by Al Venter
They refused to budge and there was no way I could take off … we had reached stalemate. Basically, the LZ was a small football field surrounded by dozens of tall trees, some more than 100ft high. Also, the outside air temperature was about 38 degrees Centigrade. While ‘Bokkie’ wasn’t underpowered, the Mi-17 definitely didn’t have enough engine power to get itself out of a relatively confined area with so many people on board, the total weight was roughly three times over factory limitations.
One of the Hind’s side-gunners takes aim at ground targets on a strike. Author’s photo
The crew kept trying, but even threats didn’t work, Nellis recalled. They couldn’t even get one of them to remain behind. Also, these guys were completely spaced out. Nellis explained that as fighters the Kamajors weren’t into the kind of drugs that most of us in the western world are familiar with. However, before each battle, they’d go through a ritual of their own, which often involved gulping down an extremely potent concoction that tended to liven things up a little.
Just then at the back of the helicopter, these guys really were on cloud nine and making a healthy din as well. They could probably be heard singing and shouting from a mile away, which was when I realized that the only way to get them out of my machine was to switch off the engines and try to talk some sense into the heads of their leaders. We went through all those motions but that didn’t work either.
The heat was steadily becoming more intense, as it does in the afternoons in the tropics. By late afternoon, Nellis knew it was like an oven in the back of his Hip with all those soldiers confined to a relatively tiny, airless area. In fact, he recalls, they were propped up, standing against each other, and if ever the analogy about being jammed into a sardine can was appropriate, he reckoned this was it!
After about an hour or so, the noise and chanting began to abate. Some of the Kamajors, soaked from top to toe with sweat, climbed out and went looking for something to drink. Obviously, there were quite a few who had become dehydrated, which probably helped in the end.
After that it wasn’t long before we managed to get some order out of the situation. I promised their leader that we would take as many as we could in the first run and return later to uplift the rest. That way we were able to select who was actually going to war. When we finally landed at Freetown, 54 of these Kamajor fighters disembarked from the helicopter, which was not bad for a 24seater!
Although they were skilled fighters, the Kamajors were up against an extremely aggressive enemy who had become accustomed to meeting little, if any, resistance, from government forces. When the war flared up again in late 1999, Foday Sankoh’s RUF quickly demonstrated that it was better trained and more than adequately equipped than it had been in the past, in large part because of the support it got from Liberia’s Charles Taylor.
‘Because of earlier results,’ commented Nellis, ‘we knew that Sankoh’s rebel army was powerfully motivated to achieve its single objective: the control of the entire country by force. Moreover, their combat ability was obvious and they succeeded just about every time they set out to capture a position held by government forces.’ Within a month of going back to war in 1999, Sankoh’s revolutionaries could go just about anywhere they wanted, except in the capital of Freetown.
Foday Sankoh’s twisted path to power as the head of the RUF spanned decades and meandered through several countries in Europe and Africa.
This radicalized 1970s student leader worked for a while as a television cameraman in Freetown before he joined the Sierra Leonean Army. He did part of his military training in Nigeria and the United Kingdom.
In 1971, Corporal Sankoh was cashiered from the army’s signal corps and imprisoned for seven years at the Pademba Road Prison in Freetown for taking part in a mutiny. On his release, he worked as an itinerant photographer in the south and east of Sierra Leone, eventually making contact with a group of young anti-government radicals.
His anti-establishment stance always fringed on the criminal and he ended up in jail several more times. When he was freed the final time in the 1980s, Sankoh fled with fellow Sierra Leonean exiles to Libya, where President Muammar Gaddafi was stirring up West African dissidents like Sankoh.
