On 25 July, two days after the Nigerians oversaw the return of the ousted president in São Tomé, the LURD fired more than thirty 81mm mortars in a ten-minute barrage of the Newport Street and Mamba Point areas. The Newport High School campus was hit. Eight refugees were killed. A further twenty-five people were killed in and around the Holiday Inn Hotel on Carey Street in central Monrovia, where an estimated two hundred civilians had gone to seek shelter. The following day yet more bombs rained down on the city, this time hitting the Greater Refuge Church, where around three hundred people had gathered: five were killed, many more injured.
On the 27th, John W. Blaney III, the US ambassador to Liberia, announced that President Bush, who had already called for Taylor to step down, had ordered three warships to sail for Liberia, laden with a fighting-force of 3,500 Marines. They were expected to arrive within two weeks. As well as the pressing humanitarian crisis, about which the United States Government had so far done almost nothing, Ambassador Blaney also reminded Jonathan – who was still in Monrovia – that the US did now need to act, not least because Liberia was severely destabilising Western Africa, a region which supplied America with around 20 per cent of its imported petroleum. Demanding a ceasefire, they called on the LURD to stop their attacks, and then called me.
Frank from US Intelligence wanted to know if I could call Conneh and urge him to agree to a ceasefire. At the very least, he wanted to know if I could help stop the LURD from launching more mortar attacks.
‘Man, we know exactly where those mortars are being fired from,’ he said, ‘and they’re just not going to be allowed to carry on doing that.’
‘So there are circumstances under which you’d take them out?’
Frank confirmed that that was the case, that they had the capability to do so and that the threat would be made directly. He also knew, he told me, that the LURD were transporting arms to Liberia from Guinea by ship.
‘Frank, you know our mutual friend? The one who’s travelled with me a lot?’
‘Roger that, yes.’
‘Er, he might possibly be on the ship. If it was going to be sunk, could you warn me?’
‘Roger that. Yes, I could do that, James.’
I had taken his call in the street. I stopped and looked at the cars passing, couples window-shopping for diamond rings along Bond Street. Everything seemed so normal. I walked down to St James’s and found a quiet spot on Jermyn Street to make the call. A besuited gentleman trotted past, muttering under his breath at the dawdling tourists clogging the pavement. I dialled Conneh’s number. He was in Conakry.
‘Listen, Sekou,’ I said, still wondering how best to broach the subject, ‘the mortar attacks on Monrovia are getting very negative publicity. You’ll get a lot of international praise if you announce that you’ve stopped them. Say it’s for humanitarian purposes. It’ll make you look good.’
I knew it was the only argument that might work. With power so nearly in his hands, Sekou was not going to be easily persuaded to stop – and he wasn’t.
‘We wi’ continue to figh’,’ he insisted.
The peace talks in Accra were evidently a sham. Every concession the rebels gave, or promise of a ceasefire they hinted at, was a tactic to buy more time or territory.
‘We jus’ talkin’ while we ge’ mo’ RPG bom’ fro’ Guinea,’ he informed me. ‘Den we ca’ sta’ de attack again.’
I gave up and called Nick, who was already in Guinea. I suspected that Nick might be due to start shepherding weapons deliveries by boat to the rebels.
‘Nick? It’s James. Listen, man, I’ve just spoken to our American friend.’
I recounted the conversation with Frank.
‘Okay, thanks, man, that’s very helpful,’ Nick said. ‘I’ll do what I can with Sekou. I don’t think they realise how many civilians are being killed.’
Nick didn’t realise how many had died, either. He was shocked by the news of the direct hits.
‘That is kak, man, the people will never support them if they carry on with that shit. And anyway, it’s stupid, they can’t see what they’re doing. If they’re not killing Taylor’s soldiers, then it’s just a fokken waste of time.’
