Paramilitary

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Paramilitary ( ancient Greek παρά [para] "next to" and Latin miles "fighter" or " soldier "), or also militia , denotes groups or units of various types, some of which act independently and are equipped with military means , but which are mostly not involved in the organization of the actual Military are involved. Examples of this are the quasi-military associations that can be found in many countries and are often subordinate to the interior ministries, which exist alongside the classic military and tend to be deployed internally.

In addition, the term applies to groups equipped with military force that are assigned to a criminal or mafia-like organization, a self-protection organization or party or are under the command of this. Such paramilitaries often act semi-legally or completely outside of legality , but actually operate on behalf of or in the interest of an official institution or the government, which is particularly the case in less developed countries.

Paramilitarism describes a military doctrine of state or economic organizations that enforce their interests by means of irregular military force.

State and non-state paramilitary groups

Official state associations

As a gendarmerie, Italian carabinieri have numerous police tasks and are subordinate to the Ministry of the Interior . They form their own armed forces , and there are also armed units such as paratrooper regiments.

The name paramilitary association denotes special police forces (such as gendarmerie , border police or coast guard ) that are not part of the actual armed forces of a country, but are equipped with military equipment. Together with state-affiliated associations, such police units can be part of the armed power in the event of an armed conflict. You then have combatant status according to the Hague Land Warfare Regulations , i.e. That is, they are entitled to conduct combat operations in international armed conflicts under international law . Paramilitary units are a reserve in case of war and as such are particularly useful for occupation tasks. But even in peacetime it is useful in that it prevents a direct confrontation between military units in the event of a border incident, which can delay or prevent another threatening escalation step. Domestically, however, the deployment of paramilitary units is often a step towards escalation, for example during demonstrations and protests. On the other hand, it is often a necessary reaction because normal police forces are no longer able to control the situation in individual cases or in general. Sometimes military units with police roles are also deployed here, such as the Carabinieri or the US National Guard . The defense of terrorist activities, organized crime or traditional gangs is often an excessive demand for purely police wax body, however also has an upgrade took place so that, in terms of training and equipment. B. automatic weapons and night vision devices and a corresponding tactical training are also available for police forces without combatant status.

Quasi-state and unofficial paramilitaries

As paramilitaries are also unofficial, non-governmental militarily organized groups, made up, police or military powers arrogate to extralegal own or secret state domestic or foreign policy goals with violence to enforce. Irregular organizations that intervene on behalf of foreign states in other states are also often referred to as paramilitaries. Often the term paramilitary, in contrast to the term paramilitary, is actually only applied to those associations which act with knowledge, tolerance or on the secret mandate of the state or individual of its institutions and representatives against actual or alleged enemies within. Such quasi-governmental or semi-governmental paramilitaries often use the alleged weakness of the state or its legal system to justify their actions in relation to so-called “ subversion ” from within or to supposed dangers from outside. You are thus referring to an alleged self-defense situation of society and the state.

Death squads

Such unofficial or semi-official associations usually operate completely outside of legality , in particular also largely outside of military regulations and the respective national jurisdiction. This means that in fact they do not have to answer for any violations of the law or human rights violations. At the same time, their task is usually to eliminate or neutralize armed or unarmed domestic political opponents . One consequence of the above conditions is that paramilitary groups in the past in many - countries as so-called - especially unstable or dictatorial regime death squads acted, killing virtually indiscriminately persons or by force and without a trace could disappear that had been identified as opponents. The suspicion of a critical attitude towards the respective government is often sufficient justification. In most cases, the majority of the killed are civilians who actually have no or only suspected connection to the resistance movement fought by the paramilitaries.

Such death squads became particularly well known in many Latin American countries in the 1970s and 1980s. For example, semi-official or unofficial paramilitaries of the US-backed military dictatorship in El Salvador killed around 40,000 opposition members from 1981, around 0.8% of the population. Such events took place in many countries , particularly during the Cold War , in which authoritarian governments and military dictatorships were confronted with mostly left-wing, not necessarily armed resistance movements. Such conflicts are also known as dirty wars . This goes back to the Spanish term Guerra Sucia , which the right-wing Argentine military dictatorship used internally from 1976 to 1983 for the top secret kidnapping and murder of up to 30,000 opposition members. These so-called Desaparecidos (Spanish for the Disappeared ) were mostly kidnapped at night by paramilitary groups such as the Alianza Anticomunista Argentina (also: Triple A or AAA ) as well as the informal secret police, which were intertwined with them, and in some cases also by the regular military from their homes or the streets . Most of them were deported in civilian cars to top secret, informal torture centers and concentration camps, where they were mostly murdered after a short period of time, often extremely severe torture.

