An apartheid-era weapons smuggler could be extradited back home to Demark, report Stefaans Brummer and Rehana Rossouw
DENMARK may ask South Africa to extradite a Dane who shipped East-bloc weapons worth millions of rand to apartheid South Africa, against the United Nations arms embargo and Danish law.
Danish shipper Anders Jensen left Denmark for South Africa in 1983 after he was charged with the large-scale supply of foreign arms to Armscor, many of them AK-47s and other Soviet- origin weaponry. He brought with him millions of rands in bounty, to pay for the allegedly illegal deals. Now changes in South Africa mean he may lose protection from Danish law.
The case highlights the irony of how apartheid South Africa, as an avowedly anti-communist state, clandestinely imported weapons from communist states, mostly for rebels to use against the communist-aligned governments of Mozambique and Angola — helped by Danes, whose government was anti-apartheid.
“I don’t regard myself as a criminal. If I am one, there are many other people who belong in jail, that’s for sure,” Jensen said. “There were lots of others sailing to South Africa at the time.”
Jensen is not the only Danish shipper accused of having transported arms in contravention of the 1977 UN mandatory arms embargo; but others were prosecuted and sentenced.
Henrik Berlau, president of the Danish Seamen’s Union, said the union had monitored embargo-busting shipments by Danish ships, and Jensen was one of 16 shippers identified.
Berlau said others had been prosecuted , but that Jensen, the “main smuggler”, evaded Danish justice by coming to South Africa.
The Seamen’s Union, which was strongly anti- apartheid, maintains that since 1978 Danish ships were responsible for at least 60 illegal shipments, of which about 25 were aboard vessels of Jensen’s company Trigon.
Jensen this week denied Danish media reports that he wanted to return to Denmark, and wanted to know whether “that communist trade union” was behind the renewed interest in his activities.
A Danish news service last month reported that Jensen was thinking of pre-empting a possible extradition request from Danish prosecutors, by asking Danish police to “evaluate” the status of the case against him.
A representative of the Danish embassy in Pretoria confirmed the attorney general in Copenhagen was considering charges against Jensen.
It is understood Danish authorities never pushed for the extradition of Jensen after 1983 because of the absence of diplomatic relations and the unlikelihood of the National Party government giving up an ally.
Now full diplomatic relations have been established, Denmark may reopen the case. A Danish statute of limitations “forgives” offences which are not prosecuted within a set period of time, but an argument can be made that it does not apply to Jensen because extradition had not been possible.
Director David Bruce, the head of Interpol’s South African bureau in Pretoria, said there was no extradition treaty between the two countries, but that there was an alternative procedure where the South African president signed an authorisation.
Jensen’s alleged offences may well have gone undetected had it not been for investigations by the Seamen’s Union, and also the World Campaign Against Military and Nuclear Collaboration with South Africa, led by former South African exile Abdul Minty, now a deputy director general in the Department of Foreign Affairs.
A 1984 Danish television production details one of the voyages by the Trigon vessel Sarah Poulsen. It shows how a contract was negotiated in Paris in 1978 by Armscor representative Charles Canfield and South African embassy official Michael Jordaan with German arms dealer Peter Mulack.
The South Africans agreed to pay Mulack $9,76- million for a shipload of arms, Trigon $300 000 for transport, and another almost $500 000 for a false end-user certificate. Mulack bought the arms — inter alia 4 000 AK47 rifles, 3 500 AKM rifles, 3 000 machine guns, tens of thousands of hand grenades, mines, and ammunition — from Bulgaria.
The ship loaded up at the Bulgarian port of Borgas, pretending to head for Nigeria, but sailed for the Canary Islands. In October 1978 the ship, its name and origin disguised, discharged in Durban.
Weapons of East-bloc origin were in demand because South Africa used these for propoganda purposes, in clandestine operations, and to supply Unita and Renamo. Such support was officially denied, so arms supplies had to be untraceable.