By Norm Dixon
"The team that we have hired to train our security force members are not cowboys; they are a reputable professional company, who are part of our many-faceted strategy to reach a lasting solution to this particular crisis", PNG Prime Minister Julius Chan said on February 24, as opposition mounted to his decision to hire the corporate mercenary army Executive Outcomes (EO) to strike at rebel leaders on Bougainville. The background and record of this private army show it to be not as innocuous as Chan would have the world believe.
EO's private army has seen battle in at least two African countries — Angola and Sierra Leone. There is strong evidence, despite denials, that its agents are involved in the organisation of mercenaries to fight the anti-Mobutu rebels advancing across eastern Zaire.
EO-linked companies have bid for $1 million security contracts with agricultural and forest companies in South Africa to combat "crime". EO companies are believed to have interests in 34 countries.
The apartheid regime allowed its security forces to operate "front" companies. There is overwhelming evidence that the origins of Executive Outcomes and its many allied companies lie in apartheid South Africa's network of covert and overt military forces, which were dedicated to the destruction of the African National Congress and other southern African liberation movements, as well as the destabilisation of Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Angola.
Vicious covert operations — the mysterious perpetrators of which became known as the "Third Force" — continued in South Africa until the eve of the 1994 elections.
EO was founded in 1989 by Eeben Barlow, a 17-year veteran of the South African Defence Force. Barlow served with the notorious 32 Battalion, an elite unit stationed in Namibia, which became renowned for its brutality towards SWAPO and ANC guerillas.
The 32 Battalion fought beside the CIA-backed UNITA terrorist army of Jonas Savimbi, fighting to overthrow the left-wing Angolan government.
Barlow was also an agent of the Civil Cooperation Bureau, a state hit squad suspected of the 1989 assassinations of SWAPO activist Anton Lubowski and ANC activist David Webster.
Barlow says he ran the CCB's western European operations but admits only to disinformation campaigns to discredit the ANC. In the late 1980s, several attempts were made to bomb ANC offices in western Europe. On March 29, 1988, ANC leader Dulcie September was killed in Paris by a letter bomb.
Barlow heads a holding company, the Pretoria-based Strategic Resources Corporation (SRC), under whose banner EO's web of interlocking private security, mining, air charter, satellite telecommunications, counter-espionage, water management and other companies wholly or partially operate.
Another SRC board member, Lafras Luitingh, was a major in the SADF's 5 Recce regiment, the force implicated in the widespread violence on Johannesburg's commuter trains before the 1994 elections. Luitingh is also a former CCB agent.
Barlow gathered veterans of the SADF's racist, counter-revolutionary wars and "dirty tricks" departments — white and black — to form the core of expertise on which a burgeoning mercenary conglomerate is now based. Former members of 32 Battalion, the Recce regiments, the CCB and the murderous Koevoet (crowbar) units, who terrorised Namibia during its struggle for independence, are strongly represented among EO/SRC's 1000-plus "employees".
EO/SRC's strategy is simple. It offers its command, training and war-fighting expertise — together with seasoned irregular forces and high-tech firepower — to prop up weak regimes in mineral-rich Third World states threatened by civil war or revolution.
After regions with vital economic resources are reconquered and rebel movements repulsed, grateful governments — as well as handing over wads of cash — grant EO and allied companies long-term security contracts, lucrative mining and energy concessions, air transport licences, engineering contracts and other business opportunities.
Multinational mining companies also eagerly sign contracts with the EO stable to provide long-term armed security for their operations.
EO/SRC first used this formula in Angola with great success.
In January 1993, Eeben Barlow met in London with senior executives of Heritage Oil and Gas, a company with oil exploration interests in Angola.
The executives, Tony Buckingham and Simon Mann (both former British Special Air services veterans with links to British intelligence), hired Barlow to round up a force to recapture Angola's main oil-producing region from the anti-government UNITA guerillas.
One hundred or so South African mercenaries with battle experience in Angola swiftly chased away UNITA, which returned only when the hired guns withdrew.