Powerfully opposed to those with wealth and anxious to lead his own rebellion, it was at Sabha, a remote and isolated terrorist training base deep in the Libyan Sahara, that Sankoh crafted a convenient alliance with Liberia’s Charles Taylor who was planning his own internal coup. Taylor’s bloody uprising ended with him seizing the presidency in neighbouring Monrovia in 1998 and it took him eight hard years of fighting to get there. Meanwhile, Sankoh and confederates, Rashid Mansaray and Abu Kanu, solicited support from Gaddafi for an armed uprising to oust the Sierra Leonean APC government.
With the support of Taylor, Sankoh spent much of the two years following a ceasefire to totally revamp his revolutionary army. Gaddafi provided material and financial support, while other countries linked to the rebels were Burkina Faso and, to a lesser extent, Sudan.
Nellis fires a rocket salvo at an enemy heavy machine-gun mounted on the back of a Land Rover. It took a couple of passes, but the weapon and the vehicle were finally destroyed. Author’s photo
Another, more ominous, factor only emerged later, after the rebel threat had been effectively countered, which may have a bearing on why Britain took such drastic steps to defeat the rebels. Islamic cadres linked to Osama bin Laden were also involved in the war. The al-Qaeda leader’s money funded a portion of the rebel diamond operations in Sierra Leone, and some of it was spent arming the RUF.
We now know that the RUF employed Russian, Ukrainian, South African, and other African mercenaries. Deployed operationally, many of these people were responsible for combat command and control as well as logistics and communications. For their part, the South Africans concentrated their efforts on imparting many of the principles they had used to good effect in their own wars in Namibia and Angola, which was one of the reasons the rebels initially gained as much ground as they did.
These ‘hired guns’ did not come cheap. Virtually every mercenary wielding a rifle or piloting a craft wanted diamonds, which was basically what the fighting was about. President Taylor’s cut was about a half of the gemstones carried, driven, flown or shipped across his border. His take was so large that it explains why, within a comparatively short three or four years, Liberia emerged in London, Johannesburg, Antwerp, and Tel Aviv as a diamond exporting country of significance.
Meanwhile, the war dragged on. On two occasions the rebels fought their way to within spitting distance of the gates of Freetown. Both times RUF forces were beaten back by a single helicopter gunship flown by Nellis, the government’s lone South African mercenary pilot. Distanced from their own supply lines, which ran out of Liberia, the rebels did not have the proper weaponry to counter the Nellis’ airborne firepower. His gunship had a 57mm rocket pod mounted under each of its winglets and a four-barrelled 12.7mm Gatling mounted in the nose which could fire nearly 4,000 rounds a minute.
Once the war was over, Sankoh was handed to the British and, under jurisdiction of a UN-backed court, he was indicted on 17 counts for war crimes, including the use of child soldiers as well as crimes against humanity that included charges of ethnic cleansing, extermination, enslavement, rape and sexual slavery.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE Mi-24 HELICOPTER GUNSHIP GOES TO WAR
There was also a lot of intrigue in Sierra Leone in June 2000. Neall recalls that:
As the conflict gathered momentum, you never really spoke your mind to somebody you didn’t know really well … and even then you could make a mistake. There were times when the war deteriorated into a kind of limbo and neither side was making headway. Then RUF supporters would quickly put the word out that the government was losing and that Sankoh’s people had taken the initiative. In truth, neither side was actually winning, but it was difficult to prove otherwise because that’s the way these insurgencies go. One of the immediate consequen
ces was that many people hedged their bets. Like the Sobels, they would be government supporters one moment and powerfully pro-rebel the next. It was almost a kind of life insurance.
Neall says that those who acted this way included ‘people who we believed we could trust and work with’. Among the worst culprits were some senior members of the Nigerian Army, in particular the unpredictable second-in-command of the United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) forces, Major General Mohammed A. Garba. Eventually, the UN Force Commander in Sierra Leone, Indian Major General Vijay Jetley, accused a group of Nigerian political and military officials at the top of the international military mission in Freetown ‘of working hard to sabotage the peace process … and the Nigerian Army command of looting diamonds in league with the rebel leader, Foday Sankoh’.
