Interviewing Eeben Barlow

Image: Major General Eeben Barlow , founder of the world`s most successful private military company, Executive Outcomes, and the African nemesis of the Warlords of Westminster and Washington

By Brendan Seery     first published in The Star, 5 November 2007

“You people,” he says, “ignored everything we provided you in terms of intelligence
about who was really benefitting from the continuation of the war with UNITA.
“There are people who have a lot of blood on their hands—by prolonging the Angolan
civil war, tens of thousands of people died.”

Interviewing Eeben Barlow is not an experience you would describe as comfortable. It’s not
because he is a former CCB operative nor the fact that he is proficient in multiple ways of
killing and maiming. It’s because what he says not only makes a lot of sense, but it also makes you somewhat ashamed of both yourself and your profession: journalism.

He doesn’t like most journalists, whom he accuses of having helped his enemies wage
a vicious disinformation war against him and his company, Executive Outcomes, for many years.

“All that shit you wrote, all the garbage you passed on from the so-called ‘sources’—where was even the slightest bit of evidence to back it up?”

In his newly-published book—Executive Outcomes, Against All Odds—Barlow
savages many local and international journalists who, he says, willingly did ‘hatchet jobs’ on EO.
And I am one of them.
Back in 1993, my byline was one of three which appeared on a piece quoting former
SA Defence Force Colonel Jan Breytenbach as saying EO was ‘training ANC hit squads’ in
Angola. (At the time, EO had been given a contract by the Angolan government to re-train the army—a project which effectively spelled the beginning of the end of Jonas Savimbi and his Unita movement, as the Angolan forces were better trained and prepared for battle.) The alleged ANC squads had a hit list of prominent people, including himself, claimed Breytenbach. …

Did we ever try to get corroboration or confirmation of Breytenbach’s claims? No. Why
would we? We all firmly believed Barlow and his bunch of ex-SADF “mercenaries” could only have been up to no good in Angola. After all, why would they help the people who were once their enemies, unless they were being paid huge amounts and were involved in oil or diamond deals? Barlow sits across from me in a Pretoria coffee shop, his blue eyes accusing. I have no answers. He has a point.
In conversation, Barlow echoes the litany of accusations and claims which were
levelled against EO in the eight or so years it operated as a private military company in Africa and elsewhere: they committed atrocities; they were given huge diamond and oil concessions; they were a front for Britain’s MI5 secret service; they fronted for the American CIA; they were incompetent buffoons.

“Take the case of Sierre Leone (where EO helped the Freetown government crush RUF
rebels): we were accused of committing atrocities against the local people. No proof. Nobody ever charged. No witnesses. The opposite was the case “As we went into action against the rebels in a new country and environment, we realised that we needed intelligence and information. And we got that from the local people, who realised that we were bringing stability and security after years of rape and murder by the rebels.
“We gave them some medical help and we made it safe for them to go back to their
normal lives. They helped us with the information we needed to mount our operations. Think about it if we had been slaughtering them, would they have helped us?”

Barlow is correct. Neither the United Nations, whose peacekeeping troops replaced EO
and who then virtually lost the country back to the rebels; nor the Sierra Leone government, has made any atrocity charges against the company.

“A professional journalist,” Barlow says…, “visited the country and wrote that the
people were happy with our presence and what we achieved.”
Angola, likewise, was an area where EO was repeatedly under fire, mainly from
journalists in South Africa.
“You people,” he says, “ignored everything we provided you in terms of intelligence
about who was really benefitting from the continuation of the war with UNITA.
“There are people who have a lot of blood on their hands—by prolonging the Angolan
civil war, tens of thousands of people died”