The Wonga Coup (26 page)

Simon Mann

The accused were shackled hand and foot, in pairs, and dressed in regulation prison garb of khaki shirts and baggy shorts, plus sandals. They walked, many limping, beside a high fence. Guards with swagger sticks kept them in line. Zimbabwe's authorities had decided to convene a court inside Chikurubi prison, in a former hospital ward, and try the plotters promptly. The courtroom was makeshift: rows of single-plank benches for the defendants and the same arrangement for the press. Mann, wearing small, round glasses and a short beard, looked more a scruffy professor than a snarling dog of war. The beefy Afrikaners were Hulk-like in their green prison clothes. At least one had sewn an extra patch of cloth into his shirt. Small handcuffs cut into their thick wrists.

Mann got no ‘major clout'. It probably would have done him little good anyway. By late March he and the others saw the ‘trial situation' begin, with the first of many court appearances. Samukange, the politically connected lawyer who took up the defence case in Zimbabwe, said the men were held for immigration offences, while prosecutors dreamt up other charges. Interviewed in Harare, Samukange explained: ‘Initially they
prepared ten charges, including ridiculous counts, such as contravening a UN resolution on terrorism and mercenaries that has not even been adopted by our parliament. There were many other crazy things, charges about coups, you name it, they thought of all sorts of things.' But it became clear it was impossible to charge anyone with more than relatively trivial charges: ‘conspiracy to possess firearms, immigration offences and aviation offences'.

Zimbabwe has not entirely lost the rule of law under Robert Mugabe. But the state can strongly bend legal process in its favour. Samukange said he received a clear message as the trial got underway. If the accused did not plead guilty, the state would drag out the case for years. There would be many excuses to do so, given seventy accused. Whenever somebody fell sick, the trial could be postponed, leaving the accused to rot in jail. So Samukange advised most of his clients to plead guilty to the immigration and aviation offences, as these normally carry low sentences, usually fines. In return, he expected the more serious firearms offence to be dropped for most of them. ‘Legally they should have pleaded not guilty, but a trial of seventy prisoners would take two years. Then they would be convicted, as it is a political case. “At the end of the day the magistrate is an ex-combatant selected to convict you,” I told them. “Then you would appeal to the High Court, and your appeal would go on to the Supreme Court where another judge is waiting. So the quickest and wisest thing for you to do is to plead guilty.” Already two of our guys were sick. The prosecution could say, “We delay the trial until they are well.”'

So the men appeared in court and did what they were told. The first appearance passed smoothly. It was a chance for Zimbabwe to display its captured mercenaries. But behind
the scenes things were not so calm: at the end of the month a dozen guards allegedly stripped fifteen of the arrested men and beat them with batons. Mann, too, was in an uncomfortable position. There was speculation he would be murdered by his embittered co-accused. Though he was probably unaware of it, some families of the poorest footsoldiers said they would like to see him killed for dragging their men into trouble. Yet those jailed with him recall that the black inmates continued to address Mann as ‘Sir'. Instead, the white ones, notably Louis du Prez, ‘wanted to kill him, to fight with him', explained an ex-prisoner later. Du Prez and Mann were separated.

Mann in particular endured weeks of intense interrogations. The British lawyer Henry Page, who worked for Equatorial Guinea, appeared in Harare and asked Samukange for permission to see the accused. Page wanted evidence against the financiers, the men discussed in the media as being on the ‘Wonga List'. Samukange refused, but Page went ahead anyway. He spoke to Mann and produced a statement that Mann later said was given involuntarily. Mann was to testify that:

By the time I saw Mr Page I was extremely distressed, disoriented and extremely vulnerable. My physical and mental condition would clearly have been apparent to Mr Page. I informed Mr Page that I did not want to see him unless my lawyer was present. Mr Page informed me and kept on informing me during our ‘interview' that it was not necessary for my lawyer to be present as our conversation was completely off the record. He said that he felt very sorry for me and undertook ‘to sort out everything with the President of Equatorial Guinea' and that all I had to do was to speak openly with him. Mr Page then dictated to me a series of
events to which I did not respond, he wrote on a piece of paper as he spoke.

