Barrel of a Gun

by Al Venter

  However, whether in KwaZulu/Natal in South Africa, in British Columbia or Peru, or along the length of the Rogue River in Oregon where some of America’s finest dope is produced, it is against the law to possess the stuff, never mind grow it commercially for an always expanding export market. In all these countries, national or parliamentary edicts dictate the law.

  One of the immediate consequences of what we were doing was that while we remained active in the eradication process, we were under constant threat. While our choppers weren’t fired on from the ground in that operation, they had been at other times. Also, quite a few of those arrested in this pursuit were armed.

  More worrying, this was ‘high octane work’ as it was phrased by a journalist who accompanied us, accentuated by the fact that almost all of the cops with whom we operated had been wounded at least once before, because such is the nature of crime in South Africa these days.

  Zwoyo Ntoshabala was a member of our group. A 28-year-old constable with South Africa’s crack National Intervention Unit (NIU), his list of wounds in action included blast trauma in an explosion in a house that had been booby-trapped by a drug lord.

  Sterre Wandrag, a 37-year-old captain with the NIU had been shot in his buttocks before he joined us in Winterton. Even more serious were wounds sustained by Captain Craig Benn, a 42 year-old NIU Captain. Apart from being hit on the head with a hammer – a powerful blow that was intended to kill him – he had previously been shot twice in the chest, once more in the thigh and another time in his foot. Craig has since left the force in disgust.

  The man running ground operations in Zululand was 48-year-old Captain Bazil Da Silva, who’d been shot twice by the time we worked together. He’d taken a bullet in his torso and another in the arm, as well as machete blows to his trunk.

  Overall, the routine that faced these cops wasn’t as difficult as it was demanding. The air component was headed by René Coulon, a fiftysomething South African Police Services (SAPS) Senior Superintendent in command of Durban’s Air Wing, KwaZulu/Natal. Married with five children, René originally flew choppers in the South African Air Force in Angola and in his ‘new’ job; he’d been chasing criminals for more than a decade.

  Louis De Waal, another Senior Superintendent in command of the Cape Town SAPS Air Wing, flew up specially to lend a hand with one of his unit’s Hughes 500s. Together with the balance of the air component, almost everybody was billeted at the Bridge Hotel in Winterton in the Natal Midlands. The rest of us stayed at what was probably the best little bed and breakfast joint in the region.

  Susan le Grange took very good care of us at Lilac Lodge where her dinners were always home-cooked and exquisite, which was unusual for a low-key countryside tourist establishment. Her food was good enough for the SAPS guys to eschew most of what was on offer at their hotel and, instead, eat with us.

  Then, before first light each morning, we’d head out towards the east in the choppers, the trucks having set out from base two hours before. At a predetermined RV – we tended to use different ones most days – the operation would start almost immediately.

  The Hughes 500s that we used were all fitted with American spraying machines developed by an Oregon company. Compact, practical and light, they are used world-wide in drug operations – including those in Afghanistan to counter the annual poppy harvest. The systems are also used in more conventional agricultural pursuits, for which they were originally designed.

  It was rare that we didn’t spot fields of dagga along the way as soon as we got away from the settlements. Sometimes there were scores of them, mostly secreted alongside the occasional river that we’d cross while heading east towards the coast. The pilots would arrive at their temporary base where the rest of gang was waiting, then fuel up and get started.

  A police helicopter in a marijuana field in KwaZulu/Natal: there are thousands such marijuana growth points in Southern Africa, much of the produce going to a burgeoning European drug market. (Will Henshaw)

  The chemicals they used were potent. Any marijuana plant sprayed was dead in minutes. Once contaminated, the plants couldn’t be harvested: they were tainted and consequently ‘out of the chain’ as it was phrased by René Coulon.

  The Police Wing handling this side of things in South Africa has expanded exponentially with demand. From a handful of helicopters a few years ago (which included the ultra-rigid and now-outdated Eurocopter BK-105s) the number of six-seater AS-350 Squirrels in SAPS livery are currently into double-figures. There are also Eurocopter BK-117s that can uplift ten passengers. Their presence stems from a joint project involving Eurocopter and the Kawasaki group.

  The BK-117s have been remarkably successful, Eurocopter having built more than 400 machines since the late 1970s, with quite a few of them finding their way to Africa. With its maximum range of more than 300 nautical miles and capacity of two crew-plus-four, this helicopter has seen use in a lot of anti-drug operations.

  Additionally, there were the Hughes-500s deployed. These were small, versatile machines that date back to when they were first employed in combat spotting in the Vietnam War. Thereafter, the 500 saw service in a variety of guerrilla wars that included El Salvador, Colombia, the Middle East and elsewhere.

  During a three-week operation in Northern KwaZulu/Natal – or what the history books tell us was formerly Zululand – about 20-tons of marijuana was either destroyed by aerial spraying or recovered from caches. Partly financed by the American DEA programme, the South African Police do not have either the manpower or the helicopters to keep pace with the volume of drugs being produced. (Louis de Waal)

  Many of the choppers in service with the SAPS Air Wing were originally acquired with subsidies from the UN Drug Agency, as well as with cash outlays from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which for quite a few years has been involved in training South African drug eradication teams.

