My Friend The Mercenary

by James Brabazon

  Mandla lit a cigarette. ‘All right, Duds?’ he smiled, winking.

  We all moved in together, following Oscar along dimly lit corridors until we reached an office where we were met by the rotund, sweating camp commandant. He introduced himself as Commander Lamine. Everyone shook hands and then sat down and looked at me. I had absolutely no idea what to say. Was it essential or forbidden to say who I was, what I was doing and where we were going? I looked at Joe, who looked at Nick, who smiled and looked at the floor. I took a breath, reminded myself that, in Cobus’s words, I was not a normal journalist, and then repeated my sales pitch, this time in French. Commander Lamine looked at me as if it was the most normal thing in the world to have a journalist ask him for permission to cross illegally the border he was charged with guarding in order to film an outlawed rebel group, several members of whom were sitting in the room with him.

  ‘Bravo,’ he boomed. ‘We are all brothers here, unified in our fight against the same enemy. We are thankful that our friends here fought bravely to defend us against Taylor’s invasion of our republic.’

  Everyone stood up to shake hands with him, or be embraced. I had expected to slip into Liberia under the noses of the Guineans, possibly with their tacit consent – not to be officially back-slapped across the border.

  Dudley nodded at me – he’d got the audio on tape – and we were off again. From now on I decided that I would record everything, and delay my decision on what part of my word to keep until the edit suite. For the time being Nick didn’t have to know what I intended. He was, after all, my employee.

  The road deteriorated into a track at the point where a lone soldier lifted a bamboo barrier to let us pass. A ragged Guinean flag fluttered over his billet. We passed into no-man’s-land. Minutes later a pick-up truck laden with armed rebel fighters careered towards us, the young men shouting wild greetings, waving their guns in the air. Nick scanned the bush that encroached on our vehicle intently as a wave of excitement washed me over the border.

  We had arrived in rebel-held Liberia.

  3

  A JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

  After an hour of sliding over narrow jungle tracks, the headquarters of the rebel army emerged from the bush. Voinjama had once been home to around 5,000 people, but now windows gaped like blind eye sockets; doors hung on their hinges like toothless mouths. Only a few hundred civilians remained, and most were connected in some way to the fighters stationed there.

  I was ushered into the office of the rebel leader – a dark room in the corner of one of the very few buildings not severely damaged by fighting, neglect or the ravages of the environment. Nick was close behind me. As my eyes grew used to the gloom of the tiny space, I picked out several men with their hands outstretched in welcome. I didn’t know whom to greet first. I had never seen a picture of Conneh – in fact, until twenty-four hours previously I wasn’t sure he even existed. After an awkward shuffling of feet, a large, young-looking man in a grey double-breasted suit rose up behind a desk littered with walkie-talkies and old computer hardware, and an aide introduced him.

  ‘I presen’ Lor’ Forces Nationa’ Chairmon, eh Excellenceh Sekou Damate Conneh, J’ior.’

  ‘You wehcom,’ Conneh said. ‘Wehcom to free, free Liber’a, so feel free.’

  Like a well-rehearsed door-to-door salesman, I repeated my pitch by rote. I made it clear to Conneh that the outside world’s extremely limited understanding of his awkwardly named organisation – Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy – was uniquely defined by his enemy, and almost all of the information about the LURD in circulation was lies disseminated by President Taylor’s public-relations machine. Conneh grabbed the opportunity to put his own side of the story across.

  ‘De people o’ Liber’a mo’ be free,’ he assured me, ‘an’ de Lor’ Forces a’ foiteen fo’ deh freedon, an’ fo’ peace.’

  Unlike Joe Wylie, whose educated American drawl was comparatively easy to understand, Conneh and his cohort were extremely difficult to decipher. It was like doing a linguistic jigsaw puzzle – in forty-degree heat, with weapons, in the dark. When they spoke to each other, I was lost. My English was equally impenetrable to them.

  ‘Y’ mo’ sho’ dis freedon, our freedon, to de worl’. Cha’ Taylah a crimina’, a liar. We mo’ bri’ ’im to josteh, to internationa’ josteh,’ His Excellency continued. ‘Milli-ahns o’ people wi’ see wha’ Lor’ Forces foiteen fo’ on de BBC. I, Sekou Conneh, wi’ bri’ Cha’ Taylah dahn – personally!’

