by Douglas Boyd
Next day, a company of Chadian paras was flown in. Together with the legionnaires, they drove the rebels out of the caves, killing forty-one and capturing two machine guns, two assault rifles and nineteen rifles. Before the end of the operation, three more machine guns, six rifles and a hoard of compromising paperwork was also taken, at the cost of one legionnaire dead and six wounded. In the entire Chad intervention most ‘casualties’ were from haemorrhoids suffered by men seated in poorly sprung military vehicles crashing for long hours over corrugations of concrete-hard earth.
In the autumn of 1962, that curious hybrid 13 DBLE found itself a new home in the Republic of Djibouti on the strategic Horn of Africa, where companies from 2 REP rotated through the territory in support. The territory had voted four years earlier to remain a member of the French Union, rather than be swallowed up in the neighbouring Somali Democratic Republic.
Fourteen years later, the run-up to independence in June 1977 placed Djibouti – a state of 23,000 sq km with a population of about 600,000 – under severe pressure from neighbouring Somalia. Hoping to end the French military presence crucial to the territory’s independence, on 3 February 1976 four armed Somali terrorists hi-jacked a school bus in Djibouti City that was carrying twenty-seven children of French military personnel. At the police control post on the city limits, the terrorist at the wheel smashed through the barrier and drove off in the direction of the Somali border. Finding the crossing point blocked by a gendarmerie vehicle, the driver stood in the doorway with his pistol at the head of a boy held in front of him as a human shield, ordering the armed gendarmes to stay clear. The boy was then sent to the officer in command with the hijackers’ demands that all the terrorists in detention be released, their weapons returned to them, the country granted ‘independence’ immediately and all French forces evacuated forthwith. Failure to comply in full was to be met by execution of all the children.
A unit of France’s GIGN anti-terrorist unit was flown to Djibouti, its commanding officer offering himself as a hostage if the children were released. The deal refused, it was evening when Jehanne Bru, a civilian employee of the Djibouti base, was permitted to take food and drink onto the bus for the children.
By this time a company of 2 REP under Capt Soubirou had taken position around the bus. The terrorists insisted that the road be unblocked, after which the driver drove forward to the Somali frontier post, so that any fire-fight would risk putting the Somali soldiers on duty there in the line of fire and spark an international incident.
A further threat was issued to execute the children should the French government fail to comply with all demands. There were now three terrorists inside the bus with the courageous Jehanne Bru and the children. Another was behind it, two were patrolling near it and a sixth was on the balcony of the frontier post when three sections of 2 REP paras rushed the bus, shooting dead the two patrolling hijackers. Under covering fire from 13 DBLE snipers, Cpl Larking managed to leap aboard the bus, as did Cpl Lemoine and S/Sgt Jorand. All three hijackers on board were dead within seconds. In the shoot-out, the little girl seated on the driver’s lap as a human shield died, but twenty-one unharmed children were immediately evacuated through the bus windows. Five injured children plus Jehanne Bru and the civilian driver were evacuated by helicopter to hospital in Djibouti City. Four of the children recovered, but a second girl who succumbed to wounds received in the assault was buried at Aubagne near the grave of her grandfather, a former Legion NCO.
Chad and Djibouti are territories to which little attention is paid in the English-language media, but one Legion operation made headlines all over the world. It happened in 1978 at an African mining town called Kolwezi.
Chapter 34: The Dove that was a Tiger
12 – 16 May 1978
On 12 May 1978 the name Kolwezi was familiar only to a few thousand people in the mining industry. The following day all the world’s media were focusing on this typical African mining town in the Shaba province of Zaire[383], where the giant Gécamines complex employed several hundred European technicians in addition to the large African workforce. Including dependents, the European population totalled around 3,000 people, who awoke on Saturday 13 May to find themselves at the sharp end of Operation Chicapa.
