by Al Venter
Nellis commented about the obvious lack of care and attention given to all these aviation assets. He told the generals that in Zaire’s tropical climate, more sophisticated equipment had to be looked after or it would deteriorate very quickly, and that included aircraft. Many of the trainers had been abandoned in the rain, their cockpit hatches left open. There was a Puma helicopter, also inoperable because it had been stripped of some of its parts, which had been sold.
‘In fact,’ Neall recalls, ‘there was an enormous amount of stuff, but nothing that would actually work properly, never mind that we might be able to use it if we were to go to war… .’ It was Baruti’s view, he recalls, that if they could get somebody to repair these aircraft and somehow buy weapons for the Sia-Marchettis, all would be well.
Others must have thought along similar lines before, probably several times, I told myself … so why hadn’t anybody done something about it? More to the point, these generals were not short of the money needed to do the necessary as there wasn’t one among them who was not a multi-millionaire.
I came up with something of a solution and said that we could fit 20mm cannons onto the three Gazelle SA-342 choppers (which the Zaireans had originally stolen from Rwanda when that country imploded). The next day I walked into the armoury attached to the base and spotted five 20mm MG-151 cannons, the same guns the South African Air Force fitted to their Alouette gunships. All were ex-factory stock from Lyttleton Engineering outside Pretoria. Although a couple were badly rusted and beyond repair—they’d probably also been left in the rain—three were still in their original grease and had never been used. They were literally ‘out of the box’.
I scratched around a bit more and even found some of their ammunition, but none of it looked reliable. They said they had some newer stuff, and I left it at that.
A few days later, Nellis and the rest of the group were flown in a Zaire Air Force turbo-prop Cessna to Kindu, a large town to the east of Kinshasa. It was regarded locally as a minor hop, but it still took four or five hours to get there, which was when Neall said he realised how big Zaire really was:
What amazed me was the extent of the forests that we flew over: they literally stretched from one horizon to another, almost without a break. For hours there was no evidence of habitation.
We landed at a fairly big airport at Kindu and were told that the rebels weren’t far away. We were taken to the three choppers that were parked, untended and unguarded, looking pretty forlorn, in a field not far away. Our flight engineers looked the Gazelles over, found them in good nick and, under the circumstances, quite well maintained considering that we were standing way out in the bush.
Satisfied that they were operable, the South African pilots took each of them up in turn and came back pleased. The rest of the time in Kindu was spent quite pleasantly, Neall remembers:
We ended up spending the night in Kindu, lavishly entertained by the general in charge of the region, French champagne and all. For all that, we couldn’t miss the poverty about us. The town itself was incredibly dilapidated—there were almost no private vehicles (nor any fuel for them, anyway) and certainly no electricity. Meanwhile, the military at the local base lived like proverbial regents of old. It was almost medieval.
While the South African mercenaries were all made very welcome by the officers and never felt any animosity, Nellis felt there was a distinct reluctance to provide any kind of information about the war, even though it was literally around the corner. They flew back to Kinshasa the next morning and reported that the Gazelles could be gunned up and sent into action almost immediately, and that Ryan and Nellis would fly them. ‘But to do that, I stressed, the three choppers had to be brought through to Kinshasa from Kindu without any delay’, said Neall. There was still a lot of work to do on the machines, including fitting firepower, he told air force General Baruti. However, the matter simply died a natural death, and Neall doubts whether those helicopters were ever flown again. They’re probably still in Kindu, what’s left of them.
In his personal dealings with the mercenaries, General Baramoto was both courteous and friendly. Socially, he was scrupulously correct. Nellis remembers him as a tall man with greyish hair and spectacles and, unlike many of his colleagues, not too heavy for his height. Also, he projected a confidence that reflected power. Whether in uniform, in traditional African dress or in a formal suit, he was always impeccably turned out. A nonsmoker, he liked a good whisky, especially a good single malt, but he didn’t overdo it, at least not in the presence of the South Africans.