Mann's lawyer in Zimbabwe, Samukange, said his client was put under enormous pressure to confess and name financiers to be prosecuted in a civil case in Britain. Samukange said conditions were ‘very bad, terrible. He is kept in a cell with all the others. The guys from Equatorial Guinea tried to break him down. He slept chained to the bed from his ankle and from his arm. Henry Page came here … They wanted Mann to admit, to get a confession.' A Guernsey court also expressed its ‘concern that Mr Page as an English solictor had made almost no attempt to answer' allegations about his behaviour.

But the court was, at first, unaware of Mann's conditions and the situation in which Page had collected evidence. Page's legal team launched a civil case in London saying two companies and four individuals financed the plot: Mann's two firms, Logo Logistics and Systems Design Limited, as well as Mann himself, Greg Wales, Calil and Moto. On the basis of Mann's confession, Page won a legal order forcing the Royal Bank of Scotland to supply details of one of Mann's bank accounts to the prosecutors. In May the bank did so. Later, when the British judges were better informed of Mann's conditions, the ruling was reversed and the bank was told not to pass on any more bank details. But the information already gathered from Mann's Logo Logistics dollar account proved spectacular. The most juicy details, including the interesting payment from the mysterious J. H. Archer, soon leaked to the press.

The civil case was lodged with the English High Court. The claimants – the Equatorial Guinean government, notably Obiang – wanted financial damages from the accused for the ‘conspiracy to overthrow the government so as to profit
financially'. These were to be arrived at by calculating the costs of extra presidential security in Equatorial Guinea, and of detaining and trying the conspirators. The case was farcical. Prosecutors wanted a British court to order that Obiang – a fabulously wealthy and corrupt dictator who had himself snatched power in a coup and had his own uncle executed – be compensated for ‘mental anguish'. To proceed, Obiang would supposedly appear in court in person and submit to a cross-examination of his own past and human rights record. Page claimed that Obiang was willing to do this.

But Page was busy in other areas. Most seriously, he wanted action from Britain's anti-terrorist branch, saying that those who plan a violent coup are terrorists and should be treated as such, even if they happen to be white, Eton-educated aristocrats, not brown-skinned Islamists. He also sought legal redress in Lebanon against companies registered there, which he said were involved in the coup plot.

Back in Zimbabwe, the prisoners suffered more miserable months. Chikurubi is a hellish place. Built by Rhodesia's whites decades earlier, it has always been brutal. By 2004 it was rundown and packed far beyond capacity: 3000 inmates crammed in cells designed for 900. Samukange called it a terrible place with no water. Prisoners drank a little water from cans; toilets were not flushed. ‘The shit is piling up in the toilets. It is only a matter of time before there is a cholera outbreak,' explained Samukange.

One of the footsoldiers later said, ‘Chikurubi was like a German concentration camp. A place of death, where you go to die. It is not a place of rehabilitation. We thought we'd perish there.' He recalled prisoners died in his cell almost
every day. Some forty people were crammed into space for half the number. Many died simply of hunger: prison rations were typically a small portion of rice once a day. And though this is Africa, Harare is at a high altitude and gets icy cold in winter. Errol Harris recalls ‘eating rats, eating pigeons which I killed in prison'. He ‘received blankets, but we also received the lice'.

All the inmates were shocked by the lack of food. Niel Steyl describes a daily meal as ‘just three bean pips and a spoon of cabbage. It takes a guy with no help from outside six months. Then his skin starts cracking, he loses his balance. [The disease is] called pellagra. None of them complain. It affects the brain. They are smiling and dying. They eventually have difficulty walking. They take one step forward, then another backwards. In time the other prisoners carry them out in the morning and back to the cells in the evening. Nothing is done for them. Then they die.'

Others noted how men lay down like sardines at night, and by morning found corpses among them. They soon learned not to try and wake men who appeared to oversleep. ‘The strange thing was, the doctor comes to certify him dead. But even when they take the body away they put him in leg irons and handcuffs. There was no mortuary. Bodies were put in a room for as much as a week. They were decomposing. They just pile up the bodies. The smell …' One footsoldier died, apparently of meningitis. Two more were released on medical grounds.