The Angolan government was impressed and contracted Barlow to construct a larger force to deliver a knockout blow to UNITA, ironically apartheid's former darling, in return a $40 million fee, over and above costs, and oil concessions.
Buckingham and Mann were also impressed and decided to go into partnership with Barlow. In September 1993, a branch of Executive Outcomes was registered in the UK, with Buckingham and Mann among the directors. The intervention of an EO force of 500 mercenaries shifted the long-running civil war in the Angolan government's favour.
In January 1996, under the terms of a peace agreement, EO was required to leave Angola. Fewer than half of EO's personnel in Angola returned to South Africa. Most were now employed by entities such as mining companies Branch Mining and Branch Energy, air charter outfit Ibis Air and Saracen International, a security firm protecting oil company operations in Soyo. All these companies operate under the Strategic Resource Corporation umbrella.
A similar scenario was played out in west Africa, in the former British colony of Sierra Leone, in 1995.
Rebels of the Revolutionary United Front were on the outskirts of the capital, Freetown, and the military dictatorship of Valentine Strasser looked set to tumble. Up to 500 EO mercenaries arrived in February. By May the rebels had been pushed from Freetown, and the strategic diamond-rich Kono region was back in government hands.
Freetown agreed to pay EO $18.5 million, and an EO/SRC-linked company called Diamond Works was granted lucrative diamond concessions. Another EO/SRC company, Lifeguard, won contracts to provide security for many of the country's diamond operations and the Sierra Rutile mine, 50% owned by Brisbane-based Consolidated Rutile.
Executive Outcomes has a frightening arsenal. EO's air force, Ibis Air, owns three Boeing 727 supply planes, two Mi-17 armed transport helicopters, two Mi-24 Hind gunships, at least two MiG-23 fighter jets and a squadron of Swiss Pilatus training planes converted to fire air-to-ground rockets.
They operate out of Johannesburg airport, from the hangars of Simera, the aviation division of the state-owned arms manufacturer, Denel.
South African intelligence reports indicate that EO recently spent $800,000 buying arms in eastern Europe, as well as purchasing "non-lethal" military equipment from Denel. It is reported to possess 82mm grenade launchers and 17mm machine guns. The Sierra Leonean rebels accuse EO of planting illegal anti-personnel mines.
This firepower calls into question EO's repeated claims that it merely provides training and military "consultants".
Ibis Air is in partnership with the son of Kenya's autocratic ruler, Daniel arap Moi. Sanjivan Ruprah, a wealthy supporter of Moi's party, is chairperson of Branch Energy's Kenyan subsidiary. EO/SRC companies are also in partnership with Caleb Akandwanaho, brother of Uganda's president.
Tony Buckingham's offices at 107 Plaza, 535 King's Road, London, houses 18 companies, including Executive Outcomes Ltd (UK), Heritage Oil and Gas, Diamond Works, Ibis Air International, Branch Mining, Branch Energy and Sandline International, the company that arranged the supply of mercenaries for PNG's planned operation against Bougainville.
A hemisphere away, Barlow's Strategic Resources Corporation's offices in Lynwood, Pretoria, house Executive Outcomes (SA), Saracen International, Falconer Systems — to provide logistical supplies to "United Nations-related organisations" — and Bridge International, specialising in construction and civil engineering.
While many governments and ruling-class commentators have expressed mock outrage at the activities of EO/SRC's buccaneers in Africa — and now in PNG — little has been done to restrict their activities in South Africa or Britain. Behind closed doors, governments and big business quietly accept that they are doing a dirty but necessary job.
In the aftermath of the debacle of the "humanitarian" US invasion of Somalia, and the dissension between France and the US over intervention in eastern Zaire, it has become increasingly difficult to launch direct US or European interventions in Africa. If a home-grown "African" mercenary outfit like EO/SRC can defend imperialist economic interests without great political cost to the western powers, they are not about to complain.