by Al Venter
Then, from nowhere, Captain Atembina pitched up at the dreaded Christmas Hotel and told us to get our things together. He loaded us into his vehicle and took us across town to the Intercontinental Hotel, where, with a flourish that you might have expected from somebody who is spending a lot of his own money, he checked us in at the government’s expense. Night had suddenly become day.
The hotel was remarkable, the best in Central Africa. Moreover, we could eat and drink as much as we liked and didn’t need to pay: we could sign for all of it. Our hotel room even had its own fridge, which was kept well stocked, and we had CNN on TV.
Roelf and I tended to keep a low profile, in part because the Belgian woman running the hotel with her Jordanian husband mentioned that there were Kabila supporters in residence. She wouldn’t say who they were, except that there were quite a few of them. There were also three Frenchmen staying there, and they liked to make a nuisance of themselves by routinely getting drunk at the bar.
A man calling himself JJ Fuentes, or simply ‘JJ’ for short, claimed to be a French Air Force fighter pilot. He also said he had Special Forces training, which sounded bogus. Another man in his little francophone coterie was a rather big fellow who had served in the French Foreign Legion, or so he said, and the third, the quiet one, maintained that he had history with the French Army. In fact, it didn’t take us very long to work out that this was another group of hopefuls trying to secure a contract for French mercenaries, probably under the auspices of the legendary Bob Denard.
We sent word back to Pretoria and told them that things were looking up, especially since we were now happily ensconced in five-star luxury and all the trappings that went with it. All the while, we were waiting for Captain Atembina to take us to visit General Mahele because, from what we gathered, it seemed that the elusive money was finally to be made available for a smaller contract for just over 300 men instead of the original 500. This was a bit of a blow because even 3,000 men wouldn’t have been nearly adequate in a country of this size.
Towards the end of March the situation in the country became critical. The rebels had taken Kisangani and the Serb mercenary group, which was supposed to be holding the city, retreated to Gbadolite in the north. There were also political demonstrations in Kinshasa which turned violent.
Suddenly, it wasn’t even safe to walk in the streets around the hotel, so accepting good advice, Nellis stopped heading out for his early morning jogs.
The demonstrations could be quite violent and were dealt with severely by the police, with the army also getting involved from time to time. Just about every day guns could be heard being fired, especially if there were demonstrators involved. The authorities were ruthless. They would fire live rounds and people who stood their ground and shouted abuse were shot dead. Nellis remembers:
Sometimes these demonstrations would take place within sight of the Intercontinental and Roelf and I would take up grandstand positions on our balcony and watch running battles and, more often than not, see some of the demonstrators being felled. The rounds fired by the cops would sometimes pass quite close to where we were perched and we’d be reminded of the old ‘tikking’ sound as bullets flashed past. It was certainly a diversion from watching CNN.
Overall, the two men couldn’t miss the fact that conditions in Kinshasa had become quite nasty. The government was crumbling and, as the saying goes, the rats were jumping ship, furiously so.
Many local people and expatriates had already left the country for Brazzaville across the Congo River and Nellis and Roelf would keep a check on the hotel guest list at reception as the numbers dwindled. They were aware too that it was almost impossible to get a seat on a plane leaving Kinshasa’s Ndjili Airport. Nellis has distinct memories of that time:
And then, when even the journalists started to leave and only the die-hard hacks remained, we had to accept that the end was not far off. On 1st June, we were told that rebel forces were only 200km from Kinshasa and, obviously, that late in the day the government wasn’t going to be forthcoming with a contract that would end up costing more than $100 million. Roelf and I talked endlessly about it and there was no escaping the fact that it was almost time for us to leave as well.
We’d just started lunch at the hotel when Captain Atembina called the next day and told me to get ready. The acting president of Zaire wanted to see me in person, he disclosed. The Congo Army captain was actually quite excited and he said that the portents looked good. I’d met General Likunya previously, while having discussions with the other generals on the prospect for the contract, and he seemed to be a reasonable man who had certainly shown himself in favour of hiring mercenaries to save his country.
