The light was beginning to fade over Harare international airport last Sunday when the 40-year-old white Boeing 727 with a US registration number landed and taxied to the cargo area. With its cabin lights dimmed, the pilot indicated he wanted to refuel before flying on. He declared a crew of three and four cargo handlers.
The Zimbabwean authorities were suspicious, not least because their intelligence told them that some interesting characters were to meet the flight. The South Africans, too, appeared to know what was afoot. Within hours an extraordinary story unfolded to mirror the intrigue of Frederick Forsyth’s Dogs of War, in which a multinational company hires a bunch of mercenaries to overthrow an African dictator — based on a 1973 coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea.
This was not just a case of life imitating art; it seemed as if history was repeating itself. Could the dogs of war that plagued the African continent a generation ago be back? The Zimbabweans found 64 men on the plane — 20 South Africans, 18 Namibians, 23 Angolans, two Congolese (from the Democratic Republic of Congo) and one Zimbabwean with a South African passport — as well as ”military material”. This turned out to be camouflage uniforms, sleeping bags, compasses and wire cutters.
Some of the men were said to have been former members of the notorious 32 Commando of the South African defence force, a clandestine unit of the apartheid regime who went on to join the equally controversial private military company Executive Outcomes, which carried out military operations for the governments of Sierra Leone and Angola in the 1990s. It was formally disbanded in 1999, largely in response to South Africa’s Foreign Military Assistance Act, which outlaws mercenary activities.
As speculation about mercenary adventurers grew, Zimbabwe also announced that it had arrested a former British SAS soldier, Simon Mann, who had arrived at the airport to meet the plane. He had helped to establish EO and its British associate, Sandline International — the military company that helped Sierra Leone beat the rebel group RUF.
Mann had been in Harare in February with a South African called Nick du Toit, apparently seeking to buy arms. The pilots were identified as Niel Steyl, a South African commercial pilot, and Hendrik Hamman, a Namibian. Both had in the past worked for Executive Outcomes.
As the revelations accelerated, the plot spiralled into the surreal. On Tuesday the information minister of Equatorial Guinea, Agustin Nze Nfumu, dramatically announced that 15 men — from South Africa, Armenia, Kazakhstan and Germany — had been arrested for ”plotting to kill the president”, Teodoro Obiang, and that their ringleader had confessed.
He said one of the men had claimed the group was acting on behalf of Ely Calil, a Lebanese businessman close to Severo Moto, self-proclaimed president of a so-called Equatorial Guinean government-in-exile in Spain, who had tried to mount a coup in 1997.
Calil, who has British and Senegalese citizenship, lives in a high-gated mansion in one of the more exclusive areas of Chelsea, west London. He is an adviser to the Senegalese president and reportedly carries a diplomatic passport.
Two years ago he was arrested in Paris and interrogated by the magistrate investigating the Elf oil scandal about his role in handling commissions for the late Nigerian strongman Sani Abacha.
Calil declined to be interviewed. But he told a London-based newsletter, Africa Confidential, that he had no connection to the coup plot. However, he agreed that he was a friend of the opposition leader and had given him ”modest” financial support.
Moto has also vigorously denied the allegation, accusing Obiang of being ”an authentic cannibal”. He told Spanish radio: ”Obiang wants me to go back to Guinea and eat my testicles. That’s clear.”
As the allegations swirled, the company that owns the plane, Logo Logistics, was desperately trying to put its side of the story. An Englishman, Charles Burrow, a senior executive, said that the men had been travelling to the DRC to guard several mineral concessions. They had stopped off in Harare to buy some ”ancilliary mining-related equipment”. Zimbabwe, he said, was ”one of the cheapest places on the planet”.
The plane’s flight plan did show that it was heading to Bujumbura in Burundi on Congo’s eastern border. Burrows explained that Logo had been set up three years ago, registered in the British Virgin Islands and administered from Guernsey. He himself was based in Dubai. He conceded that Mann was an executive of the company.
”My first priority is the safety of these men,” he said. As for the coup allegations: ”I haven’t the foggiest idea what they’re talking about.”
Events then took a dramatic turn. On Wednesday evening, as the Zimbabweans said the arrested men could face the death penalty and accused the secret services of Britain, the US and Spain of being behind the plot, Equatorial Guinea television broadcast an interview with Du Toit.
Translated from his English into Spanish, he said: ”It wasn’t a question of taking the life of the head of state but of spiriting him away, taking him to Spain and forcing him into exile and then of immediately installing the government-in-exile of Severo Moto. The group was supposed to start by identifying strategic targets such as the presidency, the military barracks, police posts and the residences of government members.
”Then it was supposed to have vehicles at Malabo airport to transport other mercenaries who were due to arrive from South Africa. But at the last minute I got a call to say that the other group of mercenaries had been arrested in South Africa as they were preparing to leave the country.”
Burrows acknowledged that Du Toit worked for Logo. ”We have five people in the country working on three contracts for the government,” he said. He also acknowledged that he knew Calil, but denied having any commercial relationship with him.
Back in Harare the allegations were becoming firmer. Zimbabwe’s home affairs minister, Kembo Mohadi, told a news conference that the heads of the police and army in Equatorial Guinea had gone along with the plot against the government. ”The western intelligence services persuaded Equatorial Guinea’s service chiefs not to put up any resistance, but to cooperate with the coup plotters,” he said.
He claimed that the leader of the group, Mann, had allegedly been promised cash payment of about R12-million and oil mining rights and that Moto had hired them. And in an aside which will delight 007 fans, he said one of the conspirators who had carried out surveillance in the Guinea capital of Malabo was called ”Bonds”.
Then came the bombshell. Mohadi claimed that, in what appears to have been a Zimbabwean sting, Colonel Tshinga Dube, director of Zimbabwe Defence Industries, had accepted $180 000 from Mann for a consignment of AK-47s, mortars and 30 000 rounds of ammunition.
A more murky interpretation, however, was provided by the Afrikaans daily, Beeld, which reported that Col Dube had been ”enraged” that the aircraft was impounded and the transaction scuttled.
Whatever the truth of that, it now seems clear that both South African and Zimbabwean intelligence had wind of a suspicious operation, which explains why President Obiang praised Thabo Mbeki in his television address.
”We spoke with the South African president, who warned us that a group of mercenaries was heading towards Equatorial Guinea,” he said.
On Friday Mohadi said the 67 men would be charged with destabilising a sovereign state.
It is understood that some of the alleged plotters had been remarkably indiscreet about their plans. Rumours of a coup have been rife in Malabo for weeks, according to several sources familiar with the territory. So the questions remain: Why Equatorial Guinea? Why now? And in whose interests?
The answers can be summed up in one word: oil. Until 1995 Equatorial Guinea, a former Spanish colony, was an impoverished backwater with a population of less than half a million. After independence in 1968, it was ruled by Obiang’s uncle, Francisco Macias Nguema, who acquired as vicious a reputation as any of the other murderous African dictators.
In 1975, over Christmas, he ordered his militia to kill 150 political prisoners in Malabo stadium as loudspeakers played Those Were the Days, My Friend. During his reign of terror a third of the population fled.
Obiang seized power from his uncle in 1979 and, although he introduced a consitutional democracy, elections have been widely regarded as fraudulent and opponents often end up in jail.
The discovery of oil in the mid-1990s transformed the country’s finances, and provided the president and his family with funds to acquire multimillion dollar properties in the US. With American oil companies in the lead, production last year at 350 000 barrels a day made Equatorial Guinea the third largest producer in sub-Saharan Africa. – Guardian Unlimited Â