Chicapa, meaning ‘dove’, had been chosen as the code-name by Cuban advisers in Angola, themselves controlled by Soviet advisers.[384] This was the period when Picasso’s white dove was a universal peace symbol much used by Communist-front organisations, although the several thousand mainly teenage Katangan FNLC[385] rebels called themselves ‘Tigers’. They had force-marched across 300km of savannah from their training camps in Angola. Armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles, Belgian FAL rifles, Israeli Uzis and American M 16s, they were dressed in cast-off uniforms from a dozen or more African and European armies, their sole distinguishing mark being a small patch of blue cloth bearing a silver tiger stitched somewhere on their clothing.
The aim of the Moscow-planned invasion was to destabilise the government of Zairian President Mobutu by seizing the copper and diamond mines operated by the giant Gécamines company, which had taken over the installations and exploitation rights of the Belgian Union Minière du Haut Katanga upon the territory becoming independent in 1960. Plausible denial was assured by the Soviet controllers staying safely in Angola, leaving operational control on the ground in the hands of their Cuban subordinates, who did not join the long march across country, but arrived first-class by air, parachuting in after the town had been taken.[386]
Mothers grabbed all the food from their kitchen cupboards and hid it under floorboards and in roof spaces to prevent it being stolen by the rebels who had arrived with no provisions of their own. The more prudent Europeans filled baths and sinks before water supplies were cut off. The main anxiety at this stage was to prevent their children going outside and being hit in the exchanges of fire between Zairian FAZ troops and the rebels, who were taking no prisoners.
[SEE MAP K – Caption: Zaire / Democratic Republic of the Congo below.]
News about the scale of the invasion was radioed to the Zairian capital Kinshasa via the Gécamines base in Lumumbashi, but the government of President Mobutu did nothing. Its alibi for inaction was an invasion by Katangan rebels the previous year, when they had been stopped 100km or so from Kolwezi by the elite Kamanyola Division of the Zairian army[387], assisted by a Moroccan expeditionary force. However, this time, the government in Kinshasa showed little interest in reinforcing the FAZ troops in Kolwezi, confronting what was obviously a much larger and more determined invasion.
In the French embassy at Kinshasa, the calm and urbane ambassador André Ross was updated by his Breton military attaché Col Larzul. Larzul, never a man to waste words, informed him tersely of the destruction of every aircraft on the Kolwezi airstrip. Summoned to the presidential palace, Ross was expecting anything but Mobutu’s bland assurance that he had told the Soviet ambassador to halt the invasion or be held responsible for it. For the moment, all Ross could do was pass this information back to Paris. At 0500hrs on 14 May he managed to have a telephone conversation with a Gécamines director in Lumumbashi, learning that all the Zairian troops in Kolwezi had either been killed or had fled northwards, with the exception of a few holed up in barracks surrounded by the rebels. All this was passed on to the Belgian and American embassies.
In Kolwezi, the FNLC accused all single European males of being mercenaries hired by the Zairian army. To save money, engineer Pierre Vérot had not brought his family out to Africa. Dragged in front of a wall pitted with bullet-holes, he had to step over several bodies on the ground. Ordered to face the wall by the officer in charge of the execution squad, he refused to do so in the belief that the teenage firing squad could not kill a man looking them in the eyes. Each time he was forcibly turned around, he turned back and faced his would-be killers – until abruptly told he could go home.
Another civilian, 50-year-old Marc Fauroux was the second generation of his family to ru
n the civil engineering firm that was the largest employer after Gécamines. Mobutu having banned the ownership of any firearms by Europeans six months previously, all Fauroux could do was impotently watch the invasion forces move into town on the Saturday and estimate their size at around 4,000. On the Sunday morning he was summoned by a little man in uniform wearing a cloche hat on which was written in ball-pen Commanding Officer. In his hand, the unwelcome visitor had a notebook with a long list of names and addresses.
‘Are you Marc Fauroux?’
There was no point in denying it. Four armed soldiers grabbed Fauroux by the arms and marched him away. ‘Where are you taking me?’ he asked, as calmly as possible.
‘To your trial.’