When I eventually got to his office, he asked me to sit down and said that the government had decided to award us the contract immediately. Trying to maintain as dignified a pose as possible, I was elated. He didn’t waste time with words, but immediately set about describing a situation that was not only bad but, in his own words, could be equated with ‘a state of emergency’.
Could we help? His brow was pinched when he asked.
Of course we could, I replied. We now had a contract and we would immediately set to work.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
ON THE RUN ACROSS THE CONGO RIVER
It could be said that what happened next was entirely predictable. By the time Kabila’s forces began to close in on Kinshasa, no trained pilots could be found to man the Hinds. There was a persistent fear within Zaire’s military command that its pilots couldn’t be trusted and some generals felt that there might be rebels among them who would take their gunships into combat and end up behind enemy lines. In reality, that would be tantamount to committing suicide as any government asset approaching enemy lines automatically became a target.
Nellis was of the opinion that had it been possible, one or two of the pilots might have been crazy enough to do just that, especially once the situation became critical. However, in the final months of the conflict there was only a single operational Puma and some combat-ready Gazelles.
Nellis takes up events as they happened:
After the meeting, I phoned Mauritz and told him we had the contract and that he needed to get the guys to Kinshasa as soon as possible. That was a priority, I stressed, because Likunya wanted us to deploy to Gbadolite the next day. Mauritz was good to his word, and arrived in the Zairean capital by private jet with a couple of pilots and ground personnel. After a short discussion, Juba, one of the South African pilots who had flown with us in Sierra Leone agreed to stay. JJ Fuentes, the French pilot who had made such a nuisance of himself in the Intercontinental Hotel, agreed to travel with us to Gbadolite as well. He made no mention of what had happened to his two pals.
Initially, the plan was for Juba and Nellis to ferry two of the Mi-24 gunships to Kinshasa. JJ would bring one of the serviceable ground strike jets down and they would then start operations against the rebels.
In checking things over, the pilots found that the Hinds were not in very good shape. In fact, most of the gunships were unserviceable, although a pair of them looked like they could be used in combat, even if there were no spare parts and little ammunition. Juba decided to test fly the one chopper that looked better than the rest, but once airborne it began vibrating so intensely that he thought he wouldn’t make it back onto the ground. Fortunately, he and Nellis were able to land. They then test-flew the second helicopter, which seemed to be relatively serviceable. Nellis commented:
The decision was made that we would try to operate the one Mi24 until we could get one of the Russian technicians to make some repairs. We realised then that the Yugoslavian crews who had been based there before we arrived had deliberately sabotaged the aircraft. Only weeks previously, when Roelf van Heerden and I visited Kisangani, we had seen them in operation.
While we were flying, Mobutu’s son visited the airfield and spoke to JJ. He assured the Frenchman that we would get all the support we needed from his father and that if we s
tayed to fight, we would be handsomely paid. He also declared that if there were to be a sudden extraction of his father and family, he would ensure that we would be on the aircraft, and that he would get us out of the country to safety. In the meantime, we should let him have a list of logistical requirements which would be dealt with immediately. Ammunition for the gunships was our priority, we told him.
Our plan was to leave as soon as possible for Kinshasa. Mobutu’s son said that everything would be arranged. Unfortunately, that was the last we saw or heard of the man.
While there are conflicting views about what went on during those final days of Mobutu’s rule, much seemed to stem from the inability of the country’s military to communicate internally. It was a fundamental issue, with staff officers alienated from the main body of the armed forces. More significantly, the generals who should have been prosecuting hostilities would sit comfortably on their backsides in the capital and hope that the next day would bring better news.
In their befuddled minds, said Nellis, there was little that prompted urgent attention: ‘it’s out there in the bush somewhere … doesn’t matter now … perhaps later’, one of them was heard to say after a few drinks with the South Africans.