  Current anti-drug operations south of the Limpopo – which sometimes also include operations in the neighbouring states of Swaziland and Lesotho – have come a long way from efforts at eradication even a decade ago. Rural operations in those days often involved both the SAAF and the Police Air Wing.

  In one programme, a few years ago, Pretoria set aside R3 million for an eight-day operation in northern KwaZulu/Natal. It included scores of police and military vehicles as well as Oryx (the upgraded, locally produced Super-Puma variant) and police helicopters. However, because finance was critical, nothing was scheduled for eradicating the numerous dagga plantations in the area.

  ‘There simply wasn’t the money to do any more’, said a senior security officer. ‘In any event,’ he added, ‘you have to recognize that there are those in authority who are not happy that a sector of the community might be deprived of a traditional means of earning a living… it’s often their rural relatives growing it…’

  We found dagga in abundance throughout the region, but almost all of those plantations were ignored. In a raid near the convergence of the KwaZulu, Swazi and Mpumalanga borders in the vicinity of Pongola, a single BO-105 detected four major dagga plantations with the combined value of the crops estimated to be excess of $3m on the European market. At the ruling exchange rates of the day, that was almost six times more than the cost of that particular law enforcement operation. Of the five or six major growth points uncovered (two were more than three-acres in extent) only one patch was ripped out and burnt.

  Then – and today – uncovering such harvests can be dangerous work. Most of these plantations are huge and secreted in inaccessible hilly country. Their owners, aware that the authorities are on the lookout, go to a lot of effort to camouflage their approach paths.

  One plantation was uncovered by chance when a mounted SAPS anti-stock-theft unit ventured into a heavily foliated krantz in search of stolen cattle. Having discovered several fields of verdant six- or eightfoot high crops that were on the verge of being harvested, the four-man patrol came under fire. The SAAF was called to the rescue and the patrol was extr
icated, but only after one of the men was wounded.

  What has become clear – following recent security incursions into the region – is the emergence of a powerful anti-establishment mindset that underlies sentiment throughout the region. Local residents simply don’t appreciate having their principal source of wealth ‘eliminated’. In recent years, there have been firefights involving dagga growers and the police, as well as with some military units.

  In another attack on a squad in the process of destroying a marijuana plantation near Mkuze, the police came under Kalashnikov fire for more than an hour. The matter wasn’t resolved and an SAAF Oryx with a back-up force was brought in, again to extricate the group. None of this activity ever made the news.

  In a bid to disguise large-scale illicit activities, there are many KwaZulu villages – even as far south as the outskirts of Durban and parts of the South Coast – that grow their own patches of the drug. Some are quite extensive, as any private pilot who regularly traverses the area will confirm.

  These little plots – usually between 50ft and 100ft square – can often be clearly seen, the dagga usually planted between regular crops. Though the majority of these mini-marijuana plantations are in full view of circling helicopters or small aircraft, the inadequately manned police force most times ignores them if it is clear that it is for ‘own use’. Obviously, even a modest crop grown on 5,000 square feet will deliver a sizeable amount of the drug: so, one must ask, who’s kidding whom?

  While cultivating the plant, officially, is a crime, a member of SAPS media relations in Durban told me that ‘we don’t exactly turn a blind eye, but if we aren’t circumspect, we’d have to arrest just about every other Zulu farmer in the province. Examine it for yourselves – just about every other plot in the interior has its dagga plants.’ It was a tradition that went back centuries, he stated. Also, he conceded that it was impossible to stem the flow, adding that smaller patches of the drug offered poor returns compared to some of the more expansive, wellirrigated and cultivated stands in remoter parts. Some are said to be financed from abroad, but he wasn’t prepared to elaborate on that point.

  Another type of operation involving the Police Air Wing in KwaZulu/Natal is the ongoing search for stolen cattle. Some of these operations extend over areas of about 10,000 square miles. The one hunt on which I accompanied police units started near the town of Vryheid in the north of the province and steadily spread out northwards towards the Mozambique frontier. As it matured, its focus shifted towards the border of the neighboring country of Swaziland.

  Most search activity took place in remote areas where the bush and undergrowth were dense. Being a semi-tropical region didn’t help either. Also, the region was remote in places. Aircraft had gone down there in the past and it had sometimes taken weeks to recover them. A fourseater which crashed in bush terrain more than a decade ago was never found.

  We left the Police Air Wing base adjacent to Durban’s international airport before dawn on a clear Monday morning and headed directly north. For much of the journey we covered good agricultural lands straddled by the occasional surfaced highway.

  However, then the infrastructure started to deteriorate. Good thoroughfares north of Ngoma gradually gave way to dusty side roads in the bush. Finally, we were left with a succession of obscure tracks that snaked through the hills.

  Most of the Zulu villages that came into view were modest and consisted of a few grass huts and a kraal for cattle. This is still a part of Africa where a man’s wealth is dictated by the number of cows he owns. That and the number of wives he can afford to maintain. Both are traditional touchstones of status within this largely tribal society.