Wealthier men suffered less. Gifts from visitors – cheese, dried meat, fruit – meant that many ate better than their guards. Niel Steyl coped by keeping fit: ‘I was in a section where you couldn't run. So I climbed instead.' Each morning he climbed a concrete bench in his cell 900 times, calculating that was the equivalent of walking to the top of the World
Trade Center and down again. But all feared death. His fifty-fourth day in jail was the worst. Apparently an escape was suspected so in the middle of the night five white plotters were dragged out of their cells.

I thought that they were going to stage an escape and shoot us. We were put in a vehicle and driven out. All of us were shit scared. In the van were Hendrik Hamman, Ken Pain, Raymond Archer, Louis du Prez and me. We were sitting there in our khaki shorts, khaki shirts. We thought, if this vehicle stops in the veld, they will open the back door. There wouldn't be many options. You couldn't run far or fast in leg irons. You couldn't offer a bribe or beg for your life. We thought we would get bullets in the back of the head.
      [Instead they went to another prison.]
      I was taken downstairs, along a long passage, then they threw open a door and pushed me through into a lit room. All over the floor were bodies, ninety-five men sleeping, lying on the concrete floor like worms. I stood a while. Then I sat in the space where the door had opened. I did nothing for half an hour. Then I saw a Gideon bible by someone and I asked if I could have it. I looked for the book of Job to find someone suffering more than I was. I read for half an hour. Then the warder opened the cell and removed my handcuffs. He went out again and a prisoner called over and said, ‘You see, it works. If you just read some more he will come back and take off your leg irons!'

Prisoners mostly smoked the bibles, calling the cigarettes ‘gumbototo'. The thin pages burn well. Cigarettes became currency. A 2-kilo (4-lb) bag of sugar cost a packet of twenty. A jar of peanut butter cost ten, and a bucket of water two.
Even starving prisoners gave up food for them. Steyl did not smoke, so used them to buy clothes off other prisoners' backs. He also bartered for fruit, milk powder and fresh bread. He also hired a servant. ‘I had a butler. I paid him cigarettes to make my bed, wash my stuff. He is called Learnfirst Chipika. He's going to come and work for me. It's agreed. He gets out on 12 December 2010.'

Finally – a taboo subject – many prisoners practised unprotected sex. Zimbabwe has a terrifying rate of HIV: roughly one in three adults is infected. Prisons help spread the virus. More than half the inmates in Chikurubi were thought to have AIDS. Hunger combined with the disease produces terrifying death rates. Steyl explained: ‘Homosexualism is rife, even among men who would not do it outside. It is only because there are no females around. It happens in the open.' Older men protected younger ones in return for sex. ‘The youngster does it to survive.' But the punishment for doing so was brutal. ‘At 8 a.m., with the whole prison watching, the guys who were caught having sex are made to lie on the ground with their feet in the air, feet facing up. Then the guards beat the soles of their feet with rubber batons. I have counted up to 300 shots on each foot. Every bone in the foot is broken. One guy's feet swelled up like elephants' feet. He couldn't walk for a week. Other prisoners had to carry him.'

Mann's conditions were marginally better than average, said Samukange in 2005. ‘In Simon Mann's hall there are ten of them. He sleeps alone in his own cell … He has a small mattress, a pillow. He is allowed books as long as they are not about escaping from prison.' He read the
Complete Works of Shakespeare
and was said to be writing his own book and learning Shona (the main language of Zimbabwe). Niel Steyl describes Mann's prison life. ‘Each day he runs around a
courtyard, he does 200 laps daily. Around the courtyard – I've been there and measured it out – is sixty metres. So that is a twelve-kilometre run each day. Then, once a month, he does a half marathon. In his cell one of the four walls is bars, a metal grid. So you can see across a passage and talk to the other guys. Simon is locked in his cell for nineteen out of twenty-four hours. But at least he can see out and talk to other guys.'

‘Oil companies operating in Equatorial Guinea may have contributed to corrupt practices.'

US Senate report, July 2004