Noticing a number of armed rebels standing outside the stores in Avenue Burga, the main shopping street, obviously to deter looters, Fauroux consoled himself with this evidence of some discipline among the invaders. Then, by a burned-out French AML armoured car, he saw the first corpses, already scavenged by dogs. The ‘courtroom’ to which he was taken, full of rebels milling around, armed to the teeth and all shouting at the same time, put him in mind of the mob at the trial of Louis XVI, howling for the king’s blood.
Accused of ‘economic collaboration in the theft of the people’s mineral resources’,[388] he tried several times to interrupt in his own defence, but was told that he had already been condemned to death, with immediate effect. Speechless with shock, he was being led away by the firing squad when he saw one trembling rebel in violent argument with the ‘judges’. Recognising him as a foreman he had employed some years before, Fauroux heard the room grow quiet as his unexpected advocate pleaded for his life. Finally the senior ‘judge’ smiled and grunted a brief order.
Expecting to be released, and uttering a prayer for his saviour, Fauroux was grabbed again, led outside and stood against a wall pocked by bullets with his feet in pools of fresh blood. Too shocked to even close his eyes, he heard the fire-selectors of the guards’ Kalashnikovs click, saw the weapons raised – and then was showered with fragments of masonry as they emptied their magazines all around him, roaring with laughter at their joke.
Outside Kolwezi, even in Kinshasa, life went on as usual. On the Monday morning at 1000hrs, Ambassador Ross called into his office Col Larzul and Col Yves Gras – the 55-year-old head of the military mission in Zaire. He showed them a copy of a cable from the Belgian Embassy to Brussels: the Belgian expats in Zaire were now demanding that their government mount an airborne intervention to protect its citizens at risk in Kolwezi. Perhaps there would be a happy ending, after all.
That evening, Ross and Gras attended a diplomatic reception hosted by the Moroccans. On the surface, everything was normal, but they noticed the Zairian guests keeping very much to themselves and nervously checking their watches. Defying diplomatic protocol, Col Gras accosted the Belgian chargé d’affaires Mr Van Sina to ask what the Belgian government was going to do about the situation. Van Sina stammered that it was not his decision.
‘There’ll be a massacre, if you don’t bestir your government to act,’ Gras hissed at him before the Belgian could disengage himself.
Tuesday 16 May dawned rapidly, as it always does on the equator. In Kolwezi, Gras’ prediction was already coming true as the rebels’ discipline broke down irretrievably. They had arrived exhausted. After three days of rest and gorging themselves on looted food and beer supplies, they saw looting and murder as their victors’ prerogatives. In the European residential areas, parents converted rooms without outside windows into makeshift shelters by dragging into them mattresses and anything else that might absorb stray bullets or fragments of grenades which pierced the walls as the rebels pursued wounded Zairian soldiers or simply emptied their magazines into houses for fun.
Men, women and children, both black and European, were dying as the rebels looted and slaughtered at will in an orgy of destruction, smashing and burning furniture and grinding toilet fittings into dust for the sheer pleasure of destroying everything of utility. Europeans who removed a vital engine part from their car to simulate a breakdown and prevent it being driven off were gunned down; others were shot after handing over the keys and left lying where they fell until packs of semi-wild dogs moved in for an unexpected feast.
After another meeting with Mobutu, still refusing to admit that the situation was out of control, Ross cabled Paris for the attention of President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing that the 3,000 Europeans in Kolwezi were now hostages of the rebels, that the summary executions and ubiquitous looting gave grounds to fear general massacres and that the situation was growing worse by the hour. Shortly afterwards, a French resident of Lumumbashi brought the news that Kolwezi was without electricity or water and that the killings were being stepped up. Ross called the Belgian ambassador, diplomatically hinting at a French and Belgian intervention, only to be told that the ‘alarmist rumours’ were all exaggeration – and that the Belgian Foreign Minister was ‘negotiating’ with the son of Katangan secessionist Moïse Tshombe in Brussels.
Larzul’s reaction was unprintable. ‘Cloud cuckoo land’, would have been a polite rendering. Amassing maps to plan a rescue operation, he found the dithering of the politicians in Paris and Brussels incredible. Gras likened it to a house on fire where everyone was arguing who had the right to use the extinguisher.
