Ed O’Loughlin
Despite lurid reports to the contrary, the pursuit of the civil war in Sierra Leone has had little to do with British mercenaries, illegally imported Bulgarian weapons, Executive Outcomes, Foreign Office intrigue or the crew of HMS Cornwall.
Whatever the British government may or may not have known about the activities of the London-based mercenary firm Sandline International, and whatever plans may have been conceived, Major Johnny Paul Koroma’s military junta was toppled by nothing more than a few battalions of lightly equipped Nigerian infantry.
Although the troops were officially acting on behalf of the Ecomog West African peace- keeping force, which gave them their mandate, there was no doubt in the minds of the few foreigners present that this was an all-Nigerian show.
For three weeks in February and March, I was one of two Western journalists covering the Nigerian advance from Freetown – liberated in mid-February – into the junta-held north.
For all the talk of “dogs of war”, the only mercenaries involved in the operation were the crew of the old Soviet-built Mi17 transport helicopter which, together with a semi- operational Hind gunship and a Liberia-based Alpha Jet, constituted the sum total of Ecomog’s air support.
It was a photograph of this helicopter being repaired in Freetown by crew members of HMS Cornwall that led the London Sunday Times to claim last weekend that it had proved co-operation between the British military and Sandline, which is believed to own the helicopter.
What the Sunday Times left out was that the Cornwall had been sent to assist Ecomog and the newly restored elected government of Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, and that it was for Ecomog and Kabbah that the helicopter was working.
I had plenty of time and opportunity to form this impression. The base for Ecomog operations was Lungi airport, separated from Freetown by a long river ferry crossing, and the comings and goings of the old helicopter was all that broke the monotony of days spent waiting for the northern advance to begin.
The crew – three South Africans and a machine-gunner of indeterminable nationality – were polite but wary: journalists could make life difficult for people in their line of work, particularly at a time when South Africa’s Parliament was pushing through legislation to ban mercenary activity by its citizens.
Their main job, it soon became plain, was to ferry the Nigerian force commander and his staff on trips across to Freetown and back to the Ecomog headquarters in the Liberian capital of Monrovia.
They also went on supply and rescue missions to the interior, where foreign missionaries and aid workers had been trapped by the unrest and Sandline employees were still contracted to guard three key installations.
On February 27, after a week of tedium at Lungi, we got lucky. The helicopter was flying to Bumbuna in the north to evacuate a number of civilians and Catholic missionaries from a dam-construction project.
Although surrounded by junta fighters, the Italian-led project had escaped the general looting and vandalism because of the presence of Sandline personnel. The Nigerian commander, Colonel Maxwell Khobe, said we could go along if it was all right with the crew. The crew said fine, so long as we did not photograph them.
There followed 40 minutes of high-speed tree-top madness, packed into the cargo hold with ammunition and supplies and a squad of nervous Nigerian soldiers being sent to reinforce the Sandline personnel. The gunner, perched in the open doorway with no safety line and a general purpose machine gun in his lap, waved politely to occasional groups of startled civilians as we zoomed over their heads.
At Bumbuna the helicopter swooped in low over the hills above the dam site, a miracle of calm and order after the eerie emptiness and unharvested fields of the rebel-held countryside. The Nigerian soldiers rushed to unload their gear, fearing incoming fire. A gaggle of frightened women and children, relatives of the construction team, climbed on board, together with three unkempt white men carrying Kalashnikov rifles.
I recognised one of them, a wary young man with an English accent, from two weeks before. I had come upon him, together with the helicopter crew, rooting through a stack of captured junta rifles at the Ecomog camp at Koso, south of Freetown, while an indulgent Nigerian quartermaster looked on. Yes, he confirmed on the helicopter after cautious introductions, they had indeed been “shopping” for weapons that day. They got on with the Nigerians very well. He thought Ecomog was doing a good job, although its organisation and supply was not always all that it might be.
“They have messed up their logistics pretty badly,” he confided. “They have no fuel or trucks for the advance yet, and they don’t have their own helicopter. We’ve had to give them ours.” The Nigerian soldiers who arrived at Bumbuna that day were the first they had seen, he said.
Sandline is also reported to have security contracts at the United States-owned Sierra Rutile mine in the south and a diamond concession in the east, but, despite efforts to contact the company in London yesterday, it is not known if they were attacked at any stage. Consisting mostly of former special-forces troops from South Africa, Britain and Europe, the mercenaries would easily overawe the untrained and undisciplined fighters of Koroma’s rabble army.
But so did the Nigerians who, the day after the Bumbuna flight, began an advance that cleared the northern towns of rebels in under a week, with the loss of only one of their soldiers and the deaths of two rebels. They conducted the operation with three armoured cars, a handful of commandeered lorries and the expenditure of two mortar shells. More significantly for the future balance of power in Sierra Leone, they did it alone.