This was nothing new, said Nellis:
The media had been aware for a while that the Nigerians were playing silly buggers with the rebels because they wanted their grubby paws on the diamonds, which was really what it was all about. Then, about halfway through my stay in Sierra Leone, things took another turn, following the interception of a signal at army headquarters which caused me to ambush a rebel convoy on the road between Lunsar and Makeni. That strike killed and wounded some of the key players in the rebel command.
Ironically, though Nigerian staff officer Garba was implicated in an anti-government plot, General Vijay Jetley, the Indian officer in charge of UN operations in Sierra Leone, ended up losing his job.
Nellis went on to say:
What Garba’s subterfuge did for me was to indirectly offer the Freetown government the opportunity of a risky but daring raid against RUF command elements. It was an ambush that relied more on gut instinct than military intelligence and that it came off at all was remarkable … obviously we had our share of luck.
Here, Nellis outlines the events that led up to this attack and sets the scene for what followed:
A few days before 19 June 2000, we intercepted a radio message from the regional rebel headquarters in Makeni. Everything we heard suggested that the RUF command had been in contact with Nigeria’s General Garba. Sankoh’s people couldn’t have been aware that we were monitoring his calls, nor was Garba for that matter, and everything that subsequently took place only happened because we had good intelligence that he was already dealing directly with the rebels.
The message we’d intercepted said that the rebels had been given Garba’s satellite phone number and that a meeting was scheduled for the following week. The nub of it was that Garba had apparently told the rebels that the UN wanted to deal which, of course, was nonsense. He told them that it was his job to explore the possibility of all the parties involved in the war making peace.
What he didn’t tell the RUF was that the Freetown government had absolutely nothing to do with any of it. In fact, they didn’t even know he was talking to Foday Sankoh’s people, never mind that he had arranged a meeting. Essentially, he was committing treason.
There were no specifics about time or place, but Garba suggested in one of his secret calls that the conference take place in Makeni. He suggested that it should be with the rebel command and there would be representatives of several African countries present (again, under supposed UN auspices which, of course, was not the case).
We got the impression fairly early on that Garba was determined to be present, if only for the diamond rewards he imagined would be his if this tidy bit of sedition succeeded. At the time, only a handful of people were aware of what he was up to because details were restricted to a few of the senior people at the top, including the president. This was one time they didn’t want any leaks.
On Saturday, 17 June, Army Intelligence had determined a tentative date for Garba’s ploy. It was to take place on the following Monday, just two days away. At that stage, everything pointed to it happening not at Makeni, but at Lunsar, a small town between Freetown and Makeni, though we couldn’t be certain. It made good sense though, as the town was close enough for both sides to get to without too many problems and Garba could reach it easily enough in one of the UN choppers. Also, Lunsar was relatively isolated so whatever took place there wouldn’t draw attention, especially from the government or the media. The probable time was set at about 10h00 hours.
On the face of it, it seemed that Garba had brokered an arrange ment convenient to both himself and the rebels.
Side-gunner on board the Hind waiting for opportunities. Nellis’ helmeted head can just be seen in the cockpit up front. Author’s photo
With this information in hand, Nellis spoke to Colonel Tom Carew, the Sierra Leonean Chief of Defence Staff, about the matter. Carew confirmed that the government was definitely not a party to any meetings between the UN and the rebels. The reply inferred that if the meeting were to happen at all, the (bogus) UN delegation would most probably get there by UN helicopter.
Being second-in-command of UNAMSIL, Garba could commandeer a helicopter at will, without questions being asked. The chopper could then be flown to a disused airfield near the RUF headquarters, adjacent to Lunsar’s old iron ore mine. Nellis’ intention was to get airborne about 15 or 20 minutes before Garba’s entourage lifted off and, he said, hope to hell that the rebels on the ground waiting for the delegation would believe that his rotors were those bringing in the Nigerian and his entourage. Nellis commented: ‘Obviously, I was also counting on them all being gathered together in one area. I’d surprise them in the open, though I’d have to get in and out before the UN contingent arrived.’ The intention was that the UN helicopter would be greeted by a lot of very freshly dead rebel bodies.
