by Al Venter
There was a lot more that wasn’t up to scratch. A single tap serviced the entire garrison, together with two modest-sized bathrooms: all for 80 men. Rations weren’t much better. The bulk consisted of homemade parcels that had been flown out from South Africa, a lot of it commercial packs of sugar, coffee and other perishables that had been bought in supermarkets and bundled into manageable ‘kits’ by wives. The most notable problem in Freetown was its humidity, which can be both clinging and fetid, and which meant that everything quickly deteriorated because it was packed in paper bags. Within a week, for instance, a half-pound of coffee became a lump of brown rock. The same happened to sugar.
According to Nellis, much of the time he spent with EO in Sierra Leone was occupied with putting local troops through their paces at a training barracks outside Freetown. It was his job to teach them helicopter trooping drills.
One day, we had a bunch of them arrive, almost all with their heads shaven and unceremoniously decorated by little plaster adhesive dressings, like those used for a cut finger. It was unusual, so we asked the EO sergeant major what it was about and he laughed. He called them ‘battle wounds’, and explained that that when the trainee troops didn’t listen to orders, they were given a sharp crack across the head. ‘Which is why we carry these sticks’, he said, pointing to bulky shillelagh tucked under his arm. ‘We can see very quickly who’s performing well and who is not’ he jocularly explained.
As it turned out, the EO training programme was tough. It was also uncompromising. However, in the end the South Africans turned out a small group of competent, trustworthy and reliable soldiers. Two of them served as side gunners on board Nellis’ Mi-17 and both proved to be outstanding fighters. Those trainees who could not, or would not shape up, were sent back to their original units.
In spite of problems with the government, which were dealt with as they arose, usually with a measure of compromise and adaptation, things generally seemed to work themselves out in the customary African way and the offensive against the RUF proceeded steadily. The rebels, meanwhile, were made very aware that they were facing some extremely determined opposition from small EO units who, with gunship back-up, ranged well into the interior.
Very early on in the campaign, EO commanders had demonstrated a ruthless brutality in the implementation of their pacifying programme. Moreover, they only took prisoners if they believed they might be useful. Neall Ellis explained:
We began an extensive offensive against the RUF in September 1996, downriver from Kenema, where we’d discovered they’d established their first headquarters in that region. For a while we’d experimented with additional firepower on all the aircraft, and finally fitted a 12.7mm heavy machine gun into the side door of the Hip. It was the first time we’d done so on an Mi-8, and it worked very well because we flew with the doors off anyway and were able to give close air support to our ground units using HE instead of ball ammunition.
As Nellis was to recall, driving the rebels into the interior after EO’s first series of battles in Sierra Leone had a significant effect not only on Freetown, but on much of the rest of the country. As the word spread, the people felt that they could breathe again. Also, it stymied Sankoh’s hopes of occupying the capital, although it was not the last time that he would try his luck.
Meanwhile, the South Africans were hailed as heroes wherever they went in the city. Never mind that they had come from a country steeped in racial discrimination, they had put their lives on the line in an African state and saved the day for everybody. The job was never easy and some of the men were killed while fulfilling their obligations, but they did what they had been paid to do and felt good.
However, the war was far from over. Sankoh’s RUF still had a sizeable force in the hills around the capital and one group after another was dealt with in the weeks that followed EO’s success. Also, for the first time, usable intelligence was coming in which eased things considerably for the gunships.
On a personal level, Nellis recalls, it was impossible not to get involved in the plight of the people of Sierra Leone. One of the victims was a lovely young woman: ‘She’d been crowned Miss Sierra Leone a short while before and had a can of paraffin thrown over her by her boyfriend because he was jealous of all the attention she was getting. The poor soul was terribly burned. I tried to raise funds to bring her back to South Africa for treatment, but that was in vain. She died soon afterwards.’ The tragedy affected Nellis so deeply that once the fighting in Sierra Leone had subsided, one of his dreams was to establish a burns care unit there.
Back in South Africa not long afterwards, Nellis once more found himself without work. One of his EO associates from East London offered him a job as manager of a Freetown supermarket, but Nellis felt that the $1,000 a month that came with the deal simply wasn’t worth it. ‘Just as well I refused’, he recalls. ‘Had I been in Sierra Leone, he would probably have asked me to fly the planeload of marijuana he’d organised to England. He flew it himself in the end. However, the Brits were onto him and when the aircraft landed somewhere in Cornwall, the cops were waiting. He ended up in prison for several years.’
CHAPTER TEN
INTO THE CONGO’S CAULDRON
Neall Ellis was introduced to Pretoria businessman-cum-lawyer-cum-intelligence agent Harold Muller when Sakkie van Zyl, a former security policeman and Koevoet Special forces operator, contacted him at his home in the Cape in November, 1996.
It was the same old story as before: they wanted to see me, like yesterday. I was in my garden when Van Zyl called and asked whether I’d drop everything and fly to Johannesburg that same day. They had something interesting on offer, he confided, and it was all going on in the Congo of old, then calling itself the Republic of Zaire. Van Zyl added that this new development wasn’t only an interesting proposition, but it had enormous potential and could ultimately be worth a tidy fortune to them all.