Although he understood English, Baramoto confided to one of the South Africans that he felt he could express himself better in French. Consequently, there was usually an interpreter in attendance, although the man was more than a good linguist. He had large bulges under both arms and, judging from what the other generals used for protection, Nellis believed that they were possibly something from the Heckler and Koch range.
Baramoto’s house was a single-storied villa in Kinshasa surrounded by high walls and bougainvillea. It wasn’t as flamboyant as might have been expected, especially since Mauritz Le Roux, on first arriving there, had been shown a room piled almost to the ceiling with bundles of cash, mostly large-denomination U.S. dollar bills, although there were also piles of Sterling, French francs, Deutschmarks and Japanese yen. Some of the stacks of cash were metres tall.
Another distinctive feature, Nellis recalls, was a SAM-14 ground-to-air launcher, complete with a missile in the tube, propped up precariously against a wall in the entrance hall. It seemed to be a permanent fixture because nobody ever moved it and, as he mentioned to Le Roux, had it been accidentally detonated, it might have demolished the entire building. He recalls making a mental note that if there was one, it was likely that there would be more.
Furnishings at the Baramoto home were sumptuous and included several leather-covered lounge suites in the sitting room, set against some magnificent silk drapes. Although Nellis never met any of the general’s wives, the pilot was introduced to two of his daughters: ‘they were quite lovely girls … very well dressed in chic European clothing that seemed to be mostly designer’, he remembers.
Baramoto’s taste in cars was ‘orthodox oligarch’: the inevitable black Mercedes limo with tinted windows, of which there were several, together with a couple of top-of-the-range land cruisers.
There was always a crowd of soldiers and civilians hanging about the place including a contingent of guards who must have been as well kitted out and efficient as any in the country. Those troops were always present, resplendent in their smartly pressed camouflage uniforms. Most sported shiny AK-47s and there was always a clutch of RPGs nearby. There were also quite a few Toyota pick-ups, some with 12.7mm heavy machine guns mounted on the back, usually with somebody standing by in the driver’s seat.
Nellis could see that these troops knew what was expected of them, and they kept a wary eye on everything going on in the vicinity, which included monitoring passing traffic. Some of these soldiers were South African trained. A couple actually recognized one of the former Recce commando officers who arrived with Le Roux one morning and the ‘reunion’ ended up being quite emotional, with big smiles all round, Baramoto included. This minister’s ties with South Africa’s apartheid leaders were once referred to by an American diplomat as ‘all but intimate’.
Most meetings took place late, as if Baramoto and his generals were almost afraid of being seen in public with white people. At the same time, warned Nellis, while you were with the man, you couldn’t help sensing that under the brittle crust of his amicability lay a magma of paranoia.
Once Neall Ellis and co. became better acquainted with the generals, they spent a lot of time chewing the fat at the home of General Likunia, the Congolese Minister of Defence, or they would pop along to General Mahele’s place. It was similar to Baramoto’s but seriously needed to be painted. As Chief of the Armed Forces, Mahele preferred to do his entertaining in the garden, usually under an
Oriental pagoda, left behind by some forgotten colonial functionary, which seemed to have weathered well in the tropics.
There would be endless talk about the best way to tackle Kabila and his ‘thugs’. Nellis would choose his moment and try to swing the conversation around to the subject of helicopters: after all, he would say, it was his reason for being there. He very much wanted to create a chopper gunship wing so that he could prove his worth. With time, the issue became more difficult to broach, if only because he had to keep going over the same imponderables: the war; the lack of resistance on the part of government forces; the inability of the air force to make headway and so on. There was a solution to it all, he would urge for the umpteenth time, ‘there was an immediate way of turning the war around!’