  Conneh, who, it turned out, had been elected to the post of chairman at the age of forty-two a mere six months previously, was by no means an intellectual. I knew from Frank that the chairman was thought to have been elected as a weak compromise candidate, but I suspected that even he realised that his personal position of power would be greatly protected from the vultures vying for his job once he had been established on-camera as the head of the rebel army, inside Liberia.

  His manner was listless, his English coming in fits and starts, heavy emphasis randomly sprinkled throughout his speech. The only courtesy asked of me was that I would provide him, and other senior commanders, with interview questions in advance of recording. I was assured that no harm would come to me, my crew or my possessions at the hands of the rebels.

  ‘Yor safe here.’

  He opened his palms in a gesture that seemed to imply that I might in fact be safe only in his office. He immediately identified Nick, whose name he pronounced Nack, as a ‘milit’ry man’, and invited him to stay for a closed meeting with several senior commanders to discuss upcoming strategy. I hadn’t realised how seriously the LURD were going to take Nick and his mysterious military credentials – he was going to be a brilliant source of intelligence. It was also clear that any idea I had of being in control of Nick was unfounded: I was going to be entirely dependent on what he chose to tell me.

  Outside, I took him to one side while Dudley filmed the growing chanting crowd of armed young men gathered by the chairman’s office.

  ‘Go for it, man,’ I begged him. ‘You’ve got to get them to agree to take us to the front. If we spend two weeks here, I’m fucked. We’re all fucked. We’ve got to see some fighting.’

  Nick took a long draw from a bottle of mineral water.

  ‘By any means necessary,’ I added, trying to make sure we were on the same page.

  ‘’n Boer maak ’n plan,’ he said. ‘A farmer always makes a plan.’

  He passed me the bottle and paused to take in the scene of a couple of dozen dancing rebels. The refrain of their song was a simple one, led by a commander with a camouflage bandana and bedecked with AK magazines.

  ‘Tay-lah da wo-ma’ … Se-kou da man …’, and then, at the finale, ‘Monkay com’ dahn! No mo’ Monkay!’

  ‘Taylah de Monkay,’ the commander enlightened us, ‘eatin’ all de fru’ at de tap o’ de tree!’

  Cheering followed, and then it started over again. Most of the rebels were in their late teens or early twenties, with a few younger children mingling with them. The older men wore a mishmash of different military outfits – mostly the dull olive green of Guinean uniforms, the darker tiger stripes of the Liberian armed forces or the universally familiar camouflage of British army surplus. The majority, though, dressed in homage to LA gangster-chic: heads were covered in bandanas; ripped jeans adorned with thick belts fastened by oversized buckles hung from skinny waists, and a collection of beads, amulets and bracelets hung from every neck. To a man they wore plastic flip-flops, which they called slippers. Many went topless, their sharply defined abdominal muscles criss-crossed with bandoliers of spare AK magazines, adorned with small Chinese hand grenades; all were drenched in sweat from the dance.

  Nick shook his head, and pronounced judgement in Afrikaans.

  ‘Vok.’

  And with that, he ducked back into Conneh’s office.

  Dudley, Mandla and I stayed outside, introducing ourselves to the young fighters, who shook hands by clicking
their middle fingers together after the main clasp. Everyone was polite, interested and armed. AK-47s were ubiquitous, with RPGs – rocket-propelled grenade launchers – scattered among them here and there. All weapons were handled with alarming nonchalance.

  There was no sign of Nick for an hour, so we busied ourselves with filming the locals. Conversations jolted backwards and forwards, always involving a constant re-positioning of one’s self away from the sharp end of an AK. My eyes were drawn to their safety catches, to see if they were set to safe (rare) or fully automatic (usual). Most discussions were shrouded in the earthy tang of cannabis smoke and uttered in half-pronounced Liberian idiom. Their reasons for fighting – or at least for joining LURD – were straightforward. Some of the older troops had fought against Taylor in the previous war and felt cheated by the ceasefire; others wanted to avenge the deaths of brothers, mothers, friends. Many were just bored. Most were hungry.

  We weren’t being threatened in any way – quite the opposite – but the situation was profoundly threatening. They looked like caricatures of soldiers; cartoon killers. Many confessed to spilling the blood of their own countrymen, and claimed they would do so again. Not having Nick next to me felt uncomfortable, and I peered at the HQ for signs of life – but he was locked in conference with the commanders.