Naturally, I acquiesced, got myself ready and rushed to the airport. Once on the ground at Jan Smuts, Van Zyl and Harold Muller were there to greet me. I met Mauritz Le Roux, the third member of the team, the following day and, frankly, I wasn’t impressed. He came across as a little naïve. However, as I discovered, he was anything but. He’d formerly served as an engineer with 32 Battalion and was a founder member of the South African mercenary group Executive Outcomes.
Once he started talking about the project, I realized there was more to him than I’d originally thought. He went on to brief me about how he had been approached by the Zaire Embassy to form a unit to assist Mobutu defeat the rebel advance.
Thus was Stability Control Agencies (Stabilco) formed, with Muller and Le Roux as the directors, and registered in the Isle of Man. The company did not survive the Congolese debacle and Le Roux eventually went on to create Safenet (later, OSSI-Safenet) one of the largest private security companies in Iraq. Before moving on to do similar work in Afghanistan, it had more than 4,000 people in its employ.
Once our little team had gathered in Pretoria, the party went into a huddle and everybody was briefed on what was going on in Central Africa. Basically, President Mobutu Sese Seko’s Zaire Republic was involved in a major civil war that had been festering for years. There was nothing new about this because, ever since independence in the 1960s, the country had been teetering on the verge of anarchy. There had been a continual spate of hostilities, if not amongst its own people then with its overly belligerent neighbours. As Chris Munnion of London’s Daily Telegraph once suggested: ‘somebody was always getting killed in the old Congo, sometimes by the hundreds and occasionally by the thousands, and nobody cared a whit.’
One wag described it as Africa’s first real ‘non-event’ even though two or three million Congolese war victims died of famine or disease or were slaughtered during this period. The problem in late 1996 was that Mobutu was about to be toppled and the country was in the process of fragmenting. Enter Muller and Le Roux, who were going to ‘save’ it. Nellis comments:
I knew a b
it about Africa by then, and I couldn’t help voicing a little scepticism: I’d heard this ‘last gasp’ kind of thing before and in modern-day Africa, it has never really worked. In the end I wasn’t wrong, but there was money on the table and it was good, so I asked them to count me in.
I was asked to find another pilot and hire a couple of flight engineers: we would be flying choppers, they reckoned. I called my pal Ryan Hogan in Durban, who had served with me in the SAAF, and he immediately agreed. Between us, we settled on Grant Williams and Phil Scott as our engineers and, once approached, they threw their hats into the ring. Like me, they all had to get themselves to Johannesburg in a hurry.
So we came together the following morning, got ourselves kitted out with tropical gear, and a couple of extras we thought we would need, and headed out to Lanseria Airport where Le Roux had leased a Lear jet to take us north. There were problems about getting clearances to fly to Zaire, so we slept on the floor of the offices of the people from whom we had leased the plane.
After filing a flight plan to Kinshasa via Malawi, the six-man team quietly slipped away early the following morning. It was a pretty tight fit in the Lear with all their stuff, but somehow they managed. Van Zyl had work to do in South Africa, so he didn’t go along. Nellis carries on:
At Ndjili Airport, the country’s biggest international airport on the outskirts of the capital, we were met by the representatives of the ranking Zairean security minister, all senior people and very well dressed with polished ostrich skin leather shoes and expensive suits. I remember thinking that if the country was on the verge of revolt, these people certainly weren’t showing it.
Instead of leading us through normal immigration and customs channels, which at Ndjili can be quite severe, they took our passports, had them stamped and hustled us, and our baggage, past the guards to a pair of luxury four-wheel-drive vehicles. I thought it was all great until we were unceremoniously dumped at what was probably one of Kinshasa’s dingiest two-star hotels. It was inappropriately called the Christmas Hotel, which was a misnomer because there was nothing white or festive about the place. Instead, it was dark and dingy with sombre wooden panelling in the lobby which matched its dark linen bedding and its equally depressing restaurant. At least the concierge was happy to see us because most of his business was based on transients like us who had hopes of doing business with the government.
Even the menu was limited, although we did have several options. There was steak and chips (fries), chicken and chips, fish and chips, vegetables and chips and a meat that was as tough as leather and, being quite small, I felt might have once been something feline (that dish also came with chips). One of the group thought that it was not impossible that one of the embassies in Zaire was missing its cat. To add further insult to all the gore, all the dishes were covered in grease.
Meanwhile, Le Roux and Muller, with a considerable effort, were able to get to see General Kpama Baramoto, Mobutu’s security chief who was in command of the Civil Guard. One of the most feared men of the regime, he would be responsible for dealing with what we had to offer. The meeting over, they went on to meet a host of other government officials including General Nzimbi, who headed the Presidential Guard, and General Baruti, an exuberant man who was in charge of the Zairean Air Force. Finally, they were able to put forward something of a plan, which relied on Ryan, me and the engineers being able to make enough of the remaining Congolese Air Force aircraft airworthy to create a helicopter strike force.