He would get everybody’s attention for about 40 seconds. Brows would furrow, the generals would stop what they were doing and, for a few moments, they’d listen. However, Neall admits that the degree of interest was usually directly proportionate to the amount of grog that had been drunk as one of them would usually make some inane comment and everybody would laugh. With that, the party would go on as before, more drinks would be called for and Kinshasa’s deceptive fog of war would envelop them all as they ignored the harsh reality of their situation.
The reality was that the military situation had become precarious in the month or so that Nellis and his group had been in the country. At that stage, already, Kinshasa was well within Kabila’s sights. What’s more, everybody in the city knew it.
One of Zaire’s key problems was the army’s pay hiatus, a situation which nobody, least of all the generals with whom the South Africans socialized, was prepared to remedy. They had money in abundance; in fact any one of the generals could have paid the army’s monthly salary bill a hundred times over, but none of them was prepared to part with any of it. Not that there was any great deal of cash involved. The average Forces Armées Zaïroises (FAZ) soldier’s basic wage was about $2 a month, in a country where a pack of local cigarettes cost half that. With government forces estimated at about 100,000 men, the sum required to keep them happy and loyal was modest compared to the millions that were being squandered by autocrats on the most absurd luxuries.
For instance, flowers for all of Mobutu’s residences, which numbered about a dozen, large and small, were still being flown in daily from Europe, as was fresh dairy produce and container-loads of milk-fed veal, some of it from Japan. This was all in a country where the majority of the population had almost nothing.
It seems illogical that all this money would be spent on such excesses when it could have been used to fight successfully against the insurrection. ‘Looking back, none of it makes sense’, Nellis says today. ‘The security, the longevity of all of these people was at risk, but nobody bothered to challenge the system, probably because they feared for their lives if they did so’. What seemed to matter most to the majority of the people in control was that their moveable assets had already been stashed abroad. At the time of his death, Mobutu was estimated to be worth somewhere between five and eight billion dollars.
A few days before Christmas, Le Roux suggested that everybody should head home for Christmas. Baramoto had gone silent and there were rumours that he had fallen out of favour with Mobutu. When they got back to Pretoria, Nellis and the others met a group of former Special Forces operators to plan the Zairean operation. Nellis comments:
What we didn’t know yet was that after we had put forward a figure of 500 troops and airmen needed for the rescue, it was first whittled down to 300 men and then to a miserable 30, which was crazy for a country four times the size of France. In the end, numbers didn’t seem to matter anymore.
Roelf van Heerden, an old friend from the SADF and EO in Sierra Leone, was put forward as the man who should command Stabilco’s ground forces. He had led a very successful campaign as a mercenary in Angola, his squad having cleared the area around the diamond city of Saurimo, in the east of the country.
A slender fellow with long, scraggy hair, a moustache and small rimmed glasses, he hardly looked the archetypal bush fighter but he seemed to fit the bill as far as Le Roux was concerned. Van Heerden and Nellis were offered directorships in Stabilco. A week later, on New Year’s Day 1997, they headed back to Kinshasa with Muller. The rest of the gang followed a few days later to assist with planning. Muller had several meetings with government officials and suddenly things looked good.
The figure that was put forward for the six-month contract plus the equipment required was U.S. $90 million. This included all vehicles, light and heavy weapons and both Mi-8 and Mi-24 helicopters. Included in the deal would be strike jet aircraft and food and salaries for the 500 men the directors believed would be necessary to make it all work.
The generals didn’t argue, but insisted that the South Africans sort out any equipment already in the country that might be of use. However, after a quick look and dismal report-back, it was clear that it would be quicker and easier to buy all the stuff new from overseas suppliers, but first they needed money to be able to do that.
