‘Y’ ma pusseh!’ shouted the rebels. And then they butchered him.
I filmed it diligently: wide shots; cutaways of small details – the bloody knife, the man’s feet; and the close-up, messy business of gutting a human being. I protected myself, my mind – or so I thought – by collecting the individual details of murder frame by frame.
Cutting up a man with an AK bayonet is not a simple task. A rock was used as a mallet to help smash the blade through the rib cage so that the prized organs could be reached more easily. As the stone came down, it made a wet thock, thock, thock sound, as the blows echoed in the partially opened chest cavity. The cadaver rocked to and fro with the exertion. When the organs came out they did so with a slurping pop, or a stretched-out squelch. The smell of blood was heady, and clung to the roof of my mouth in a metallic glaze.
Finally, the teenager held the heart aloft.
‘I’m a totally wickeh boy,’ he proclaimed.
‘We a’ de lion o’ de jongle,’ the others sang.
I zoomed in for a close-up and re-focused to find myself filming deep into the gaping chest. I panned away feeling like a voyeur, a thief, as if such intimate shots were part of the violation. But the corpse was compelling. There seemed no good reason not to film anything now. If I could have saved him, I would have; but he was already naked. He was already naked. He was already naked, I told myself, as the tape sped through my camera.
‘We a’ de Kamajor fro’ Kenema,’ another fighter announced, a kidney in his hand. ‘I’ mak’ good foo’ fo’ os.’
‘You’re from Sierra Leone?’ I asked.
‘Yessah.’
The civil war in Sierra Leone had supposedly ended a year before, and yet here were both sides of that conflict – the previously Western-backed Kamajor civil militia and the Taylor-backed RUF fighting to the death on a daily basis. They sang and gyrated around the desecrated body, and then whooped and hollered back into town, setting out the chopped-up sweetbreads on a mocked-up market stall. Then they carried their bullion back to their billets, to be mixed with hot chillies and stewed cassava leaf, and served with handfuls of starchy white rice.
It was extremely hard to find common ground with cannibals. They had masked their crime with the language of anthropology – a tradition and legacy of ritual and magic that saw warriors in West Africa’s forests consume their enemies to assume their prowess in battle. That much I knew was true from talking to Cobus in Freetown; but if that could justify the torture and murder of a prisoner of war – albeit one who likely shared similar beliefs – then anyone could justify anything. Moral relativism in war, it seemed, was the first step on the short road to genocide.
Nick had stood guard over me at a respectful distance while I filmed. He said nothing, did not interfere; he gave neither opinion nor advice. When it was over, he said, simply, ‘Ag, they did that for the camera.’
I was polite, but almost angry. I disagreed vehemently. I hadn’t been complicit in this brutal killing, I told him, suddenly unsure of myself.
As we walked back to our balcony, I explained that they were all from Sierra Leone, a detail that had passed him by. In fact, these were the same troops he was fighting with and against in Executive Outcomes. Then he understood. Theatrical flourishes in its execution notwithstanding, it had been absolutely genuine.
For my part, I could not honestly say exactly why I had filmed, only that it had happened, and I had been there. I was in Liberia to film; so I had filmed. To stop, to turn the camera off in the middle of this killing, would have been a bolder statement than not to have filmed at all – and could have put us both at risk. My security depended upon their respect, and their acceptance. What happened with the footage was for later discussion.
Perhaps there was another reason, too. You could watch a hundred hours of television news, and never see a death in war: fighting was re-packaged as politics; death sanitised; horror neutered before the ad-break. Shock, disgust, revulsion – these did not draw in audiences, could not sell the nine o’clock news: no one showed the visceral truth of war, especially not an uncivil war in West Africa. I was convinced of my duty to depict the reality of the fighting. There I was, up to my elbows in blood and shit, thinking: James, you have finally found something you are good at. And the consequences of employing that skill were something I would have to live with.
