Cry Havoc by Simon Mann. John Blake Publishing Ltd. 2011. 338 pps. $24.99. ISBN: 978 1 84358 403 2. In 2004, Simon Mann was arrested in Zimbabwe, en route to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea. For his role in that failed coup attempt, Mann served four years in a Zimbabwean prison and was then extradited to Equatorial Guinea, to serve another 34-year sentence. He was pardoned in late 2009. This book is his account of the ordeal. Mann, a former SAS officer, co-founded and managed the private military corporations Executive Outcomes, and Sandline International. Mann participated in assisted regime change in the 1990s in Angola and Sierra Leone, which won Mann and associates a fortune in mineral exploration rights, and diamond mine concessions. While private military operations may be lucrative, the jackpot lurks in the spoils of war. Mann, a soldier of fortune, is quick to point out that the target of the failed coup, Equatorial Guinea, is the third largest oil-producing nation in Africa. There was big money on the line. The book is written in the style of an adventure thriller, books which, Mann read voraciously as a youth. His beginning chapters shift back and forth between his operations in Sierra Leone, Angola and the failed coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea. Mann is explaining his motivation behind the coup d'état turned coup de grâce. It's unnecessary. We know he's after petrodollars, action and prestige. But Mann insists on justifying the coups. His casus belli is absurd: How many people does a tyrant have to kill or torture before you can take him on? English Common Law is clear enough on that topic: tyranny is assault. To fight against assault is good. To fight to help someone who is being assaulted is good. He has a Batman complex derived from a children's comic book. Further, Mann doesn't speak of any of the ‘good' that he did with the expansive mineral wealth he won in the aftermath of his Sierra Leone and Angola mercenary operations; the working conditions of African mineral extraction projects are well-known to even the most casual reader as sub-human. Did Mann build roads, clinics and schools in Black Africa that we should know about? Further, Mann whimsically equates his failed coup attempt to participating in a sort of zeitgeist of assisted regime change in the early 2000s, referencing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Certainly, there was a hyper-hawkish attitude in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. However, assisted regime change frequently produces disastrous and unpredictable results, which engender uncontrollable destabilization, q.e.d. Foreign policy analysts with an aggressive bent have been forced to re-think the methodology of large scale military operations that have no exit strategy. Hydro-carbon and mineral exploration rights in Afghanistan, worth tens of billions of dollars, are currently being awarded to China whom, never fired a shot in that war. And what makes Mann qualified to propose candidates for assisted regime change? He assures the reader, passim, that he's been given a green light on the coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea by the world's intelligence communities. However, once Mann begins languishing in African prisons, there is no indication of outside help giving a green light to his defense counsel or an evacuation plan. And he dwells on the abandonment, often falling into despair. He now spends his vast mineral wealth bribing underpaid prison officials, and paying incompetent lawyers to survive the horrific living conditions during his tenure of incarceration. Simon Mann got what he asked for. The narrative is difficult to follow. This isn't a patios he's writing in, it's fragmented, ephemeral and solipsistic thought masquerading as stream-of-consciousness. And frequently, I simply had no idea what he was talking about. It doesn't work. Years spent in solitary confinement with access to all the books he wants, buys and has sent do nothing to improve his intellect. For example, Mann—like many of us from the West who live, work and travel in Black Africa—contemplates Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and claims to have kept a copy with him in prison. But he never looks for himself in Heart of Darkness—is he Kurtz, the madman ivory raider?—or Marlowe, the man sent to retrieve Kurtz? Mann instead fixates on the exotic and the grotesque. There are three books here, really: the mercenary operations in Sierra Leone, Angola, and Equatorial Guinea. It would've made for a decent action trilogy, had Mann any talent or a serious interest in writing. But the result is a rambling, scattered and shallow narrative that becomes a chore to get through. Private military contractors, while nothing new, have been getting significant press since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The US government continues spending billions to use mercenaries as a support mechanism in security operations abroad. The American firm, Blackwater, had big problems in Iraq involving high-profile civilian casualties that were widely reported. Like Mann's own private military corporations, Blackwater has been forced to change their name twice, due to bad publicity. Criticisms of these military contractors often include poorly-trained, or poorly-vetted soldiers, who tend to act impulsively and with impunity. In 2011, the US was publically exposed in Pakistan, as having used private contractors in its covert CIA operations there, when one contractor shot dead two men in broad daylight, downtown Lahore. And it is this recent spate of private military corporations acting in tandem with government armies, which made this book so anticipated; we want to understand the machinations in the big fascinating industry of an outsourced war machine. Mann doesn't give us the hows-and-whys of mercenary work. The book disappoints again, in that respect. But much like a disappointing glass of shiraz, the taste won't linger. • Pete Willows is an assistant editor at Bikya Masr, and a contributing writer to The Egyptian Gazette, and The Egyptian Mail. He lives and works in Cairo. He can be reached at [email protected]
ShortURL: http://goo.gl/V9m3D Tags: Cry Havoc, Regime Change, Simon Mann Section: West Africa, Written Word