To the majority of these senior military men, Kabila’s rebellion did not appear to warrant any kind of radical action. It was impossible for them to grasp that a crass and untutored clown like Kabila could win a single battle, never mind lead a revolutionary army to victory.
For years Mobutu’s intelligence services, which were immense, utterly intimidating and intrusive, had been downplaying the threat. It got to the point where opportunities arose to assassinate Kabila (twice by poison), but the idea was scotched on the basis of better the devil you know. There was no rationale for any of it, especially the failure of the Zairean High Command to do what was expected of it.
Despite the horrendous hardships suffered by their troops, who had been holding the line in the interior for more than a year by then, these sycophants went on living the good life as if it would never end. Their staff officers would sometimes come back to Kinshasa and try to argue that disaster was only a step away, but it made no difference. For a major or a colonel to infer that his boss wasn’t doing his job wouldn’t have been worth his life. The last person to be made aware of any of it was le grande patron himself. Nobody had the courage to suggest to a visibly ailing Mobutu that things were falling apart in his beloved country. One member of Kinshasa’s peripatetic diplomatic corps commented: ‘You needed a really big pair of balls to bring any sort of bad news to the old man.’
When they finally did get things going towards the end, recalls Nellis, they rushed about like proverbial chickens without heads and achieved even less. ‘And that was already late November, with everybody looking after their own interests and fuck the country’, was his wry comment. ‘It certainly didn’t appear to work that way with the rebels,’ he said, ‘they just came headlong at us and nothing seemed to stop them.’ By then, Kabila’s main force was perhaps a few weeks march south of Kinshasa. Nellis remembers:
We all knew that Mobutu could have bought ten squadrons of modern Russian fighter jets with his small change alone. Had he done that, he could have ended the war in a month. The best helicopter gunships were available to him on the international arms market and no government would have minded a jot, not even if he acquired foreign pilots to fly them. To begin with, Moscow would have seized the opportunity and scored billions of dollars in arms sales.
All that stuff was ready and waiting: surplus stocks that lay rotting in dozens of abandoned former Soviet bases in Siberia. The only thing that Mobutu had to do was get hold of some of Kinshasa’s resident biznesmeni and they would have sold him their grandmothers if they thought they could have scored.
It was also a reality that most nations trading with the Congo were desperate for Mobutu to reach some sort of accord with his enemies. As well as exporting diamonds and precious metals, for more than half a century the Congo had been a major producer of about two dozen essential metals, including copper, uranium and cobalt. Zaire alone owned half the world’s reserves of coltan (short for columbite-tantalite—a heat-resistant compound used in electronics to make things like mobile telephones and Sony PlayStations).
Obviously, as the war dragged on the insecurity that resulted from the impasse suited nobody. It was also certain that none of the major powers would have stood in his way, no matter what he did, even if he hired mercenaries. Executive Outcomes had already very successfully established the concept of the private military company, so that precedent was in place. That the country topped the international list in human rights atrocities was no longer an issue. Instead, peace, at any price, was.
As Nellis reviewed the situation facing him after his tiny group arrived in Gbadolite, he saw that there were two options, and both were immediate.
The Hinds could be stripped down and taken to Kinshasa in a couple of support planes. However, Jet A1 fuel would have to be freighted in as, by then, Ndjili International Airport was down to its final reserves and being avoided by all the foreign airlines that usually called.
Alternatively, if necessary clearances could be obtained, the Mi-24s could be routed through Congo (Brazza) and from there, flown across the river to Kinshasa. That option went down when an American military advisory group in Brazzaville commandeered all available aircraft fuel in the state. The Yanks put out the word that permission for the Hinds to transit was, as they liked to phrase it, no longer viable.
