“Die Manne” Whip Boko Haram’s Azz!

by Katherine Frisk:

Some background on “Die Manne,” and they are more than just rugby players 🙂

During the 1970s and the 1980s, every white South African male by law, had to do 2 years military training and service and thereafter, camps every year. Those who refused due to religious reasons had to do jail time.

South Africa was fighting “die Komunisss,”en “die Terrorisss” on the Angola border. Though in retrospect, I think the country had been co-opted into the Unholy Alliance Between the Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia, assisted by the likes of Kissinger and LaRouche, who sold Mandela out to the Apartheid government.

South Africa as a country, would have been far better off cutting deals with Angola to build an oil pipeline from Luanda, through Namibia to Cape Town and across southern Africa through Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and to Durban, This would have made the whole of southern Africa oil independent from the Middle East and been a great boon to our economy.

We could have afforded it. The South African Rand in the 1980s was worth more than the US dollar, thanks to our Gold Mines. This industry has since been destroyed through Gold price rigging by Wall Street and Brussels who have smashed the price of Gold in the interests of maintaining the illusion of value of the Dollar and rigging the real free market price of Gold. The Rand is now R11.00/ $1.00, our GDP has suffered and our economy is nowhere near what it was in the 1980s. Instead of building oil pipelines we wasted millions if not billions on a senseless war and ruined many lives, people who today have not been treated for PTSD, or what South Africans call “bosbevok.”

In early 1989 a dear friend came to visit me. He used to tell me funny stories about the border, all highly censored of course. About the “dog bisquits” they were given to eat, how they hated them while doing camps but missed them when they were back in “civie street.”(civilian life) He also told me about the time his troop had been out in the bush for days, walking a square to catch the terries, when they heard the sound of a chicken. The whole square collapsed on the poor bird as though it was SWAPO. How they managed to share one skinny chicken between them I will never know. Each and every one of them could have had the dang thing for tea time.

This time Andries did not have any funny stories to tell. He was mostly silent. And then eventually said:

“I have been called up to do another camp.”

Ok, So? He had started his military training when he was eighteen years old and had spent the better part of his twenties doing camps up on the border, every year. What was so different this time?

“This time,”he mumbled, “there is a bullet with my name on it.”

I believed him, any soldier will tell you that being in battle you develop a highly attuned sixth sense. I do not mess with these things or laugh at people when they share these fears. At the time however, I did not know about Cuito Cuanavale, none of us did, well not the average South African, the media was far too censored for that. Cuito Cuanavale was the biggest battle ever fought in Africa since the end of World War 11.

In April news came about UNTAG and a possible peace process. Andries and I listened to every news broadcast. I remember at a braai (barbeque) one Sunday afternoon, he and I were dashing in and out of the house, catching up on news updates. Everyone else was doing what uninformed people whose lives are not on the line normally do. Talking crap and oblivious to the very real consequences of what was going on in Namibia. My ex husband being one of them. He had found a loophole in the system and after doing his two years never had to do a camp again. He and many others like him, were referred to as “NAFIs.” (No Ambition, F#ck all Interest.) The Namibian deal was settled and Andries, like a cat, got another life. This then is the back ground to “Die Manne.”

In 2012 I read Gordon Duff’s article: Romney Leaks: Drugs, Blood Diamonds and a Cuban Mistress (Updated)

Here is an extract:

BAIN and AFRICAN TERROR
Blood Diamonds

There is an African end of this story. A CIA agent named “Tony,” working South Africa, part of a team of agents there, all Mormons, contacted a professional associates of mine. (an intelligence agency director)

South Africa is my “turf” also.
“Tony” as he called himself was working with a US law firm and was tasked with investing $120 billion in drug profits, maybe from Afghanistan, in South Africa. He told our representatives he was looking for mining properties worth more than $200 million each.

“Tony” met, not just with us, but with dozens of other groups in South Africa. Tony is, what we call in the spy business, “burned.” Tony’s group works with UNITA, a terrorist organization, sometimes supported by North Korea, Israel, the US and China. The former Angolan revolutionary organization is now “for hire,” and “terrorism on demand” with a reach that covers a dozen nations.