The butchering reminded me of something Cobus had said to me in Freetown, while venting against the RUF. ‘In my mind, you draw a line,’ he’d said. ‘At a certain point a human being becomes less of a human being, and more of an animal, and then he should just be culled and got rid of as quickly as possible so the rest of humanity can go on with their lives. There should just be total annihilation for animals like that.’
I remembered the quote by heart, it had seemed so shocking. At the time I had thought it racist bile – no one was irredeemable; no one should be denied a trial to account for their crimes. Now I wasn’t so sure. Perhaps ruthlessly wiping out rebels, government armies – whoever – was a sensible route for guiding West Africa back to normality after all.
I said as much to Nick. How was it possible to see the men around us as anything but bloodthirsty savages?
‘In Sierra Leone, some of the local guys under my command started to cut the heads off the rebels they captured,’ Nick recounted. ‘I stopped that immediately. Once you do that – taking heads – you become as bad as the people you’re fighting against.’
On this day, of all days, Nick seemed to me the epitome of the professional soldier; his calmness made him seem measured and wise, so much so that I failed to notice that he hadn’t answered my question. The irony of asking one of apartheid’s shock troops for moral guidance, though, was not lost on me. I was a long way from scribbling black power graffiti on my text books at school. Propping his AK against the balustrade and unlacing his boots, Nick explained how the RUF had launched their offensive from Liberia in 1991, led by Sankoh – a disaffected army corporal.
‘At first the rebels said they wanted to stop the corruption in the government – which was really bad, even by African standards. But as soon as they got their hands on the guns, they went crazy. It was unbelievable.’
Community leaders who opposed them were decapitated, their children forced to rape their mothers, the villagers kidnapped and forced to dig for diamonds.
Nick reminded me of the history that I had learned while staying with Cobus in Freetown a year before. As more territory fell to the rebels, and more atrocities were committed, the international community looked on – unwilling to commit the troops or resources necessary to halt the RUF’s advance. Bloodied by losses in Somalia and Rwanda, and the humiliation of having their peacekeepers used as human shields by the Bosnian Serbs, the United Nations did nothing. The Nigerians sent a small force to guard key installations, and ended up participating in a debauch of violence and looting themselves. The Libyans, meanwhile, had trained the rebel commanders near Tripoli, and Charles Taylor, the Liberian president who was rattling his sabre at us further up the road, was alleged to have been busy providing cash, weapons and yet more training in return for the blood diamonds mined illegally by rebel slave-labour. ‘Sierra Leone’, Taylor said in an interview with the BBC, ‘will taste the bitterness of war.’ In desperation, Valentine Strasser, then the incumbent in Sierra Leone’s presidential palace, brokered a deal with EO in March 1995. In the face of absolute abandonment by the international community, Nick’s mercenaries had been the only people willing to help – for a price.
The company had been founded in 1989 by agents from the South African CCB, the Civil Cooperation Bureau – a sinister counter-insurgency agency that specialised in murder, assassinations and dirty tricks. So secretive was the CCB that its existence was only officially admitted in 1990. These men, I fancied, were not regular soldiers like Nick, but were instead apartheid’s willing executioners. Nick himself believed that ultimately the CCB had been designed to form the nucleus of a white resi
stance organisation to fight black-majority rule in the way that the apartheid government had faced an ongoing armed struggle from the ANC and MK. In the end, most of the CCB’s agents had gone to jail, gone to ground – or found lucrative employment in the commercial sector.
Executive Outcomes was originally conceived as a front-organisation for South Africa’s increasingly isolated regime – an apparently legitimate commercial company that, like many others, was set up as part of a sanctions-busting operation in the late ’80s and early ’90s. EO was then transformed in 1993 by a consortium of English entrepreneurs, including a rich businessman called Tony Buckingham and a wealthy ex-SAS officer called Simon Mann.
These men needed a South African-registered company – and experienced military personnel – to realise their wider ambition to create a modern, corporate military machine for hire anywhere in the world. They injected funding, business acumen and legitimacy. Led by experienced South African Special Forces operators, EO morphed from an underground Afrikaner cell into the world’s largest private army. Complete with its own airline, hundreds of employees and multi-million-dollar contracts, it operated some of the longest supply lines in modern military history – at times from Pretoria to Sierra Leone, Cabinda and New Guinea in the Pacific. They claimed to deal only with bona fide governments: no coups, no assassinations and no support to rebel groups. And they got rich.
