MERCENARIES

Also by Guy Arnold

WARS IN THE THIRD WORLD SINCE 1945

BRAINWASH: The Cover-Up Society

KENYATTA AND THE POLITICS OF KENYA

MODERN NIGERIA

THE RESOURCES OF THE THIRD WORLD

* WORLD GOVERNMENT BY STEALTH

BRITAIN SINCE 1945

* THE END OF THE THIRD WORLD

* From the same publishers

Mercenaries The Scourge of the Third World

Guy Arnold

First published in Great Britain 1999 by

MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library,

ISBN 978-1-349-27710-0 ISBN 978-1-349-27708-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-27708-7

First published in the United States of America 1999 by

ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010

ISBN 978-0-312-22203-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Arnold, Guy. Mercenaries : the scourge of the Third World/Guy Arnold.p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-312-22203-1 (cloth) 1. Mercenary troops- Developing countries. I. Title. U42.A 78 1999 355.3'54-dc21 99-18562

CIP

© Guy Arnold 1999 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1999All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE.

Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 108 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99

Contents

Preface VI

List of Abbreviations and Acronyms Vll

Introduction IX

The Congo 1960-1965

2 The Nigerian Civil War 18

3 Southern Africa (I) Rhodesia 26

4 Southern Africa (2) Angola 33

5 African vulnerability 46

6 Island destabilization: Comoros, Seychelles, Denard 56

7 The British mercenary tradition: The Middle East 65

8 Papua New Guinea and Bougainville 74

9 Nicaragua and Colombia 86

10 Europe 101

II South Africa and Executive Outcomes 113

12 The new mercenary coporations 123

13 Sierra Leone, Sandline and Britain 132

14 Western attitudes 147

15 The United Nations 159

16 Conclusions - the future 169

Notes 175

Appendix 181

Index 190

v

Preface

The subject of mercenaries rouses similar emotions to that of arms sales and in a violent, competitive world the demand for the services of the former and the supply of the latter steadily escalates. In the near 40 years from the Congo crisis of the early 1960s to the restoration of President Kabbah in Sierra Leone with the help of the British mer­cenary company Sandline in 1998, there has been a profound change in the perception and use of mercenaries, from the individual soldiers­of-fortune who turned up in the Congo or Angola to the new corpo­rate mercenary who is leased out by a range of security and military advice companies which claim only to work for legitimate govern­ments. These companies are the result of a new approach to problems by an ever wider range of governments: the 'outsourcing' of tasks to private enterprise which formerly were the sole province of govern­ment. There is every indication that sophisticated military advisory security firms will become increasingly powerful, sought after and dangerous. If this proves to be the case they will turn into an inde­pendent monster that cannot be controlled and one, moreover, that will have been encouraged by the shortsighted and foolish policies of the world's major military powers.

Vl

List of Abbreviations and Acronyms

ADFL

AFRC ANC APC BATT CCB CIA DCC DSL ECOWAS ECOMOG ELP EO FAPLA FAZ FMG FNLA MDLP MPLA MPRI NGO NPFL NPRC OAU RUF SADF SAS SDP SLPP SPPF SPUP SWAPO UDI

Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire Armed Forces Revolutionary Council African National Congress All People's Congress British Army Training Team Civil Cooperation Bureau Central Intelligence Agency Directorate of Covert Collection Defence Systems Limited Economic Community of West African States Economic Community Monitoring Group Portuguese Liberation Army Executive Outcomes Forc;as Armadas Populares de Libertac;ao de Angola Forces Armees du Zaire Federal Military Government Frente Nacional de Libertac;ao de Angola Democratic Movement for the Liberation of Portugal Movimento Popular de Libertac;ao de Angola Military Professional Resources Inc Non-Government Organization National Patriotic Front of Liberia National Provisional Ruling Council Organization of African Unity Revolutionary United Front South Africa Defence Force Special Air Services Seychelles Democratic Party Sierra Leone People's Party Seychelless People's Progressive Front Seychelles People's United Party South West Africa People's Organization Unilateral Declaration of Independence

vii

Vlll

UNIT A UNSDF ZANU ZIPA

Abbreviations and Acronyms

Uniao Nacional para a lndependencia Total de Angola Ukrainian National Self-Defence Forces Zimbabwe African National Union Zimbabwe People's Army

Introduction

The story of mercenaries goes back almost as far as that of organized armies; they recur throughout recorded history, sometimes playing a relatively honourable role, at others a disreputable one. The most reliable army is that of patriotic volunteers, the least the mercenary corps, while lying between these two extremes is the army of the modern state: that is, one made up largely of conscripts. The fact about the mercenary which should never be forgotten is that he serves for pay; he is not a patriot and he has no loyalty to the cause for which - temporarily - he is fighting. An army composed, wholly or in part, of mercenaries cannot be relied upon in the same way as a national army. The financial motive comes first with the mercenary; as a result his loyalty must always be suspect. Those who employ mercenaries, therefore, must ensure that they are paid and paid regularly. Such pay is often extremely high but unpaid mercenaries are a danger to their employers and not to be trusted. The mercenary bands commonly employed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries easily and often turned into a menace both to their former employers and, more generally, to the country in which they would operate as freebooters once the money to pay them had run out - as it frequently did.