A few firemen were on the way. At first light, a company of Zairian paras had been dropped east of the New Town, near what had been the Local HQ of the Zairian army. Shot dead in mid-air or shot on the ground before unbuckling their harness, the majority died within minutes. The few survivors fled, meeting on their way a FAZ motorised column from Lumumbashi commanded by Maj Mahele that was supposed to link up with them. In Brussels, the FNLC spokesmen were convinced that Mobutu’s troops could not have managed to drop in without foreign support and announced that the paras had been European and suffered hundreds of casualties. The news was relayed worldwide by the wire services. Worse, the FNLC now declared that any further armed intervention would be met by ‘grave retaliations’ against the European hostages and flooding of the mines, where demolition charges had already been laid.[389]
The failure of the airdrop was the last straw for the remaining Zairian soldiers holding out in Kolwezi. Of different tribal origin from the Katangans and not even speaking the same language, they tried to make their escape in small groups, unleashing a mounting blood-lust among the rebels, who were high on their easy victory. Nor were they any longer restrained by the Cubans, who appeared to have left the immediate area of Kolwezi after raising a militia in Manika, the native town.
In the offices of the Baron-Levêque company, a number of Europeans saw laughing teenage soldiers approaching, armed with Uzis, M 16s, Belgian FALs and the ubiquitous Kalashnikovs. Calling out that there were no Zairian soldiers inside, two pipe-laying engineers walked out, hands away from their bodies to show they were unarmed. The kids mowed them down. Turning their weapons on the men, women and children inside the building, they continued firing until every wall was covered in bloodstains, with bodies in places jammed solid in a last desperation one metre high. The only survivors were two men who had hoisted each other into the crawl space under the roof when the first shots rang out and a woman with four serious bullet wounds, who survived under a pile of dead bodies.
The hero of the day was Maj Mahele, whose untried young para recruits were about to run away at the first ambush until he stood up and opened fire, taking out one rebel sniper with a grenade and yelling at them to do likewise. Inspired by his personal courage, they yelled their ancestral battle-cry of ‘Kanga diablos!’ and pushed on through several other ambushes to retake the airport after killing around a hundred rebels. Shortly after 1400hrs, the valiant major was able to radio the good news. A single counter-attack at 1800hrs, repulsed by his young troops, was their final test.
‘Just as well,’ Mahele commented later. ‘By then, we’d run out of ammunition.’
Chapter 35: Go! Don�
�t go! Go!
Operation Leopard – 17-19 May1978
As news filtered out of Kolwezi, at 2 REP’s Camp Raffali on Corsica and in the Calvi citadel which served as the officers’ mess, the general consensus was that no other military unit was equipped and trained to intervene in such a situation. It was, however, extremely unlikely they would be given the job because Zaire, as the former Belgian Congo, was more closely linked to Brussels than Paris, and there were many more Belgian than French expats in Kolwezi.
At 1100hrs on Wednesday 17 May Col Philippe Erulin took a call from the HQ of 2nd Parachute Brigade in Toulouse, informing him that 2 REP was placed on operational stand-by, ready to move out in six hours’ time with all equipment and vehicles. No destination was specified.
He replied, ‘I need a minimum of twenty hours.’ An energetic and resourceful leader of what he regarded as the best regiment of professional soldiers in the French army, he was not being negative – simply stating the obvious.
‘Tell me the problems,’ replied Gen Liron, at the other end of the line.
Only two months off retirement, Erulin had the regiment’s state of readiness in his head, day and night. Apart from officers and men on leave, 1st Company under Capt Vergio was yomping high up in the Corsican Mountains, far from the nearest road; part of 2nd Company was in Bastia, on the other side of the island; other detachments were at Corte in the highlands of central Corsica. More of a problem was how to get back the sixty-six officers and men on courses spread out between Castelnaudary and the combat swimming course at Mountlouis-Collioure in the Pyrenees.