Strasser – Sierra Leone’s ‘legitimate’ leader – had himself taken power with a military junta in a coup three years previously. At the tender age of twenty-five, he was the world’s youngest head of state. As the RUF marched on Freetown, he feared he may also be one of the shortest-lived. He invited EO into the country for a fee of $31 million a year, to be remunerated out of diamond revenues (of which nearly $19 million would never be paid). Having previously fought very effectively against UNITA rebels in Angola, EO’s foot-soldiers and commanders were confident of success.
Nick picked up the story.
‘From about May in ’95, around two hundred South Africans were sent out there – the rebels were right on the edge of Freetown. Ja, we was equipped only with light weapons, but we had a couple of armoured personnel carriers and one attack helicopter, which was very handy. The original guys who went there secured Freetown in six weeks.’
Nick arrived in Sierra Leone shortly after. Within eighteen months they had comprehensively destroyed the RUF’s 3,000 to 4,000-strong rebel army. By the time EO’s contract was cancelled under pressure from the international community, the RUF held no significant territory in Sierra Leone at all.
‘The guys just did it with these,’ he said, nodding to his rifle. ‘They picked on the nearest RUF concentration to Freetown and attacked it. From there, we just carried on that way. We had the same weapons as these guys, the rebels here, but ours were better-maintained, and we knew how to use them.’
It wasn’t simply the case that the rebels were a disorganised rabble who couldn’t fight their way out of a paper bag: the soldiers that EO deployed were extraordinarily efficient and battle-hardened from two decades of war in Southern Africa. They learned from early mistakes. On one occasion, Cobus’s entire squad was almost wiped out.
‘Ja, before I got there, he was ambushed once by the rebels. The RUF lined both sides of the road, spaced at intervals, and let them have it with everything they had at once. The first vehicle lost a track when the driver turned too quickly, then the other driver stalled when they were hit by a grenade – a direct hit on the turret. The blast knocked out Henri the gunner’s eye.’
After the fighting of the last week in Liberia, I could imagine it only too well: blood everywhere; unbearable noise; the screams of the injured.
‘Ag, Henri was trapped in the turret and just carried on firing. He went through hundreds of rounds of ammunition, while Cobus led his troops round the back. He managed to counter-attack just as Henri ran out of ammo.’
As if ushered on by the darkness, rain began to lash the zinc roof of our house, sending the hidden frogs outside into paroxysms of excitement.
‘It was fokken close enough, though,’ Nick added.
The troops he spoke of in EO were an eclectic bunch – of whom around 90 per cent were black, not white, Africans. Many of them were, in fact, Angolans who had fought in the South African Army’s 32 ‘Buffalo’ Battalion – South Africa’s Foreign Legion. Recruited to fight for South Africa against their newly independent, Marxist, government, these soldiers became among the most feared troops in the apartheid state’s army. Led by white officers and supported by Special Forces commandos – including Nick, on dozens of operations – they specialised in daring long-range attacks against their fellow-countrymen. Unloved by the new democratic government in Pretoria, their controversial unit was disbanded. All but unemployable in the New South Africa, dozens of them joined Executive Outcomes.
After the disaster of opening the general store in the Snake Pit, the lure of an adventure with the guys he’d fought alongside with for so long was irresistible. Nick went in as one of the three overall commanders of EO’s ground operations. As a top dog of war, the company’s stunning victory in the face of overwhelming odds was partly his own.
As well as finding a respite from the new South Africa, Nick found diamonds. Part of EO’s mandate was to head straight to Kono and open the diamond field there so that Strasser’s government could generate revenue and pay their bills to EO. I knew from Cobus that other rebel bases had been passed over in the stampede to get to Kono – a fact that did not sit well with many of the hired soldiers. Nick was more relaxed. He was there to orchestrate the fighting; the diamond deals were for others to arrange. No diamonds, no pay. It was that simple.