Mercenaries first appear in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia where their services were essential aspects of imperial control. At the height of their military dominance the Carthaginians employed large num­bers of mercenaries alongside their regular troops. Some of these regular mercenary forces such as the Nubians serving the Pharoahs or the Janissaries serving the Ottomans were composed of slave regi­ments. Possibly the most famous mercenary band in history was that celebrated by Xenophon in the Anabasis, his story of the 10,000 Greeks who were employed by Cyrus, the pretender to the Persian throne. These Greeks formed a highly efficient fighting force and were available because the long Peloponnesian war between Athens and Sparta had just come to an end.

Mercenaries or potential mercenaries are usually available in large numbers at the conclusion of any major war. When the Roman Empire ceased to rely upon its citizen armies and turned instead to mercenaries it embarked upon a path that led to its eventual disinte­gration.

IX

X Introduction

The end of the 'Dark Ages' which followed the collapse of the Roman Empire saw the rise of a new kind of mercenary. The medieval Spanish hero, the Cid, whose exploits have been celebrated in over 200 poems and sagas, was a mercenary who hired himself out to both Christian and Moorish rulers in the long struggle then taking place in Spain while Norman knights as early as the eleventh century roamed Europe in search of military employment to end up as mercenaries serving petty kingdoms in Italy or Sicily. In the early fourteenth century the Byzantine Empire hired Spanish almogavares or frontiers­men to fight the Turks; this they did successfully but then turned on their patrons to attack the town of Magnesia before going on to ravage Thrace. The end of the 100 Years War in 1453 left large numbers of unemployed soldiers in Europe ready for hire and it was at this time that Swiss, Italian and German soldiers took to hiring themselves out in bands to rulers or the churches; these bands put themselves under condottieri, the name by which the mercenary leaders of the time, the contractors, became known. They were well trained professional soldiers who sold their services to the highest bidder. Their livelihood depended upon the military life and their comman­ders attracted men into their service according to their reputations for success and the booty to be gained under them. They flourished not least because the Italian city states and their medieval rulers feared their own citizens and were loathe to arm them. In general, such mercenaries were undisciplined, greedy and brutal and much easier to hire than subsequently to fire. If it suited them to do so they would desert their paymasters on the eve of battle, especially against a super­ior enemy, to plunder civilians instead.

Mercenaries were a regular feature of European politics throughout the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries and some of them acquired high reputations for loyalty and steadfastness as did the Swiss Guards employed as bodyguards to the kings of France. The Swiss generally were highly regarded as mercenaries all over Europe and often formed elite corps in the armies to which they were attached. The French revolutionary wars saw the rise of national armies and from the nine­teenth century onwards mercenaries tended increasingly to be single soldiers of fortune.

As the major European powers extended their world influence and created their empires through the nineteenth century a new kind of mercenary appeared. Regular soldiers such as Britain's General Gor­don would obtain leave of absence from their own armies and instead take service under a foreign power as he did in China. France created

Introduction XI

one of the most famous of all mercenary bands, the French Foreign Legion, to provide a force to fight in the long war of conquest in Algeria that began in 1830 while Britain, for more than a century, recruited battalions of Gurkhas from Nepal as a regular component of its imperial armies. The rise of the European empires in the nineteenth century also witnessed a new interest in mercenary troops who represented a relatively straightforward way of boosting colo­nial armies that could not rely upon locally recruited militias. Mer­cenaries could also meet part of the military requirements of wealthy imperial powers which could afford to hire them and, for example, the annual recruiting of Gurkhas in Nepal by the British became an important social and economic event for a country which was among the poorest in the world.

In the post-1945 world perceptions of mercenaries again shifted. They were to become a factor in a number of newly independent developing countries, especially in Africa, where it has been assumed, often erroneously, that the mercenary would provide a level of skill and professionalism that the country itself was not yet able to pro­duce. As it happened, the end of the European empires and the emergence of many new weak states coincided with the years following World War II when many discharged soldiers who knew little except warfare were available and more than ready to act as mercenaries~ for suitable pay. Such mercenaries have become prominent in a number of Third World countries, hiring themselves out to governments or dis­sident factions or liberation movements, assisting coup attempts and appearing on both sides in civil wars.