  When he emerged, two hours later, Nick brought us up to speed on the briefing. He announced that Conneh insisted that almost half of Liberia was now under rebel control. That was a revelation. Their furthest position south was in Bomi Hills, in a town called Tubmanburg – a day’s walk from the capital Monrovia. Elsewhere there was serious fighting in the towns of Foya and Gbarnga. In Foya – only forty miles away on the Sierra Leone border – the Government was said to be using RUF mercenaries to brutal effect. Although the Sierra Leonean troops were all but surrounded, the LURD were unable to oust them: regular food and ammunition drops from Taylor’s helicopter sustained them in the face of daily attacks. The thought of a well-armed detachment of the most notorious fighters in West African history breaking out of their cage and heading to the rebel HQ filled me with dread. It was one thing to ask to go to, and film, some fighting to prove the capability and intent of the rebels, quite another to hear that the enemy was two days’ march away. I peered into the bush, as I had done in Sierra Leone a year before, searching for the same enemy.

  Over the next three days I interviewed Conneh, who insisted his forces had the capacity to oust Taylor within a month; Joe Wylie, resplendent in crisply ironed US military fatigues and a white T-shirt; Brigadier General Deku, the senior field commander who had led the chanting; and a plethora of other fighters, administrators, politicos, fantasists, civilians and stoned liggers. Everyone was confident of success.

  Nick and I shared a room in a building across from the HQ – me in a hammock, him on a rotting mattress. At night we took anti-malaria tablets with a slug from a whisky bottle.

  I remained apprehensive of him, and of being alone in his company. Although I had convinced myself to trust him out of necessity, I knew almost nothing about him, or his motives. He spent as much time with Conneh as he did with me, and when we were together – even though he was optimistic about the film – he said very little. When I could, I stayed close to Dudley and Mandla, who camped out in a room across the hall, and together we picked over the bones of the information we were harvesting.

  It transpired that the LURD had been fighting the Liberian Government since late 1999, expressly and specifically, they claimed (tirelessly and repeatedly), to remove President Charles Taylor from power. ‘When Taylah go,’ almost every rebel had told me, ‘we wi’ lay dahn our weapon’.’ No Taylor, no war: simple ideology, simple objective, simple cause. But from what the rebels were saying, the complicated truth was that the wars in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia were the same war. Liberia was the rock thrown into the regional mill-pond, whose ripples drowned a generation of young men educated in violence.

  The elections that ended the first civil war in 1997 and made Charles Taylor president were designed to make one government and one national army out of all the warring factions. Two of the strongest factions, ULIMO-K and ULIMO-J, felt excluded from this process of incorporation. Fearing assassination, they fled, re-grouped, reunited with some of their old comrades-in-arms and re-named themselves LURD. Membership was extended to anyone with a grudge against Taylor.

  The LURD went from strength to strength. The president of Guinea used the Liberian rebels as firepower in 2000 to fend off an invasion of his own country by Taylor. Conneh was elected chairman: his wife was the Guinean president’s spiritual adviser – ‘the Lady’ that Joe Wylie referred to at our meetings in Conakry. Under her influence the Guinean Army began covert support for the LURD, supplying them with arms and ammunition – and the advance towards Monrovia had begun.

  I sat smoking my way through my dwindling supply of duty-free cigarettes, perched on the balustrade of our poured-concrete veranda. Mandla and Dudley lounged in their own sweat, struggling to digest the latest gift of boiled rice and stewed leaves. In the oppressive heat of the afternoon, despondency was taking hold. I had achieved what no other journalist had done so far – I had met the LURD, interviewed many of their senior leaders on tape, and crossed into rebel-held territory. So what? It didn’t even begin to approach what a TV commissioning editor would want to see in a final programme. Warfare – so-called ‘bang-bang’ – on tape, at close quarters, was the only way to rescue the project: it would prove whether the rebels had the capacity to oust Taylor.

  After three days of treading in ever-decreasing circles, salvation appeared in the form of the national chairman and his entourage lumbering towards our lodgings.

  ‘Tomorro’ y’ wi’ go to our territory in Bomi,’ Conneh announced, looking at no one in particular. ‘General Deku wi’ carry y’ all de way dahn t’ Tocmanbur’. Tell de BBC we bringin’ dahn Taylah!’