Nick also confirmed that the peace talks were a ploy – at least for Sekou. The last ‘ceasefire’ had been agreed to so that the LURD forces outside Monrovia could re-supply MODEL rebels coming up from the southeast, who had – in true Liberian style – run out of ammunition. I had only a very sketchy idea of what Nick was now doing in Guinea with Sekou. It was frustrating and alarming. I’d brought him into the Liberian war, and he’d co-opted me into the coup – but our relationship was anything but equal. Nick was clearly in danger, but without full disclosure from him about what he was planning, it was impossible to protect him.
When we finished talking, I realised that the implications for Nick’s Adventure of both the coup in São Tomé and the LURD rebels’ indiscriminate bombardment of Monrovia could be substantial. The presence of US naval firepower in the region, and the Nigerian military response to the São Tomé coup, had ushered in a set of unintended consequences: Guinea and Liberia per se were more than likely fatally compromised as operational bases. More than that, it was probable that any seaborne operation to launch Nick’s offensive was off the cards. I might have a long wait on my hands.
In the end, the war in Liberia came to a quick resolution. Sekou, who had been accompanied by Nick to the last round of peace talks in Ghana, was frozen out of the final negotiations by the ‘politicians’ from Conakry. He remained the titular head of an army that could no longer fight unless it took on the Americans, and of an organisation that was all but unelectable. His wife, long the source of the rebels’ military power, began to move against him – splitting away senior fighters and shoring up her own power base. On 31 July, the LURD agreed to a ceasefire, still only having reached Freeport. Not one rebel fighter had managed to cross New Bridge into the centre of town.
By 3 August, American warships had arrived off the coast of Liberia. Two days later, 700 Nigerian peacekeepers deployed by air into Robertsfield airport and occupied Monrovia without a shot being fired. The war was over, and the front line fell silent.
I watched the pictures on the evening news. Journalists, dozens of them, swarmed around Cobra, spilling out into LURD territory. Government fighters and LURD rebels held their forearms up to each other and shouted ‘same skin, same skin’, calling each other their ‘Liberian brothers’, while embracing and sharing cigarettes and hooch. It was strange to watch. Only a few days before, LURD fighters had been hacking the arms off Government soldiers whom they captured near the bridges. Now, suddenly, the years of war and slaughter had all apparently dissolved in an afternoon.
As soon as the fighters began to re-discover their shared humanity with the enemy, the LURD high command began to fragment. Cobra was bought off by the promise of a command position in the new Liberian Army, and the knowledge that he could pay himself a generous slice of the money the United Nations would offer for buying up the rebels’ weapons in the ensuing disarmament programme. In total, the UN paid to demobilise more than 100,000 combatants in Liberia (including more than 10,000 children), despite accurate estimates that there could have been no more than 4,000 or 5,000 rebels and a similar number of Government troops and militia. The commanders on both sides made small fortunes: Cobra invested some of his in a diamond-mining operation near his home of Bakedu.
On 11 August, Taylor went into exile in Nigeria. A week later LURD, MODEL and the Government of Liberia signed the Accra peace accords, and established a two-year National Transitional Government – which excluded Sekou Conneh – and agreed the demobilisation of the armed factions.
It wasn’t clear who the real winners would be, though I suspected that the true beneficiaries would be the people who took power once the Transitional Government ended. For the time being, the LURD and MODEL ‘politicians’ had stolen a march on Conneh and the fighting men. Joe Wylie, who denounced Conneh
as being xenophobic, incompetent, disruptive and dictatorial before the attack on Monrovia began, landed a position in the Ministry of Defence. What was clear was that the fighting men themselves would be left with nothing, least of all their weapons.
Nick dropped off the radar. Guinea’s territorial waters were being closely monitored by the Americans and Nigerians. It was no longer possible that Nick could use Liberian rebel fighters – who would have to disarm, anyway – on his planned raid.
In addition, the failure of the São Tomé coup had confirmed that the target of Nick’s planned regime change must surely be the president of Equatorial Guinea. In Nick’s absence, I sat down to research the sordid, seldom-reported facts of the Equatoguinean regime. In the same way that reliable information about Liberia had been hard to come by eighteen months beforehand, verifiable details about the government of Equatorial Guinea were equally difficult to source. It seemed that the only point at which the former Spanish colony had broken into popular political consciousness at all was after Frederick Forsyth published his bestselling novel The Dogs of War, a ripping yarn that was, in fact, a fictionalised account of his own close personal involvement in a foiled coup there in 1973.