The situation in Gbadolite itself was discouraging. The MiG fighter jets were there all right, but they were still in kit form. Russian technicians were assembling them, but that could take weeks. Also, special oils and greases, ordered from Moscow to complete the task, never arrived. Then there were some battery problems. There were none for the MiGs, which meant that even if they were able to fly, it would have been impossible to start the engines. Issues were further compounded when it was discovered that the Jastrebs’ batteries were missing and that there was only one serviceable Mi-24 battery (whereas two are needed for an internal start). It was a shambles.
The crunch came when Nellis was told by Rudi, a Russian technician in charge of the air force base at Gbadolite who spoke passable English, that the ground power units that had been sold to Mobutu’s people didn’t have the correct fittings needed to plug into the aircraft, so they were useless too. Hands in the air, the normally unflappable Nellis asked what else could go askew. Lots, he was to discover. On top of everything, neither the aircraft technicians nor the unit armourer had arrived at Gbadolite, as had been instructed by the head of the air force.
The following day, Friday 16 May 1997, President Mobutu arrived at Gbadolite in his presidential jet. He had a huge throng of family, ministers, wives and children in tow—easily more than 100 people. Kabila was on the verge of taking Kinshasa. Later that afternoon, Rudi quietly cornered the South Africans in one of the hangars and said that he’d had a call from friends. ‘Things are really bad’, he told them. If the government hadn’t already collapsed, it was about to do so.
The news didn’t exactly come as a shock, but Nellis hadn’t expected things to move quite so fast. Most worrying was the prospect of being stuck in one of the darkest reaches of central Africa. An hour later they got word that rebel units were moving towards Gbadolite itself, and that their vanguard might even be there the next day.
Meanwhile, Rudi whispered that he’d heard that Mobutu was intending to leave the country that night on an Ilyushin Il-76. The plane was expected to arrive at Gbadolite in the early evening and the remainder of the ZAF mobile missile systems still positioned around the airfield were scheduled to be removed and returned to Moscow. They should all be sure to be on that aircraft when it left, the Russian warned. If they weren’t, he shrugged and made the symbolic cut across the throat.
Nellis and Juba Joubert met Mobutu later that afternoon and it came as a surprise when the old and obviously ill
leader started ambling around the airport with a couple of bodyguards. He stopped to talk to the two South Africans. Nellis was impressed, especially since there were no shared experiences to stoke a conversation. Even at that late stage Mobutu asked them in a quiet, dignified voice what they needed. When they told him what the problems were with the Hinds, he said that everything would be delivered the next day. He confided, too, that he was expecting several arms shipments from Libya. His manner reflected confidence, recalls Nellis.
The relief flights were part of a done deal, Mobutu told them. Therefore, there was no reason to doubt the man, Nellis recalls, although at that late stage, he would have liked to believe just about anything. Mobutu did warn the crew not to return to Kinshasa, and promised that if he had to leave, he’d take them with him. With that he shook hands and moved on.
A short while later they heard that their old friend General Mahele, by then appointed Commander of the Army and Minister of Defence, had been shot by one of Mobutu’s sons, an army colonel. The story was that Mahele had intended to defect to Kabila, or at least that was what a Kinshasa radio bulletin suggested. Perhaps he had, it was an excellent option, although the South Africans doubted it. Everybody was aware that Mahele was professional to his fingertips and perhaps he had been perceived a threat to members of the Mobutu family who were still in Kinshasa. The turncoat general had been ‘dealt with’, Kinshasa Radio crowed shortly afterwards and Nellis thought it was a great pity. Mahele was the only real soldier he’d met during his six-month stint in the country.
Unknown to the South Africans, Mauritz Le Roux at that moment was in the air in a chartered Lear heading towards Gbadolite. He’d told his wife that he intended to pull the two men out, even though he believed he might be too late. When he arrived at Brazzaville, he was not only denied fuel but arrested and his plane was impounded. Having been allowed to refuel the following morning, Le Roux and his flight crew were warned that if they ever returned, they would be jailed. They had no option but to head back to South Africa.