How South African hit men, Serbian paramilitaries, and other human rights

[Judi Lynn]

Dirty Warriors

How South African hit men, Serbian paramilitaries, and other human rights violators became guns for hire for military contractors in Iraq

By Barry Yeoman

November/December 2004 Issue

WHEN THE BUSH administration turned over much of its Iraqi security operations to the private sector last year, one of the companies that stood to profit was the London-based Hart Group. Run by former British soldiers, the firm received a large contract through the Army Corps of Engineers to guard Iraqi energy facilities and protect engineers rebuilding the country’s electricity network.

Hart Group needed to hire 170 English-speaking guards with military experience -- and it had to do it fast. “We had to recruit people in very, very short order,” says Simon Falkner, the company’s chief of operations. But Falkner knew exactly where to find many of his recruits: in South Africa, where soldiers trained under that country’s apartheid regime now often find themselves unemployable. “They’re good soldiers, the South Africans,” says Falkner, a retired colonel. “They’re tough people, and they’re well-disciplined. And there are a lot of them who want to do the work. A lot of people have left the South African defense force since Nelson Mandela came in.”

Hart’s hiring practices might have passed entirely unnoticed had one of the company’s employees not died in a firefight with Iraqi insurgents last spring. The victim was 55-year-old Gray Branfield, a former covert-operations specialist in South Africa’s fight to preserve white minority rule. In the early 1980s, the apartheid government decided to assassinate the top 50 African National Congress (ANC) officials living beyond the country’s borders, and Branfield was charged with tracking down apartheid opponents in Zimbabwe, Botswana, and Zambia. “We saw it as a battle in the global war to fight communism,” he said in an interview shortly before his death.

In July 1981, Branfield’s team was assigned to hunt down Joe Gqabi, the ANC’s chief representative in Zimbabwe and the operations chief of its militant wing there. After two weeks searching for their quarry, Branfield’s team located Gqabi at a house in a working-class suburb of Harare. With Uzis and Berettas beneath their coats, they climbed over a fence and waited until the anti-apartheid activist emerged from the house. Then the soldiers jumped from the bushes and pumped 19 bullets into Gqabi at close range.
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http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/notebook/2004/11/11_200.html