Life's Little Ironies Intrude Upon Deon Gouws.

The New Eldorado - and Sometimes the Nightmare - of South African Mercenaries
By Fabienne Pompey
Le Monde

Thursday 07 April 2005

For Deon Gouws, a forty-three-year-old former policeman, it was supposed to be his last contract: four months in Iraq to act as bodyguard for major personalities. However, the mission ended in a nightmare. Deon Gouws lost his right arm, his left eye, and his toes. Since he's been back in South Africa, he has only one objective: to dissuade South Africans from leaving for "that hell."

Like others, Deon Gouws had been recruited by word-of-mouth. Former colleagues, who, like him, had quit the ranks of the police after the end of Apartheid, had put him in contact with Erynis, a private security company. He left with 17 compatriots on January 8, 2004. He was, he says, responsible for an American general's security.

He stayed only twenty days. January 28, at dawn, an ambulance filled with explosives blew up the Shaheen Hotel where he was lodged with five of his South African colleagues. The friend who shared his room died instantly. Seriously wounded, Deon Gouws was evacuated to Germany.

"To Go There Is Crazy"

"It was a 250 kg bomb, a huge thing," he relates. The former Pretoria police sergeant knows what he's talking about. During apartheid, he worked for Vlakplaas, a secret entity known for its brutal methods, murders, tortures, and attacks. At the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Deon Gouws acknowledged having killed at least fifteen people and having blown up between 40 and 60 houses of anti-Apartheid militants. He obtained amnesty.

"This war is not ours," he says today with regard to Iraq: "Over there, you're a target every second. It's hell. To go there is crazy." He gets phone calls every day from people who want to know how to go there, and he tries to dissuade them. But nobody listens to him. "They have only one motivation: that's money, money, always money," Deon continues.

Since he left the police in 1996, the former sergeant has received a pension of 5,000 Rand (650 Euros) a month; in Iraq, he was paid 10,000 dollars (7,700 Euros). "We are thousands in my situation, who came out of the police or the army. We can't live on our pensions," explains Deon Gouws.

He asserts that at least 4,000 South Africans have had a contract in Iraq, for several months, sometimes for a year. Some even make return trips. According to the South African Institute of Security Studies, there are 1,400, but these are only estimates. Many are former Apartheid hatchet men: they've fought in Namibia or tracked African National Congress "terrorists."

But there are also young men like 29-year-old Heinrich Visagie, killed April 7, 2004, in Falluja. He came from the Special Task Force, an elite police unit, many of the recruits of which, once trained, leave for Iraq. Companies like Erynis or Meteoric Tactical Solution (MTS) are suspected of widely recruiting in South Africa. "They know that we're good at this kind of work," explains Deon."And less expensive than a Briton, who gets paid twice as much for the same work."

South Africa has forged an inexpugnable reputation for itself as a holding tank for mercenaries. After the end of Apartheid, many soldiers and police officers converted themselves into "war dogs," operating all over the continent from Angola to Sierra Leone.

The principal employer then was the South African company Executive Outcomes, which, after having dominated the mercenary market, closed in 1999. Many of its men were recruited by the company, Sandline International, created by former British Colonel Timothy Spicer. Sandline, grown famous after many problems, notably in Sierra Leone, has officially ceased its activities, but has been recreated under the AEGIS appellation. AEGIS obtained one of the biggest security contracts in Iraq from the Pentagon in 2004. Today, AEGIS is a mainstay of the "private military security" market in the world.

More discreet, Erynis has removed its coordinates in South Africa from its Internet site. According to the South African press, it won a 39.5-million-dollar contract to train 6,500 Iraqis in security and to assure the surveillance of oil wells and other strategic sites.

Their local representative asserted a few months ago that he was not recruiting, except for "advice in security matters for companies working in Africa." Recruitment is done directly by Erynis offices in Jordan or Iraq.

Anti-Mercenary Law

Since 1998, South Africa has an anti-mercenary law on the books, the Foreign Military Assistance Act, but its enforcement appears to be difficult. In seven years, only three people have been tried. The first two, including a Franco-South-African who worked for Ivory Coast president Laurent Gbagbo, were condemned to pay fines of 2,600 and 13,000 Euros. The third is Mark Thatcher, son of Margaret, fined 380,000 Euros for having participated in the financing of an attempted coup d'état in Equatorial Guinea.

Deon Gouws does not believe he is affected by this law and asserts that he was unaware of its existence when he left for Iraq. "I'm not a mercenary. I wasn't there to participate in combat. We were only paid to protect people," he says. The law punishes all forms of military assistance to one side of an armed conflict, but also advice, training, personnel recruitment, or even medical and para-medical services. It also prohibits "security services for the protection of people involved in an armed conflict or the protection of their property."

The law as it was written in 1999 includes enough loopholes to prevent its enforcement. In March, the defense minister declared Iraq "a theater of armed conflict" and announced that South Africans working there would be prosecuted. However no prosecution has ensued. According to National Police spokesperson Sally de Beer, an investigation is under way against one company and several individuals. Nothing has been completed.

"We will review the law on foreign military assistance to discourage those who try to benefit from a conflict and from human suffering, as in Iraq," President Thabo Mbeki declared in February during his Speech to the Nation. The new version of the law is ready, the Defense Ministry indicates, and must be submitted to Parliament.