President Obiang of Equatorial Guinea, or Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, to give him his full name, was indeed no stranger to the idea of taking power by a coup d’état. In 1979 he deposed his own uncle in a bloody rebellion that saw him installed as one of Africa’s most brutal dictators. He had exemplary training: before grabbing the top job, he ran the country’s renowned Black Beach prison – an institution feared across the African continent for its extreme violence and depravity. Executions, which were said to be commonplace, reportedly involved forcing the condemned man to lie face down, and staving in his skull with an iron bar.
During his near-quarter-century of mis-rule, hundreds of opposition activists had been tortured, murdered and possibly even eaten by his security services, who were accused, along with the president, of cannibalism by political opponents. Even his deposed uncle was put in front of a firing squad – but not before his protégé had taken safe delivery of the former president’s extensive collection of skulls, rumoured to confer magical powers. The macabre good-luck charms seemed to be working. His grip on power was complete. Presidential elections in 1998 and 2002 had seen Obiang romp home with 98 per cent of the vote. A coup, it seemed, was the only way of getting rid of him.
The 61-year-old President finally denied that he ate people, insisting that he was a ‘Catholic and a humanitarian’. He also declared himself to be a living god. Equatoguinean official state radio repeated Obiang’s claim that he was ‘in permanent contact with the Almighty’ and ‘can decide to kill without anyone calling him to account and without going to hell’. Self-deification notwithstanding, Pope John Paul II, at least, took his claim to be a sincere Roman Catholic at face value, and celebrated Mass with him in 1981.
Enjoying life as a god incarnate clearly offered other fringe benefits. Reports on the financial pages estimated that his personal net worth weighed in at an extraordinary $600 million, making him one of the richest heads of state in the world. It seemed likely that Obiang’s personal income from the granting of oil-exploration licences to international companies was exceeding $10 million a week; meanwhile, the majority of his citizens struggled to find clean drinking water, electricity or healthcare. According to the World Health Organisation, life expectancy for the majority of the population was a mere forty-eight years – only a slight improvement on war-ravished Liberia. At the same time that Obiang re-affirmed his divinity, he also felt compelled to take full, personal, control of the National Treasury, a measure, he explained, designed to stop ‘government corruption’ whittling away oil revenues. At the same time, his son, heir-apparent and LA rap music producer, Teodorín, had managed to accumulate an impressive fleet of Lamborghinis, Ferraris and Bentleys, despite claiming to earn an official salary of $50,000 a year. His favoured status as Obiang’s successor sent shivers down the spines of the Western governments who imported increasingly large amounts of West African oil, and needed stable regimes in the region to keep the wells flowing.
Equatorial Guinea’s oil reserves were vast, to say the least. The third-largest oil producer in Africa, the fetid equatorial island of Bioko sat on an enormous reservoir of premium-quality crude: proven reserves were estimated at 1.1 billion barrels. Equatorial Guinea was producing 250,000 barrels a day. The United States alone imported nearly 5.5 million barrels in 2001. In the first six months of 2002, they had imported almost as much oil from Equatorial Guinea as they had done in the whole of 2001 – when US direct investment already stood at $1.7 billion.
The keys to the presidential palace were a licence to print money – as much money as a mercenary could imagine.
Three weeks passed. Simon Mann called out of the blue. He was trying to track down Nick. We both were: neither of us had heard from him for weeks. I said I’d pass on the message and immediately dialled Nick’s numbers. None of them connected.
I was a month away from heading out to Sierra Leone for the BBC. The preparations were unlike those for my previous trips to West Africa. The culture at the BBC was one of legal protocols, risk-assessments and heavy printed tomes of Guidelines for Producers. I learned to phrase the challenges that I might face on location in optimistic, non-threatening language. Liberia, for example, was represented as ‘a hostile environment in which a number of threats to the production personnel had been identified, but that with proper planning and contingencies did not present risks that could not be sufficiently mitigated to ensure the successful completion of the brief’. Despite the miles of red tape at the BBC, I was looking forward to getting back out to West Africa again, and seeing what had happened in Liberia after the guns fell silent.
