Peter Dickson
They come over the mountains from Lesotho on skis every full moon, invisible in their snowsuits, lethal with their AK-47s. In experienced bands of five, on a good night in the virtually perennial snow that erases their trail in seconds, they will drive off at least 100 head of livestock.
For a time this year, thanks to only two members of one of the world’s most feared private armies, each paid R12 000 a month, the snowmen stayed at home and, in time, moved elsewhere.
But now the men from Executive Outcomes are packing up to leave and, on New Year’s day, will have left the isolated farmers of Maclear, Lunsdean’s Nek and Moshesh’s Ford to fend for themselves against the ski-bound marauders from Lesotho.
Before Executive Outcomes’s farm protection outfit was collectively hired, these farmers would illegally head over the inadequately policed border themselves to track down their stolen sheep.
But this is a hard land riddled with steep mountains, and many semi-frozen animals, even if found, would have to be put down because of their exhausting ordeal.
Now the farmers may not be so keen after this week’s border disaster in which three men in a 25-strong Mount Fletcher cross-border recovery party died in a hail of semi-automatic rifle fire on entering Lesotho.
That area, far to the east of Executive Outcomes’s protective boundary, is no stranger to stocktheft and its accompanying violence.
Only two years ago, hundreds of blanket-clad Basotho poured over the hills, plundering, burning and looting. Police say 15 Transkei villagers in the Matatiele district died and those Basotho raiders who were captured, as eventually revealed in court, were killed in cold blood by frustrated police.
Last year police in the Mount Fletcher area must have thought they had been time-warped back into the 19th-century when an intercepted Basotho raiding party on horseback turned and swept towards them in a line like the great cavalry charges of old, oblivious to the daunting modern odds of helicopters and automatice gunfire.
As even the once-mighty South African National Defence Force learned in October, Lesotho is no easy pushover.
Executive Outcomes has made a tidy packet from the 15 farmers of Moshesh’s Ford, Lunsdean’s Nek and Maclear who hired them over the past nine months to achieve what they gratefully called an “unbelievable difference” after giving up on earlier efforts with San border war veterans.
>From January 1, however, it’s back to silent nights of anxiety in an area of primitive communications and roads, economically depressed and too rough and remote for ready response.
Asked for his thoughts on the future of his worried clients, Executive Outcomes director Nico Palm said brusquely this week: “This is a matter between the company and the client. It has nothing to do with the press.”
It is not an answer that pleases his cash-strapped clients. Said one angry local farmer: “I feel like I’ve been robbed – twice.”