This strategy of counterinsurgency against groups such as the paramilitary resistance movement of the Montoneros was deliberately kept strictly hidden from the Argentine and world public; the full extent only came to light after the end of the dictatorship in 1983. The processing of these crimes continues to this day, that by that time still unresolved fate of most of the disappeared and the uncertainty about the whereabouts of the bodies - at an unexplained part, people were stunned to murder and naked dropped from transport aircraft over the Atlantic was , most of them buried in distributed, anonymous mass graves - represents an ongoing burden on Argentine society.

Selected examples

Selected examples of the numerous conflicts in which (mostly) dictatorship-controlled paramilitaries, often in the form of the death squads described above, fought resistance movements or even just opponents in dirty wars are or were: The 36-year civil war in Guatemala , the massacres about half a million communists in Indonesia 1965–1966 , the conflict in Colombia , the civil war in El Salvador , the fight against the ANC by the South African apartheid regime, and the conflict in East Timor , which was formerly occupied by Indonesians , during which about a third of the Timorese passed through Indonesian paramilitary and regular military personnel was murdered. In many of these countries, after their transition to democracy in the 1990s, so-called truth commissions were set up to deal with the consistently high number of human rights violations. In East Timor and Guatemala , the events are now assessed as genocide and are still currently being prosecuted. In 2006 an Argentine court ruled that the actions of the Alianza Anticomunista Argentina death squad should be classified as " crimes against humanity ". In Argentina, these are not subject to the statute of limitations, which significantly increased the possibility of prosecuting crimes that occurred decades ago.

Guerrilla and resistance movements as a special case

Members of the ERP guerrillas during the civil war in El Salvador , 1990. Guerrilla associations are usually not referred to as paramilitary, despite the appropriate equipment and organizational structure.

Conversely, organizations and groups who organized the state or the ruling government itself will fight by force of arms - such as politically motivated resistance movements , separatist and ethnic motivated movements and / or underground organizations - usually not called paramilitaries even if they often readily paramilitary in Can be structured and organized in the sense of “similar to the military”. Such groups opposing the ruling government are usually objectively correctly described as guerrilla movements , " insurgents ", rebels or separatists, sometimes also derogatory and mostly objectively incorrectly as terrorists . The use of the term terrorism , mostly by government representatives of the state attacked by the resistance movement, is often politically motivated. Its aim can be to deny the legitimacy of the basic concern of the paramilitary resistance movement - which, depending on the individual case, for example in dictatorships , can be given and in some cases even open to discussion or justified under international law - by using this strongly negative term right from the start. The American terrorism researcher Brian Jenkins wrote:

“The use of the term implies a moral judgment; and if a group / party succeeds in attaching the label 'terrorist' to its opponents , then it has indirectly managed to convince others of their moral point of view. Terrorism is what the bad guys do. At the same time, this assignment can also be used to justify the aforementioned 'tough crackdown' by own forces such as the military and paramilitary in front of their own and / or the world public. The definition problems resulting from this widespread, politically motivated use of the term are one of the reasons why there is no generally accepted definition of the term terrorism either in academia or at the level of international law . "

- Brian Jenkins

Examples

State, official paramilitary associations

Informal, state-affiliated paramilitary associations or groups in the past and present

Serbian Chetniks with soldiers of the German Wehrmacht .
The contra rebels organized by the CIA fought the left-wing government of Nicaragua from 1981 in the contra war . This claimed around 60,000 lives, mostly civilians.
German paramilitary volunteer units nationalist ex-soldiers fought with the acquiescence of the State or after the end of World War I , first in the Baltics against the Bolsheviks , against insurgents in Upper Silesia and against various communist revolts in Germany. They also played an important role in the German civil war after 1918: in the suppression of the Munich Soviet Republic in 1919, during the Kapp Putsch and in the subsequent fighting in the Ruhr uprising in 1920.
This organization was initially founded as a bodyguard for the party leadership of the NSDAP . After the seizure of power of Adolf Hitler in 1933, the SS was converted into a kind of private army of the Nazi Party. The SS was active as a terrorist organization in Germany. After the outbreak of the Second World War , the Waffen-SS was also created, which fought alongside the Wehrmacht .
  • 1931: Iron Front , a social democratic militia founded by the elected government and the trade unions to defend Weimar democracy against the opposition's anti-democratic militias (SA, Stahlhelmbund).
  • 1933: Sturmabteilung (SA), Germany
The private paramilitary army of the National Socialists was used from 1933 for a short time as "auxiliary police" against political opponents.
An unofficial secret society in which senior police and military officers conspired as a " death squad " to commit murder against thousands of political opponents.
Of the US -funded rebels in the Contra war against the leftist Nicaraguan government of the Sandinistas fought.
Paramilitary youth organization that aims to prepare young people for military service.
An umbrella organization of right-wing paramilitary groups in the Colombian civil war, financed primarily through cocaine trafficking .
They were used for the first time in the Iran-Iraq war. Mainly children and old people who volunteered to defend Saddam Hussein . Today a well-trained paramilitary unit.
Serbian militants and paramilitary groups such as B. the Cetniks , the White Eagle that Seseljevci of Vojislav Šešelj , the Serb Volunteer Guard of Zeljko Ražnatović ( "Arkansas"), the "Kninjas" or "Alfas" of Dragan Vasiljković that Martićevci of Milan Martić , the Crvene Beretke , the Army of the Republic of Serbian Krajina ; on the Croatian side, the associations Hrvatske obrambene snage and Hrvatsko vijeće obrane .
In Venezuela, Hugo Chávez won the 1999 elections seven years after an attempted coup thanks to Bolivarian circles that mobilized the population and then expanded this collective into the “armed arm of the Bolivarian revolution ”. They are accused of suppressing the civilian population and killing demonstrators.
  • 2018: Nicaragua
In Nicaragua , paramilitaries “hunted down opposition activists” (NZZ), while in 2018, depending on the information, between 200 and 500 people were killed.
  • 2018: Slovenia
In Slovenia , the Štajerska Varda ("Styrian Guard" or "Styrian Guard") has been active since 2018 , which according to its own information consists of several hundred members and is partly equipped with assault rifles. The area of ​​responsibility stated is the border guard with Croatia, the paramilitary arm of the right-wing extremist party "Gibanje zedinjena Slovenija" (United Slovenia) headed by Andrej Šiško .