As Nick dissected the tactics of his mercenary war, like some dark bedtime story, ominous explosions erupted into the evening air beyond the horizon, muffled by the falling rain. Worryingly, they came from the Bopolu road, behind us. Initial booms were followed by the crackle of small arms just audible over the hissing downpour and the whoosh of RPGs. There was little doubt: the long-awaited re-supply of ammunition from Fassama must have been ambushed. Not only were we surrounded, but we had no means to repel the next assault.
Nick and I discussed our options. We were bored and terrified by the inevitability of the daily attacks on the town. It was time to take control. We sent the pekin who brought us our rice to fetch Deku and Dragon Master. They arrived quickly, wet from the rains, in sullen mood.
‘Deku,’ I began, cautiously, ‘I would like you to think about doing something for us.’ They looked at me quizzically. ‘We would like you to send out an ambush party tonight, on the Monrovia Highway. The Government troops attack us every day from the same direction. If we can hit them before they reach the town, they’ll turn back.’
Dragon Master and Deku considered it. It was unorthodox; no one liked fighting in the rain. Fighting at night was usually out of the question. Nick pressed the point home. In the morning we would be attacked, and we had three choices: evacuate now; be wiped out in a last stand with no ammo; or use what little supplies we still had to cut them off before they got here.
Deku agreed. Over our battered map, Nick laid out the basic structure of the ambush, and within an hour a platoon of men snaked off into the howling storm.
In the time it had taken to conclude the short conversation, I had crossed another line. I wanted to survive, at any cost. I had taken my chances in battle for days on end, but I wasn’t prepared to be killed by the stupidity of incompetent rebel tacticians. I was making my own luck – and drawing up my own moral code for war reporting at the same time. If that meant participating, so be it.
8
THE GREAT ESCAPE
Before dawn broke, the distant rumble of explosions told us the ambush had begun. Nick and I sat in the dark, and waited for the sodden men to return to camp. They all did. No rebels were injured; no Government troops were confirmed killed. With them they brought 10,000 rounds of captured ammunition and thirty-five
AKs.
I leaned on the balcony and breathed a long sigh of relief into the weak morning light. The odds had been tipped slightly in our favour.
‘De bulleh’ too plenteh to carry,’ the dripping captain in charge of the operation informed me, breathless with pride at his daring raid. ‘We burn i’ by de roa’ si’ so dey can’ use i’ on os.’
A thick smile spread across his face. Nick’s relief turned to anger:10,000 rounds was a lot of ammunition; but 20,000 rounds could have been decisive. They could have hidden the valuable extra ammunition and gone back for it later. Instead, they had burned it.
At least the Government army had been prevented from reaching town. It gave us the space to try and find out what had really happened to the big shipment from Fassama, and then plan accordingly. There was still no sign, nor word, of the expected delivery – and we feared the worst.
Emboldened by what he saw as the success of the morning’s ambush, Deku sent a hundred LURD fighters out from Cobra Battalion to attack the Government forces at Klay Junction immediately. They returned surprisingly quickly with another 7,500 rounds of ammunition and sixty-five captured AKs. Still wrapped up and in their factory grease, the new rifles looked like overgrown sardines freshly prised from a gigantic tin. I peeled back the plastic packaging to examine them. Deku was euphoric about the seizure; Nick was interested, as always, in all sorts of weapons; together they missed the true significance of the haul: Taylor was breaking the United Nations and regional ECOWAS arms embargo levied against him. The rifles were stamped, as usual, with their date of manufacture – in this case 2002 – engraved above the magazine port, next to the serial and model numbers. The rebels had not just captured weapons, they had gathered evidence. Nick traded in his Kalashnikov for one of the new haul. Although they were of inferior manufacture to the one he’d been using until then, it was the only way we could guarantee holding onto one long enough to deliver it to the Americans in Conakry.
My Friend The Mercenary Page 15
