Fearing mercenaries

For UN peacekeeping, Western countries generally prefer to send money rather than troops and vital equipment....

For now, the UN makes up the shortfall by hiring private firms to provide helicopter transport. Such commercial aircraft are not insured to fly in combat zones, even to pick up wounded soldiers. But the UN is loth to hire attack helicopters privately; it would seem—horrors—like hiring mercenaries. Yet when 500 UN peacekeepers in Sierra Leone were taken hostage in May 2000, it was not just the arrival of British paratroopers that turned back the advancing rebels; it was the unsung actions of a South African mercenary, strafing and rocketing the rebels from his Soviet-made Mi-24 “Hind” attack helicopter.