Gus > The Lion and the Springbok: Britain and South Africa since the Boer War
Interesting, but with the rise of black nationalism in Southern Aftrica, largely irrelevant to the present situation which is being dominated by Robert Mugabe, who is virulently anti-West and anti-white, and those who nurture similar racial and political values, although muted, like Thabo Mbeki.
Re the Boers (Afrikaners), this is where they find themselves today.
motherjones.com
>>For some, a job as a security contractor offers escape from political changes at home. Between 2,000 and 4,000 former South African soldiers and policemen work in Iraq. One South African contractor quipped, not too inaccurately, that "Afrikaans is the third-most-spoken language in Iraq." Bertus is typical of this crowd. A thickly muscled ex-cop with 18 years of experience, he served in South Africa's notorious Koevoet battalion, which fought a proxy war against the Marxist government of Angola. He's now employed by Reed, a company established in 2003 by the former South African military attache in Washington, D.C. Many of Bertus' Afrikaner cohorts had been discharged after "the changes" in South Africa, he says, and few had been able to find work. Bertus had been a cattle farmer, but working in Iraq is far more profitable, well worth defying the South African government, which recently passed a law prohibiting its citizens from working in Iraq, or as mercenaries anywhere. Fearing arrest, most of the South Africans I met in Iraq didn't expect to return home; they'd earn enough to bring their families abroad. "We weren't given no futures," one says, explaining that he left the South African army after being told, "You, as a white major, have no future in this regime."
The South Africans are popular with U.S. companies, and even the U.S. government, which uses them as bodyguards for high-ranking officials. "If losses are taken, it's not soldiers killed," Bertus says, explaining the appeal of using contractors, "and if civilians are killed in the crossfire, then they can't blame it on the Army"—though he claims that is less likely to happen when the contractors are former cops like himself. "If you are a soldier it's straightforward: Wipe out everything in front of you. Police must use discretion, and policemen are better drivers." I met him while he was temporarily posted in comparatively peaceful Kurdistan, and he was getting bored. "I miss the action," he said. "I miss Baghdad, the sweat on my hands."
Quite a few South African bodyguards work for DynCorp, a Falls Church, Virginia-based company that has drug interdiction contracts in Colombia and Afghanistan and works in Iraq to protect U.S. officials and train Iraqi police. (DynCorp has had its share of scandals, including, during one excursion, providing cnn's Tucker Carlson an AK-47 and commandeering an Iraqi gas station. In February, federal auditors cited DynCorp for wasting millions on projects, including building an unapproved, Olympic-sized swimming pool at the behest of Iraqi police officials.) DynCorp has taken over the Baghdad Hotel on Saadun Street, which comes under regular attack despite the concrete blast walls that ring it. Iraqis protect the perimeter while inside the bodyguards are Americans, South Africans, and, chatting in Portuguese, former Angolans who'd fought alongside the South Africans and been granted citizenship by the apartheid government but who no longer feel welcome in South Africa either.<< |