We reasoned that the best tactic would be to approach Mobutu with the offer of a couple of squadrons of gunships, with our chaps in charge of course. With such a force, we could argue pretty persuasively that the revolutionary advance could be stopped. Also, we had history on our side because it had been done before, very recently in Angola and subsequently in Sierra Leone. Both times, EO was involved.
However, Stabilco’s founder still had to persuade the dictator’s henchmen that the proposals were realistic and attainable and could be implemented with a modicum of effort and outlay. That was the difficult part because, although there was a lot of money around, the people in government weren’t too eager to part with any of it, even though it was obvious that we offered them salvation. We needed to act quickly because the enemy was on the last stretch of road leading to Kinshasa, the final objective and, as we were to learn soon enough, Mobutu’s much-depleted army wasn’t doing much to stop them. One of the reasons for their inaction was that most of the soldiers hadn’t been paid for months—their officers had simply pocketed all the money.
What was more unsettling, thought Nellis at the time, was that some of Mobutu’s senior men, including a handful of generals, sensing the inevitable, had already defected to the revolutionaries. This hugely diverse bunch of Congolese, Rwandan and Burundi nationals were better known by their initials, AFDL, than by their proper name, Alliance des Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération du Congo-Zaïre.
Meanwhile, General Baramoto arranged for the South Africans to be taken to several air force bases around Kinshasa and they were perturbed at what they found. It didn’t take them long to appreciate that although Mobutu remained the Congo’s head of state, in reality a hopeless interregnum prevailed. Instability, and the uneasy lassitude that resulted, had pervaded the entire community in a country already stultified by corruption. However, even with all its problems, Zaire still seemed to attract just about every charlatan known to Interpol, as well as many others that weren’t.
Among those who arrived were some gritty, fast-talking arms dealers from both sides of what had once been the Iron Curtain, as well as numerous dubious characters from France, Israel, Yugoslavia, South Africa and elsewhere. Also poking about in the embers were all manner of ‘financiers’ and hopeful mercenary groups. It was truly a congregation of opportunists, each one of them believing that he could cut a deal. They had good reason for this belief. Despite the war, there was still a lot of good money about. The mines around Mbuji-Mayi in Kasai Province never stopped churning out diamonds, with more being smuggled into Zaire by UNITA’s rebels from Angola and, of course, there was widespread corruption. Often when there was a shortage of real money, gemstones would replace greenbacks. Two or three tiers down the economic ladder were a myriad of smaller operators, among them Neall Ellis and his group of freebooters.
A couple of days after they arrived, Le Roux and Muller were ushered into Baramoto’s Kinshasa residence. Le Roux’s initial presentation in Baramoto’s plush offices was both forceful and disarmingly simple. Apart from the heli-force, he told the general, he and his associates could muster about 500 ground troops within weeks. These would mostly be former EO veterans with experience in conventional as well as counter-insurgency operations. He stressed that many had been blooded in Angola.
Le Roux also told the general that he had any number of helicopter pilots on call, all professionals who were immediately available for deployment on the Zaire Air Force gunships that would be used to stunt the Kabila offensive. That done, he suggested that his people would set about training indigenous aviators so that the next time Zaire was faced with an emergency, foreigners wouldn’t have to be hired.
Having persuaded General Baramoto that Stabilco’s contribution might be the cure-all that he sought for the country’s ills, the South Africans were taken to the office of another close military associate of the president, Special Forces commander General Ngbale Nzimbi. After that it was the turn of the Minister of Defence, Admiral Mudima Mavua.1
One of Nellis’ first jobs on arriving in Kinshasa was to try and assess the situation with regard to military aircraft assets. He needed to find out whether Mobutu actually had any aircraft that could fly and whether there was any kind of strike capability that could be used against Kabila’s rebels. It was a hard task as everything was cloaked in secrecy. However, despite this, it didn’t take Neall long to discover that there were almost no airworthy helicopters. The machines had been bought, but most of them were in the crates in which
they’d arrived and hadn’t even been unpacked. Many critical elements, such as electronics or something applicable to rotor operation, would be missing. Often, they would have been sold so that the requisite rake-off could be passed on to the responsible minister or general after the order had been placed. Occasionally, one of the Mi-24s that could still lift-off would go out on a sortie, but ammunition and fuel were limited. In a tight spot, the Hinds could be used for ferrying troops, but that was only a stopgap measure.
As Neall recalls, they’d insisted on seeing all of the country’s aviation assets, and they were eventually taken to a local air force base where they found a C-130 transport plane, minus three of its engines. Otherwise, it was in excellent shape, having been refurbished by the Atlas Aircraft Corporation in Johannesburg the year before, at a cost of millions. It was only discovered years later that General Baruti, the man responsible for the planes, had sold the engines to a local trader, together with an export permit to get them out of the country.
Also at the base was a Canadian-built Caribou showing serious signs of wear and the lack of adequate service. There were also 20 Sia-Marchetti 260s, the majority in reasonable shape but not flyable. Although these prop-driven trainers were light, they could be fitted with machine guns and under-wing rocket-pods (very much as the Pilatus PC-7s had been fielded against UNITA forces in Angola). These planes could then be deployed against Kabila’s rebel force as ground-attack aircraft and with good tactical direction, could cause a lot of damage.