Then Captain Atembina suddenly appeared on the scene. Although it was never clear what his job actually was, he eventually arranged a meeting with General Mahele, who immediately came across as a more professional soldier than the usual military opportunist the South Africans had dealt with so far. Mahele was surprisingly candid in admitting that his people were simply not up to the job and that he and his colleagues needed help. He was also concerned about Stabilco’s ability to put men on the ground as soon as possible, but stressed that he would not be able to provide assistance with equipment. Nellis comments:
This was clearly a problem. Our men, all 500 of them still waiting back home, were ready to roll but we needed the equipment to make things work. That, in turn, relied on the money that needed to be paid up front. We told him that buying military hardware wasn’t something that happened overnight. Some of the stuff was ‘on the shelf ’, but most of it was not. There were international laws and obligations in place to prevent the illegal sales of weapons to rogue nations which included the need for End User Certificates. Also necessary were authorisations for the aircraft ferrying the arms to Zaire to overfly the countries en route. Getting over these hurdles took time. The governments doing the selling had to satisfy themselves that the arms would not be passed on to another country. In a sense, it was bureaucracy gone mad, but these were things that had to be taken account of.
It was immediately clear to us all that things had become bogged down again. Moreover, it would take a massive effort to arrange it all, and that was before factoring in the extreme level of corruption that we would have to deal with. On top of that, Kabila and his rebel army were making significant progress in the east. Time, obviously, was of the essence.
General Mahele quickly tasked us to produce a plan, which he wanted to present to Mobutu a few days later. Meanwhile, we needed an office from which to work, so Captain Atembina introduced us to George Kiriakos, a Greek businessman in Kinshasa. George, the ultimate dealer, broker, entrepreneur and outrageous speculator, was one of those charming quasi-colonial characters you find all over Africa, even today. He allowed us access to his office where, he said, we could put the plan together. Obviously, nothing was free and he and Atembina wanted their cut from any deal that was ultimately brokered: 30 per cent of it, and that on top of the original figure! It was an enormous add-on, he agreed, but as he said, who cared, as long as the government was prepared to pay and Le Roux and the rest of us got our share. We couldn’t argue with that kind of logic, so we let it roll.
George appeared to have financial interests in many corners of Africa. After dealing with him, we became aware that he was involved in the war in Angola. He had actually been dealing with the Angolan rebel movement UNITA, buying and selling coffee and timber from the eastern part of that country. Diamonds were clearly a part of it, but he couldn’t be drawn on that issue. We decided soon enough that George Kiriakos was playing bot
h sides and that we had to be circumspect about how much we told him. It was entirely possible that he had links with Kabila and his henchmen.
Because of the impasse that gradually took shape—the government was seriously dragging its feet—Harold and the rest of the group returned to South Africa, leaving me and Roelf to hang in there and hope that something would develop. We ran short of cash and, to cut a long story short, we went through difficult weeks when we sometimes didn’t even have enough money to eat, never mind buy beer.
The food issue gradually developed into a major problem. Roelf and I eventually had to resort to buying a loaf of bread and a tin of pilchards each day simply to keep us alive. Because there was no money left over for transport, we walked wherever we needed to go, which wasn’t easy because Kinshasa is a pretty big place. One day, while walking alone down one of the avenues, I was surrounded by a group of young thugs who demanded money. They pointed to my watch and it was clear they meant business.
I tried to reason with them, telling them that I was as broke as they were and that there was no way I was going to give them anything. They suddenly turned aggressive and started the usual strong-arm stuff, pushing and manhandling me. That was when I decided that the only way out was to show them that I wasn’t the usual passive tourist, and I hauled out my only means of protection.
Normally, in these primitive countries I like to carry a knife, so out came my Spyderco, a pretty mean-looking blade shaped like the claw of an eagle. It was actually quite vicious. Frustrated as hell, I lunged at the leader and it was clear to everybody that I had serious intent. Obviously, I might have ended up in one of Zaire’s notorious prisons had I actually stabbed the man, but all I could think then was ‘fuck the consequences’. With that, this brave bunch of muggers fled. Nobody was robbed or stabbed that day, but I certainly felt a lot better for it afterwards. At least I’d managed to work off some of my frustrations.