Nellis armed the Hind’s Gatling and two pods of 57mm rockets, ‘courtesy of the United Nations’. Ironically, these were munitions returned to Cockerill Barracks at General Jetley’s behest only days earlier and it was Garba who had signed the release.
Rather than use the other Mi-24, with its larger 80mm rocket pods (which made for a bigger kill radius), Nellis reckoned that the smaller projectiles would be the more feasible option as he would be coming in low and fast. That way, he’d be able to launch the attack at the last moment and ensure sharper accuracy. It wasn’t always possible to do that with 80mm projectiles, he explained, as he’d have had to stand off a bit. If the 80mm rockets aren’t fired from a reasonable distance, there is a chance that the chopper can take hits from its own shrapnel if coming in on a very low profile, which, under the circumstances, was essential.
On the day of the planned ambush, Nellis met for an early breakfast with Chief Hinga Norman. Nellis was aware that almost nothing affecting the course of the war or those involved in it escaped Norman’s notice and the chief had already been given the backdrop.
Nellis outlined his plan of attack. He wanted his boss’ opinion on the political implications if he were to take out an RUF convoy on its way to supposed ‘peace talks’. If he was successful, he knew, there would be some very loud noises made afterward in the world media. Also, he would most likely end up killing some senior RUF men including front-line commanders.
Chief Norman smiled at the news, sat back in his chair, and told Nellis not to worry himself about such things. That was his bailiwick and, as he said, ‘you do what you have to do’. What Nellis actually wanted Chief Norman to do was officially sanction the strike. It was one thing to act on innuendo, but something else to receive a direct order. A wily old battler, the chief understood military procedures quite well, largely because he had served in the British Army when he was young.
As the issue was so sensitive, before Nellis left the chief ’s office, Norman phoned UN Commander General Jetley and asked Jetley whether he was aware of any UN operation in the Lunsar area that day. The chief explained that he wanted to task the Hind with a recce in that sector and was not able to guarantee the safety of anybody else who might be there.
‘No’, Jetley answered, his tone indicating annoyance. There was nothing happening and of that he was certain, he declared. Chief Norman warned t
he Indian General that the Air Wing would be conducting an armed reconnaissance around Lunsar and that his government couldn’t be held responsible for any attacks on unauthorized UN patrols operating there. Jetley accepted that position and didn’t argue any of its finer details.
The conversation was enlightening, said Nellis. If the Indian had been a party to this conspiracy, he would almost surely have asked more questions or possibly even have acted differently. There was nothing defensive about his responses. Instead recalls Nellis, he seemed straight up and down. ‘Jetley’s immediate reaction told us pretty conclusively that he’d nothing to hide’, explained Nellis. It was significant too that Norman had not bothered to call General Garba. Everybody who mattered at Cockerill already knew of the Nigerian’s involvement in the plot. ‘Based on Jetley’s response, Chief Norman gave me the clearance I sought’, Nellis said.
I was to carry out an armed patrol of the road between Lunsar and Makeni. Being the wily politician, he never instructed me to deliberately seek and destroy any rebel convoy, but instead, stated that he had been given assurances by Jetley that nothing untoward was expected, so I should go ahead and do my job, which I did.
Norman added one more thing in this tentative briefing. He told Nellis to use his discretion if any target presented itself. ‘Those were his last words before I left his office’, said Nellis.
Nellis’ plan had a second phase to it. If nothing was happening at Lunsar by the time he got there, he would follow a route along the Makeni road and see if there was anything or anybody moving along it. Cockerill was aware that if Garba got cold feet and decided to cancel, he would not be able to get a message through to the RUF command in time to stop the convoy.