  I would be allowed absolute freedom to film on the journey to Tubmanburg in Bomi Hills, and was given a typed, signed laissez-passer that guaranteed my freedom of movement and security throughout Conneh’s sphere of influence.

  The crisp letterhead was adorned with Liberia’s Lone Star flag and a cartoon handshake superimposed on the national map. The logo was completed by what were supposed to be the rays of the sun, but looked like an air-burst artillery shell. Signed by Conneh, it was rounded off with a blue ink-stamp that read ‘LURD’S FORCES’.

  We were off the next day. It was official.

  My excitement was short-lived. Deku, thirty-year old Brigadier General Musa Donso, the former ULIMO-K deputy chief of staff, whom I’d interviewed the day before, wandered over to talk to us. He looked wild, sweat clinging to his braids and fuzzy moustache. It was almost impossible to make out anything he said – the endings of his words were cut short, his accent confused further by an excited, emphatic delivery.

  ‘Mah man, da plai’ fa’ o’, hmm!’ he confided. ‘I’ wi’ take two week to go com’ back ’ere. Boh we readeh, an’ we are prepare’ to move, no’-stap.’

  Fourteen days to get to Bomi Hills and the town of Tubmanburg and back would take me right to the limit of our schedule. Deku explained the difficulties ahead, and why we too must be ‘ready and prepared’. We would have to walk long stretches, and cross a wide river, so we could take only the bare minimum of kit – and only that which, in an emergency, we could carry ourselves. In the morning we would drive through Guinea to the Liberian town of Zorzor, before continuing to our jungle jump-off point. Nick – whom Deku also called ‘Nack’ – took the news with a smile.

  ‘Strip everything out,’ he advised. ‘Take only what you need to film with, one set of clothes to walk in and one dry set to sleep in. I’ll pack everything else.’

  Dudley decided to leave the big Beta camera behind – it weighed a ton, and was not working properly in 90 per cent humidity. Instead we would rely on the smaller professional mini-digital video camera he’d discreetly used to record
the meeting with the Guinean Army.

  ‘What’, I asked, as Nick bundled up our flak jackets, food and most of our clothes into the bags we would leave behind, ‘shall I do with my balls of steel?’

  ‘Wear them round your throat,’ he suggested, ‘then they won’t rust when we cross the river.’

  The next morning, just after dawn, I stuffed my one permitted bag into a pick-up truck, and wedged myself into the cab. Nick and the others were in the vehicle in front. It was no use – no matter how I twisted my legs, my knees were jammed tight against metal. The young guys around me smiled and tried to make space, but the front of the truck was just too packed with people. I retrieved the bag, walked to the other vehicle, and got in. I felt calmer. Joe Wylie turned up and complained that I had taken his seat. It was like being on a dysfunctional school trip. Conneh, cast now in the role of headmaster, told Joe that he should stop complaining and get in the other vehicle. I was beginning to like him.

  We set off back towards Guinea in high spirits. Going to Tubmanburg was great news for me for other reasons: Taylor was using his helicopter in Foya, which was in the opposite direction. Our new schedule would hopefully remove the possibility of shooting it down. We arrived in Macenta for fuel and spares in good time. Weapons were kept out of view of the locals. Joe’s truck was nowhere to be seen. An hour passed, and then we heard it careering through the gateway of the compound.

  The windscreen had caved in completely, and the door panels cut into jagged tears. The driver’s door opened, and blood spilled onto the concrete below: a man lurched out, his clothes, hands and face wet and red. The tailgate snapped down, more blood ran onto the floor. Joe staggered to one side, and sat down, deep in shock. As Dudley filmed, the story coalesced around us. A young rebel sitting behind the driver had accidentally pulled the pin on his hand grenade. He turned towards the window to throw it clear but it blew up in his hands, cutting him in half. His torso and legs had been dumped by the road. Pieces of intestine stuck to the grey faux-leather seats. The driver, now writhing on the floor by my feet, had his right arm and shoulder shredded with shrapnel. Nick bent over him, surgical gloves on, methodically tending to the wounds. Incredibly, no one else had been killed. Joe somehow managed to escape unscathed, his neat uniform spattered with dark spots of blood.