Their task, as South African intelligence indicates, is to buy up South Africa and take over the rest of Southern Africa through running terrorist groups out of the DRC or Democratic Republic of the Congo. On their list is Kenya and other nations.

Their method of operation is to finance themselves with blood diamonds, sent through agents to Tel Aviv, money to be handled by Bain Capital/Romney, then to China where arms are purchased and shipped to terrorists in Africa, “Al Qaeda, Boko Harum and UNITA.

The details of the deal were set up a month ago. Currently, UNITA is having difficulty coming up with their end, the $1.2 billion a year in diamonds they promised.

On the Israeli end, Romney, while traveling there with Las Vegas casino boss, Sheldon Adelson, met with diamond traders at what was supposed to be a/an (illegal) fundraiser.

It was something else, putting together one link in the diamonds, terrorism, money, narcotics trade which, working with Bain, the Bush family, Mormon groups in the CIA and the Mossad, meant to take over all of Africa.

Now just pretend for one moment that you are a South African. When I read this, pi##ed off does not even describe my anger. Romney and Adelson had better hope that they never find themselves surrounded by a troop of “Manne” in a square! I do not approve of private armies like Blackwater, paid for by Corporations that create wars in their own best interest in order to access resources in other countries, and what is more, with no government oversight. However in the following, I see this as self-defense, in both Nigeria’s interests and South Africa’s and it does have the Nigerian Government’s oversight. For once, “Die Manne” are fighting the right enemy. Thumbs up Boete!

South African mercenaries’ secret war on Boko Haram

Mercenaries from South Africa have proved quietly decisive in helping the Nigerian military turn around its campaign against Boko Haram, writes Colin Freeman in Abuja.

With their roots in South Africa apartheid-era security forces, they do not fit the standard image of an army of liberation. But after just three months on the ground, a squad of grizzled, ageing white mercenaries have helped to end Boko Haram’s six-long year reign of terror in northern Nigeria.

Run by Colonel Eeben Barlow, a former commander in the South African Defence Force, the group of bush warfare experts were recruited in top secrecy in January to train an elite strike group within Nigeria’s disorganised, demoralised army.

Some of the guns-for-hire cut their teeth in South Africa’s border wars 30 years ago. But their formidable fighting skills – backed by their own helicopter pilots flying combat missions – have proved decisive in helping the military turn around its campaign against Boko Haram in its north-eastern strongholds.

• Who are Nigeria’s Boko Haram Islamists?
The Islamists have now fled many of the towns they once controlled, leading to the freeing of hundreds of girls and women last week who were used by Boko Haram as slaves and bush wives.

The role of Col Barlow’s firm in turning around one of the most vicious African insurgencies of modern times has been kept largely quiet by Nigeria’s outgoing president, Goodluck Jonathan, who lost elections six weeks ago to ex-general Muhammadu Buhari.

But last week, Col Barlow discussed his company’s role in a seminar at the Royal Danish Defence College, and in a separate interview with a Sofrep.com, a special forces website, he described in detail the “aggressive” strike force that was created to push Boko Haram onto the back foot.

“The campaign gathered good momentum and wrested much of the initiative from the enemy,” said Col Barlow, 62. “It was not uncommon for the strike force to be met by thousands of cheering locals once the enemy had been driven from an area.”

He added: “Yes, many of us are no longer 20-year-olds. But with our age has come a knowledge of conflicts and wars in Africa that our younger generation employees have yet to learn, and a steady hand when things get rough.”

During apartheid, Col Barlow served with the South African Defence Force, a mainly white military unit that defended the regime against insurrection and fought border wars in neighbouring Angola and what is now Namibia.

In 1989, as apartheid was beginning to crumble, he co-founded Executive Outcomes, a private military company made up of many ex-members of South Africa’s security forces. One of the first modern “private armies”, in 1995 it successfully helped the government of Sierra Leone defend itself against the rebels of the Revolutionary United Front, notorious for chopping off the arms of their enemies.

Another co-founder of Executive Outcomes, which dissolved in 2000, was Simon Mann, the Old Etonian later jailed in Equatorial Guinea over his attempts to plot a coup there.