  The region between Zululand’s great Tugela River and the Pongola seems to have always been beset with security problems in the past. In places such as Tugela Ferry, strangers – and people in uniform, especially – are at risk if they go in there at night.

  These are communities that are subdivided into more clans, fiefdoms and dynasties than anybody has bothered to list. It is also a society that has an unusually long memory: an innocuous, off-hand insult made long ago might, for the moment, be put aside, but it is never forgotten. As a consequence, inter-tribal factional killings are commonplace.

  The Task Force plan was for SAPS elements – operational in Northern Natal with the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) for the duration – to link up with a combined force of about 250 army, police, air force and civil defence ‘volunteers’, some of whom were deployed adjacent to the Swazi border. Also involved was the Swaziland Police Force who, for the first time, was operational on South African soil; from past experience, some of the cattle likely to be recovered had been stolen in Swaziland. It was to be a ten-day operation against what were termed ‘lawless elements’ from both countries.

  While the job of the main section was to recover livestock, security elements used the opportunity to search for criminals as well as gangs, escaped prisoners, illegal weapons, firearms ‘factories’ and, finally, gunrunners. The region remains a conduit for weapons smuggled into South Africa from neighbouring territories.

  If time allowed, we were told, the force would destroy whatever marijuana plantations were spotted from the air. However, it was suggested that this was low on the priority list.

  Apart from our own 105s, a single air force Oryx was dispatched as back-up from Waterkloof Air Force base near Pretoria. The main ground force was transported by the Air Wing, together with an assortment of about a dozen army vehicles, including Buffel troop carriers which, interestingly, are making a comeback on some Natal estates. Farmers are buying this surplus military equipment privately, largely for home protection, as well as for use against stock theft gangs.

  In order to stay within budget, most of the men – air crews included – brought their own food. The total cost of the ten-day entire operation to the security forces was roughly R3m, or about US$300,000 at the 2010 rates of exchange.

  By comparison, a similar-sized operation in Europe or America would easily have cost that per day, never mind the cost of additional logistical components.

  Law is enforced a little differently in Africa, to which former Colonel Craig Mackrory can testify. Mackrory was a veteran of a succession of South Africa’s battles in Namibia and cross-border raids into Angola, and thereafter, the SAPS Air Wing. Since superseded by Senior Superintend René Colon, he is no longer with the Air Wing, having moved on to the more tranquil waters of one of the Indian Ocean islands.

  A few years ago, flying a police helicopter around the Tugela Ferry area, he spotted a number of burning huts below. That was hardly unusual since there is often somebody burning somebody else’s home somewhere in the region. On going closer, he was suddenly greeted by the spectacle of a heavily armed Zulu Impi or battalion, of about 600 men. Mackrory had been working the area long enough to recognize them as members of the Sijozeni Zulu clan, one of the most bellicose in the Kingdom

  You don’t often see a traditional Zulu regiment in South Africa any more. Impis are a legacy of centuries past and the great Zulu king Chaka and others before and after him. However, violence in the ‘New’ South Africa has tended to harden and to coalesce in tribal sentiments. The fact that this great African tribe has been reverting to its old ways, says much for the kind of brutality which has almost become a South African way of life.

  This Impi, Mackrory noted – with their distinctive mottled brown and black shields and assegais glinting in the morning sun – were inter spersed by some warriors carrying firearms. The group moved across a low knoll at the double, clearly expecting trouble.

  As his chopper’s glide path took him over the next hill, another Impi came into view. In-between there was all that was left of about a dozen burning huts. Bodies lay where they had been struck down. All of this destruction, he was to learn later, belonged to a second Zulu faction, the equally belligerent Ngcengeni clan.

  There was nothing new about any of this, Mackrory suggested afterwa
rds. Intelligence reports had been circulating back in Durban all week that the clans were itching for war. It seems that there were differences that needed to ‘sorted out’, which meant there would be killings.

  As he pointed out, these might have included something as mundane as not honouring a lobola – the requisite bride price paid when a man takes a woman – or it could have been revenge killings for deeds that might have been committed half a century ago. ‘Zulus have phenomenal memories’, the colonel stated.

  In South Africa’s brief history of conflict it has always been an unwritten law that when the Zulus are on the march, they are best left alone. It is in the interests of the authorities to look elsewhere when Impis clash. Ignore that fundamental precept and it might be your brains that end up splattered across the countryside.

  Tugela Ferry enjoys another special notoriety, because many of the criminals operating out of there are sometimes armed with automatic weapons. Many are Soviet AK-47s, smuggled across the border from Mozambique. Others might be regular South African Army carbines stolen during armed robberies in the country’s big cities.

  These weapons slot in well as crime continues to escalate in presentday South Africa. The age of the knobkerrie has been superseded – as any crook in Zululand will tell you, it’s easier to shoot someone than beat him to death. Also, life is cheap, especially in a region where the daily wage is often as low as $5 a day, and sometimes half that, and that’s if the labourer involved can get work.

  Consequently, there are a lot of desperate men in this remote area a couple of hundred miles north-east of Durban.