West that alter­na­tives be sought con­sid­er­ing the poli­cies of the EU and the USA toward Soma­lia to be fruit­less. Activ­i­ties of secu­ri­ty com­pa­nies, such as Asgaard, are inten­si­fy­ing abroad. They are coop­er­at­ing on a reg­u­lar basis with sev­er­al for­eign busi­ness asso­ci­a­tions, such as the Ger­man-Africa Busi­ness Asso­ci­a­tion or the Ger­man-Iraqi Busi­ness Asso­ci­a­tion (MIDAN), pro­tect­ing Ger­man per­son­nel in war and cri­sis zones. Berlin’s Fed­er­al Col­lege for Secu­ri­ty Stud­ies is close­ly observ­ing the devel­op­ment of this pri­vate indus­try of repres­sion, which, accord­ing to its pres­i­dent, allows inter­ven­tions that are “much less notice­able” than the usu­al mil­i­tary deploy­ments. . . .