The mercenary appears at one crisis after another according to the laws of supply and demand; he is expensive to hire and expendable once the crisis has passed. As a rule nations or factions hire mercen­aries 'whenever there exists a gap between a soldier and his ability to operate complicated modern military equipment'. 1 At least this is one explanation for his appearance. It became clear during 1975 in Angola that both the United States through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and France through its intelligence service were directly involved in the recruitment and use of mercenaries to fight against the Marxist Movimento Popular de Liberta({aO de Angola (MPLA) which had formed the successor government to the departing Portu­guese. Otherwise these mercenaries would not have appeared on the scene. By the second half of 1976, following the capture, trial and execution of a number of European mercenaries in Angola, Lebanon and Rhodesia became the main focal points for mercenary recruiting

Xll Introduction

operations. It was described2 as symptomatic that one French mer­cenary, Stephane Zanettaci of the neo-fascist 'Action Jeunesse', and one British mercenary, Gerald Thacker, both lost their lives taking part in the Falangist attacks on the Palestine refugee camp at Tel al­Zaatar. The modern mercenary can be seen as a semi-outlawed profes­sional killer: he is supposed to be good at his job; he cares nothing for his victims and is widely despised and feared by the general popula­tion.3 A fact about the modern mercenary that constantly recurs is the rightwing nature of his politics: a high proportion of mercenaries have shown themselves to be openly racist, anti-communist, and all too often fighting to maintain reactionary regimes in power. In the period since 1960 when mercenaries of the present era first became notorious in the Congo, there have generally been too many mercenaries chasing too few jobs; some have been proficient trained soldiers; others, and all too often, have been little better than killer psychopaths. They have appeared in the Congo, Nigeria, Angola and Rhodesia; in the drug wars in Colombia where an estimated 10,000 drug traffickers have been trained in jungle commando tactics by former members of Brit­ain's SAS or Royal Marines; or in the civil wars in Central America; in Burma and Papua New Guinea and Cambodia. They serve as body­guards or make up private armies. Sometimes they have been sup­ported clandestinely or relatively openly by western governments which do not want to be directly involved in dubious dissident or revolutionary operations yet are clearly committed to a particular side although political considerations have prevented them declaring their interests. Some names crop up again and again. The British mercenary 'Mad Mike' Hoare first achieved notoriety in the Congo in 1960 and made his last mercenary appearance in a 1981 botched coup attempt to overthrow Albert Rene, the left-wing President of Seychelles. The French mercenary, Colonel Bob Denard who also featured in the Congo during the early 1960s, made his penultimate appearance in a Paris court which treated him more as a hero than a lawbreaker.

A long article in a 1990 issue of Defence Today attempted to justify mercenanes:

Whatever the opinion each one of us has concerning mercenaries, it is necessary to reflect on the extraordinary flexibility of this profession, which has always known how to adjust itself to meet new market requirements, caused by the evolution of the art of war and of political relations, also in the most backward corners of the earth.'4

Introduction xiii

The article suggests, conveniently forgetting the behaviour of mercen­aries in the Congo, that the modern ideological condemnation of mercenaries really only began in the mid-1970s after a number of western mercenaries were put on trial in Angola by its new Marxist government. Individual mercenaries such as Hoare or Denard or the riff-raff who turned up in Angola in 197 5 are on a different level to the organized mercenary forces used by Britain (the Gurkha Brigade), France (the Foreign Legion) or even Gadaffi's Islamic Legion which was used in the long war and Libyan intervention in the Aozou region of Chad during the 1980s. It is a moot point whether the Cuban troops used in Angola during the 1970s and 1980s in support of the MPLA government could be described as mercenaries; they were volunteers and much of the cost of the operation was paid for by the USSR rather than Cuba. Britain has positively encouraged former regular army officers to serve as military advisers in such places as Oman or the Gulf Emirates. Former Royal Marines turned up in the low­intensity civil war, waged for several years in Suriname, leading the insurgent forces of Ronny Brunswick against the government of Pre­sident Buterse. The brutal war that destroyed Yugoslavia between 1991 and 1995 saw the emergence of a new generation of mercenaries and in its aftermath Serbs and Croats appeared in Zaire in 1997 supposedly in support of Mobutu's crumbling empire though when it came to fighting they retreated ingloriously instead.

Though exceptions may be found, the general behaviour of western mercenaries operating during the last 40 years of the twentieth century in what until recently was described as the Third World has been abysmal: brutal, cruel, racist and, more often than not, simply ineffec­tive. The great majority of the mercenaries who feature in this book came from Europe or North America and on the whole they have done far more damage to the reputations of their own countries than they have succeeded in solving the military problems of the countries in which they operated.