Col Barlow’s new company is known as STTEP, which stands for Specialized Tasks, Training, Equipment and Protection. It is thought to have sent around 100 men to Nigeria, including black troopers who previously served in elite South African units. Others even fought as communist guerrillas against the South African Defence Force.

It is not known how much the Nigerian military has paid for STTEP’s services. But the fact that the Nigerian government felt it necessary to bring them in raises questions about the level of help that it was receiving from the British and US militaries, who offered mentoring packages in the wake of Boko Haram’s kidnapping last year of more than 200 schoolgirls from the north-eastern town of Chibok.

Describing Boko Haram as “a bunch of armed thugs who have used religion as the glue to hold their followers”, Col Barlow said the initial plan was for his men to train up a team to help free the schoolgirls. However, as Boko Haram continued to run amok across northern Nigeria, massacring hundreds at a time in village raids, the plan turned to schooling Nigeria’s largely traditional army in “unconventional mobile warfare”.

Key to this was a tactic known as “relentless pursuit”, which involved mimicking Boko Haram’s hit-and-run tactics with non-stop assaults. Once the insurgents were on the run and their likely route established, members of the strike force would be helicoptered into land ahead of them to cut off their likely escape routes, gradually exhausting them.

The South Africans even used bush trackers to work out where their enemies were going, an old-fashioned art that proved vital in Boko Haram’s forest hideouts. “Good trackers can tell the age of a track as well as indicate if the enemy is carrying heavy loads, the types of weapons he has, if the enemy is moving hurriedly, what he is eating, and so forth,” said Col Barlow.

While the Nigerian government has insisted the South Africans’ role was mainly as “technical advisers”, Col Barlow suggested his men had been involved in direct combat. His air power unit was “given ‘kill blocks’ to the front and flanks of the strike force and could conduct missions in those areas,” he said. His forces also helped with intelligence gathering, troop transportation and evacuation of casualties.

Mr Jonathan’s decision to hire STTEP came just ahead of March’s elections, when his government’s failure to either tackle Boko Haram or free the kidnapped Chibok schoolgirls was a major issue. He has promised that when Mr Buhari takes over at the end of this month, Boko Haram will be a spent force, although it is not yet clear whether the Buhari government will renew STTEP’s contract.

Col Barlow warned that while the Nigerians had done well within three months that he had been contracted to mentor them, “the enemy was able to flee the battlefield with some of their forces intact, and will no doubt regroup and continue their acts of terror.”

The involvement of STTEP in Nigeria will inevitably reignite the debate over whether private military companies should be used in conflicts. Human rights groups question whether they are publicly accountable, and in South Africa especially, their background in the apartheid-era makes some uneasy.

However, Col Barlow, whose firm has a code of conduct for behaving “in a legal, moral, and ethical manner” said that private companies were often better than UN or Western trainers of African armies. The latter were often hamstrung by political baggage and a failure to understand how either African armies or their enemies worked, he said. The advisers that Britain and America have sent to Nigeria are also not permitted to take part in operations on the ground, partly because of the Nigerian’s army’s poor human rights record.

Noting that even the US military appeared to regard his firm with distrust, Col Barlow added: “Some like to refer to us as ‘racists’ or ‘apartheid soldiers’ with little knowledge of our organisation. We are primarily white, black, and brown Africans who reside on this continent and are accepted as such by African governments.”

Back to Andries. After the Namibia peace deal in 1989, the SADF were pulled out of Angola and many of them during their “camps” were redeployed to the black townships during the height of the political riots against Apartheid.

Andries came for tea.

“They were rocking the buffels. Kids, teenagers, unarmed. They wanted to turn it over and set it alight. Vok!”he swore. “I am NOT GOING TO SHOOT AN UNARMED CHILD! En… hy is een van ons mense nogal!” ( And …he is one of our people what is more.)

Andries and many others spent most of their time cruising up and down the streets keeping look out for the cops and redirecting the black residence to other areas of safety. They had had enough of war and killing. We all had. We still feel that way. But if Boko Haram or any other such covert funded terrorist group comes near us, expect the square to collapse on you and take you out. And that is a promise.