Finally, on 9 September 2003, Nick re-surfaced. In response to my enquiry about the timing of the coup, he wrote an email: ‘James, Movements not yet set. Will keep you posted.’
The operation was still on.
At the end of the first week of October, I set off for the first leg of my long slog around West Africa. In Monrovia, I walked across bridges the battles over which had killed dozens of young fighters and hundreds of civilians. I walked past the spot where Tim and I had filmed Iron Jacket firing at looters on the far side of the bridge, and where later that evening we’d drunk bottles of stolen, warm Club beer amongst the corpses that littered the highway.
In truth, all the fighting had been about getting over those bridges; they spanned the deaths of maybe 3,000 or 4,000 people in those last four years of fighting alone. Exact figures were impossible to calculate. Almost all of the rebels I asked after had been killed on the bridges, or executed by their own comrades – often for looting. Dragon Master was in hiding somewhere in the city; Deku had become posthumously lionised as the rebels’ harbinger of death. A popular peace slogan ran No more Deku, no more Taylor.
It was a sad city, filled with people displaced from their homes, desperately pinning their hopes on an awkward and corrupt United Nations peacekeeping mission and a kleptocratic Transitional Government. The adrenaline and hubris of the battles they had endured were dissolving inexorably into the squalid reality of urban poverty.
I returned to Tubmanburg and met with Conneh, an almost-tragic rebel without a cause, who, it turned out, was still trying to cement a business deal with Nick. But with peacekeepers fanning out across the country, and the Americans watching everything closely, the chances of setting up a joint mining operation were increasingly slim. Liberia’s players were moving on, positioning themselves for the elections: but the soldiers in his compound were listless, still armed and getting younger. Dozens of children clutching AKs hung around, while Conneh sat, guarded by Guinean soldiers, like some surreal Hamlet.
As I walked through the town, I was mobbed by people wanting to say hello – civilians who remembered me from the war, rebel soldiers I’d filmed fighting. The market was working again, as was a small
cinema. People had crawled out of the forest and reclaimed their homes, and their lives. Everything looked different. Roofs were patched with zinc or sheets of United Nations-issue blue plastic, and blasted walls were hung with loosely fitting tarpaulins. I walked to the spots where the prisoners had been executed, where I’d dived for cover, or sat, exhausted and smoking, astonished at my own survival. Drying clothes and children’s voices wafted from the balcony of the house where first Nick and then Tim and I had passed so many hours. I squatted down and wiped the sweat out of my eyes, and put my palms onto the hot, dusty ground. It was impossible to get Liberia out from under my skin. Its mark festered inside me. I was glad I’d come back to see Conneh and re-trodden the ground I’d run over during the fighting, but the shabby politics and double-dealing of the peace settlement demeaned the deaths of the people I’d filmed and become friends with. When I left a week later, I knew I wouldn’t return.
During a break in filming, I finally got hold of Nick. His plans were developing rapidly. The original reconnaissance of the target had gone well. Now he was in business with the brother of the president he intended to overthrow. In addition to negotiating a sea-fisheries protection contract (to which end he was purchasing a boat from Cape Town), he was working on agricultural projects and hoped shortly to sign a contract to start up an aviation company. These businesses were cover operations – fronts that allowed him to conduct an in-depth reconnaissance of the island, in textbook Special Forces style. The companies had two other purposes: first, they provided a pretext for importing men, machinery, boats and – in the case of sea-fisheries protection – even guns; second, they could be profitable in their own right – in effect, an insurance policy in case the coup failed to happen. He’d moved his men into permanent accommodation and was travelling ‘there’ more frequently himself. He sounded genuinely excited, and was either astonished at his luck in business, or playing the consummate actor over a telephone line that we both knew must be monitored.
My Friend The Mercenary Page 30