Other

Shooting clubs, too , sometimes have a long tradition, which can be traced back to paramilitary groups, such as the mountain rifle or Tyrolean rifle .

See also

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Raul Zelik : The informalization of the state of emergency. In: Jour fixe initiative berlin (ed.): War. Unrast, Münster 2009, ISBN 978-3-89771-490-8 , pp. 115-130.
  2. ↑ a b c Amnesty International: Rights at Risk. Security and human rights - contradicting or complementary objectives? In: Jahrbuch Menschenrechte 2003. Archived from the original on May 18, 2015 ; Retrieved December 17, 2008 .
  3. ^ Benjamin Schwarz: Dirty Hands. The success of US policy in El Salvador - preventing a guerrilla victory - was based on 40,000 political murders. The Atlantic, book review on William M. LeoGrande: Our own Backyard. The United States in Central America 1977-1992. 1998, December 1998.
  4. ^ "Operation Condor" ( Memento from September 12, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) - Terror in the name of the state. tagesschau.de, September 12, 2008
  5. ↑ Harold Pinter: Speech on receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature 2005 . Quote: "After the end of World War II, the United States supported every right-wing military dictatorship in the world, and in many cases they created them. [...] There have been hundreds of thousands of deaths in those countries. Really they did given? [...] The answer is yes, there was, and they are due to American foreign policy. "
  6. ↑ Steffen Leidel: Notorious ex-torture center opens to the public. In: Deutsche Welle. March 14, 2005, accessed December 13, 2008 .
  7. ↑ Christiane Wolters: Ex-officer in court for "death flights". Deutsche Welle, January 14, 2005.
  8. ↑ Angela Dencker: 25 years of military coup and genocide in Argentina. The processing of human rights violations from the perspective of Amnesty International. In: Menschenrechte.org. March 21, 2001, accessed December 17, 2008 .
  9. ↑ Guatemala's dictator sentenced to 80 years in prison. Die Zeit, May 11, 2013
  10. ↑ East Timor - a forgotten genocide. Wiener Zeitung, January 28, 1999.
  11. ↑ Manuel Justo Gaggero: El general en su laberinto. Pagina / 12, February 19, 2007.
  12. ↑ a b c bpb : The Definition of Terrorism , accessed May 10, 2015
  13. ↑ What is 'terrorism'? Problems of legal definition
  14. ^ Venezuela crisis: The 'colectivo' groups supporting Maduro , BBC. February 6, 2019.
  15. ↑ The Devolution of State Power: The 'Colectivos' , insightcrime.org, May 18, 2018.
  16. ↑ On the anniversary of the protests in Nicaragua, people are again walking the streets - despite a government ban , NZZ, April 18, 2019
  17. ↑ https://www.derstandard.at/story/2000086679017/bewaffnete-buergerwehr-will-sloweniens-grenzen-schuetzen
  18. ^ Slovenia: Vigilante "Styrian Guard" patrols the border. In: kurier.at. Retrieved January 13, 2020 .
  19. ↑ https://www.eurocommpr.at/de/News-Room/City-News/Buergerwehr-Steirische-Garde-Nationaler-Sicherheitsrat-will-Gesetzesaenderungen
  20. ↑ https://futter.kleinezeitung.at/in-der-untersteiermark-gibt-es-jetzt-eine-bewaffnete-buergerwehr/
  21. ↑ https://www.diepresse.com/5491662/rechtsextreme-steirergarde-schockt-slowenien