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October 26, 2004
Apartheid Over? Need a Job? Iraq Awaits You.
Just what Iraq needs, South African mercenaries:
Fat pay as high as ten times of wage earned at home has allured dozens of South Africa's special-task police to Iraq to work as security personnel for the country's interim government and the coalition forces, South African media reported on Tuesday.The South African Police Services (SAPS) elite Special Task Force has lost 28 members to Iraqi coalition force recruiters fromits Pretoria base in the past 18 months, with similar numbers leaving the Durban and Cape Town bases, Pretoria News reported.
The newspaper said the Special Task Force "is facing a crisis,"because it is believed nearly 60 percent of its active task force members were lured away throughout the country.
...The latest victims were former soldier Johan Botha and former policeman Louis Campher, who worked for Omega Risk Solutions, a security company to protect construction workers in Iraq. They died in an attack outside Baghdad on Oct. 12.
Here's a brief nugget from the history of this "Special Task Force" that tells you most of what you need to know:
In 1975, the SAP [South African Police] established an elite anti-terrorist unit known as Unit 19 or the Special Task Force. The Special Task Force played an important role in the training of the police Riot Units established at more or less the same time. Based in several centres around the country, its recruits were drawn largely from those with counter-insurgency training. Thus, for example, Colonel Theunis 'Rooi Rus' Swanepoel, veteran of the sabotage squad and Ongulumbashe, was drafted into Soweto on 16 June 1976 to command a riot unit which was responsible for a high number of civilian casualties. Interviewed in the 1980s about the operations of his unit in Soweto, he stated that he regretted only not using more force. "You can only stop violence by using a greater amount of violence".
You may remember that this protest was instigated by the Apartheid government's order that Afrikaans be mandated as the language of instruction at black schools. Here's the his lifeless body of thirteen year old Hector Peterson, fatally shot by members of this unit on that day:
And here are the questions from that day, still with us in many places of the world including Iraq:
And to illustrate how far we've come along, here's how the famous travel guide Fodor's website describes that day (with an official death toll of 23, although many believe it was in the hundreds):
The march turned nasty quickly. The protesters, mostly young students, got somewhat overexuberant, and so, too, did the police. The police started firing into the youthful crowd.
Got that? The protesters got "over"exuberant, so did the police. We all had a bit of a hangover the next day, you know.
Posted by zeynep at October 26, 2004 10:13 AM
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Comments
And we only find about these people if they happen to get killed. In April, an obit appeared in the Johannesburg Sunday Times (available here:
http://allafrica.com/stories/200404190944.html )
An excerpt: "Gray Branfield, 55, admitted to being part of a death squad which gunned down Joe Gqabi, the ANC's chief representative and Umkhonto weSizwe operational head in Zimbabwe on July 31 1981. Gqabi was shot 19 times when three assassins ambushed him as he reversed down the driveway of his Harare home."
Posted by: WIIIAI at October 26, 2004 02:32 PM
This is an excellent post in my view, Zeynep. Two things strike me about this story aside from the aspect of the continuing overt privatization of the U.S. military occupation in Iraq. The first is the quote from Colonel Theunis 'Rooi Rus' Swanepoel that "You can only stop violence by using a greater amount of violence." This you-gotta-destroy-the-village-to-save-it mentality turns logic and language on its head and is at the root of much of the immorality of warfare in the first place. Thus there is no such thing as a military solution to anything. War does not resolve conflict or anything else. It is a fallacy to state otherwise and an obvious one to anyone on whom the imperial propaganda has not completely worked. On the planet earth that would be most of us. We are in a majority I believe. Most humans would I think support an end to all armed aggressions wherever they are occurring. Only those few who profit from war economically and politically seem to want to continue this fallacy of violence as resolution.
The second thing that strikes me is the shallow, misleading, and mindless way that the 1976 Soweto massacre has been portrayed on the Fodor's website. Conveniently Fodor's omitted all of the pertinent data regarding the reasons for the march in the first place, and then tried to draw an inane equivalency between a civil rights march and mass murder by the police. If I didn't already know the history behind this massacre, I would never have recognized it at all from fodor's description. Must we be continuously lied to by greed-and-profit driven entities giving credence to the imperium? Apparently so.
Sincerely,
Old & In The Way
Posted by: Phil Cicchi at October 26, 2004 08:46 PM
>> Got that? The protesters got "over"exuberant, so did the police. We all had a bit of a hangover the next day, you know.
Yes! Viva el nacion de turistas!
Where is Baghdad Hilton!
Hang me! No, shoot me! No, thrill me till the minute I fall asleep!
Guiness, Iraqi Draft -- next on ABC!
Posted by: Sean Champ at October 26, 2004 10:36 PM
It doesn't end with South Africa. Blackwater, the company that hired the four Americans killed in Falloojeh that started the US ruckus, they have also hired ex-Pinochet regime thugs out of Chile.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/chile/story/0,13755,1162443,00.html
I wonder if they have hired "experts" out of El Salvador as well, so that they can get the Death Squads and the people who were terrorized by them on the same team?
Posted by: ripley at October 27, 2004 12:17 AM
Destroying the village to save it ... MyLai, Falluja!!
Posted by: Ralph at October 27, 2004 04:17 AM
I am pretty sure the Special Task Force in the first article refers to the "Scorpions" unit of the SAPS.
Despite also being called a "Special Task Force", this is not the same unit as the Special Task force / Unit 19 of the SAP referred to in the second article, which was active during the apartheid.
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Posted by: texas holdem at March 13, 2005 12:50 PM
Where do i go if i wish to signup to work in Iraq as a meenary?
Posted by: Vincent at June 13, 2006 01:57 PM