SIMON MANN: ‘A Very English’ Corporate Killer

On 10th September 2004 a Zimbabwean court sentenced Simon Mann to seven years in jail for illegally buying arms for a coup against Equatorial Guinea. He was described in the British press as ‘looking more like a jailed intellectual than a freelance commando’. by Merrick

What is there in a mercenary leader’s appearance that would be so different from a jailed intellectual? As Leonard Cohen said in response to the normality of the captured Nazi Adolf Eichmann .what did you expect? Talons? Oversize incisors? Green saliva?.. The BBC even had a big-print quote from someone calling this mercenary leader a ’’humane man... very English, a romantic, tremendously good company’’.

A ’humane and romantic’ breaker of both British law and the Geneva Convention, Mann is an ex-SAS soldier who runs a company called Executive Outcomes (EO). They are mercenary soldiers, ready to go anywhere to kill whoever they are paid to . the phrase ’international terro ist’ could not be more aptly applied. The Zimbabwean authorities acted against Mann in part to defend the regime of Equatorial Guinea, but there are old scores to settle too. Eeben Barlow, founder and, until recently, director of Executive Outcomes, was second in command of apartheid South Africas elite special forces 32 Battalion, and was also an agent of the .Civil Co-Operation Bureau. which murdered anti-apartheid activists both at home and abroad. Themajority of Executive Outcomes’ soldiers are drawn from apartheid South Africa’s special forces; their old job entailed destabilising several southern African governments, including Zimbabwe.

Executive Outcomes was registered in the UK by Simon Mann and Tony Buckingham. Buckingham is another ex-SAS officer, and chief executive of a company called Heritage Oil And Gas. Heritage is associated with a Canadian corporation, Ranger Oil. Both companies had drilling operations in Angola. Since the mid-1970s Angola had been riven with civil war between the government and UNITA militia, assisted covertly by South Africa In 1993, Mann and Buckingham used Executive Outcomes troops to capture the Angolan oil town of Soyo from UNITA for Heritage Oil. Soon after the EO troops left, UNITA retook the town. Having been impressed with EO’s work, the Angolan government hired EO to fight for them in exchange for oil concessions – EO effectively became an oil company with a private army. Weirder still, they were fighting UNITA using the same South African soldiers who’d once fought alongside them!

Other great ‘romantic adventures‘of Mann’s include running guns and 120 mercenaries to Sierra Leone in 1995 at the height of the killing, in direct contravention of a UN embargo designed to limit arms input and stem the bloodshed. They pulled a couple of PR stunts – memorably taking a Sierra Leone football team to the African All Nations Cup – but they weren’t in Sierra Leone to be socially useful. You don’t bring two Mi17 transporter gunship helicopters, an Mi24 helicopter gunship and an Andover casualty evacuation aircraft with you unless you’re there to fight and kill. They were paid around $40m plus, as in Angola, an ongoing mineral interest. This time it was a 25 year lease for EO’s diamond mining sister company Branch Energy on the enormously lucrative Koidu diamond mines in the area EO had been fighting in.

A report by the United Nations' Special Rapporteur Enrique Bernales Ballesteros says this procedure is common. Once a degree of security and stability has been achieved, the mercenary organisation ‘apparently begins to exploit the concessions it has received by setting up a number of associates and affiliates… thereby acquiring a significant, if not hegemonic, presence in the economic life of the country in which it is operating.’ Once it was colonial governments who would send in the soldiers to acquire the natural resources of poor nations, now it’s private enterprise.

As power cedes from the nation state to the transnational corporation, so the muscle is moving with it. In this peculiar transitional stage, it is the same individual soldiers who used to fight for one that now fight for the other. Their job is the same. Indeed, they readily admit it. Eeben Barlow, founder and ex-head of Executive Outcomes said, ‘I’m a professional soldier. It’s not about politics. I have a job to do. I do it’.
A Cape Town neighbour of his friend and co-coup plotter Sir Mark Thatcher, Simon Mann represents the new generation of colonialism. Brutal, exploitative, greedy, murderous. Not humane, not romantic, but yes, historically speaking, very English.

This is a highly edited version of a longer article that can be found in full on the Corporate Watch Website and also at http://www.headheritage.co.uk/uknow/features/index.php?id=56