Free Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade by Julian Rademeyer Page A

advisor. He’s lost count of the number of ‘contacts’ he’s been in lately. Things move fast on the ground. Burman and his teams are perpetually on the run, pursued and shot at by Cuban gunships. By now, the ops follow a familiar pattern: Get in, find the enemy, kill them, and get out in a cloud of dust and a whirr of rotor blades.
    The frequent deployments take their toll. Burman needs a new rifle. If you’re regularly dropped into combat by chopper, the solid stock of a standard-issue R1 is nothing but a hindrance. He’s looking for a rifle with a folding stock. He dumps his pack and heads for the stores. The warehouse is chock-a-block with army-green packing cases.
    He opens one, then another, and another. He’s astonished by what he finds.
    ‘Every single case was packed with ivory and rhino horn and game skins, including sable, roan antelope, leopard skins and lion skins. Boxes and heaps and heaps and heaps of it. I blew a fuse. I lost it completely. Nobody was mentally normal at that stage, but in my case, that was basically the straw that broke the camel’s back.’
    There must have been at least sixty crates, all labelled ‘dental equipment’ and marked for dispatch to Waterkloof Air Force Base near Pretoria.

    In the 1970s and 1980s, Rundu is one of the SADF’s main forward-operating bases. The administrative capital of the Okavango region, it’s a large town by Namibian standards. Just to the north is the Okavango River and, across it, Angola.
    When the Portuguese, who had colonised Angola for 400 years, hastily abandoned the country in 1975, conflict between the three main Angolan liberation movements – UNITA, the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and the National Liberation Front of Angola (FNLA) – escalated into bloody civil strife. Angola’s tragedy lay in its riches – seemingly unlimited quantities of oil, diamonds and minerals. Everyone seemed to want a piece. In addition, the country formed part of the unhappy
cordon sanitaire
of buffer states that apartheid South Africa regarded as protection from ‘hostile black Africa’ and the ever-present threat of the communist
Rooi Gevaar
.
    War turned Angola into a proxy battleground for the Cold War superpowers. Cuba and the Soviet Union threw their weight behind the MPLA. Along with Pretoria, Washington – in the guise of the US Central Intelligence Agency’s shadow warriors – threw its weight behind UNITA and the FNLA. By the war’s end, over 600 000 Angolans were dead and more than a million displaced.
    Before the war, Rundu was a major trans-shipment point between Angola and Namibia. By 1979, the pont that once ferried cargo across the river is disabled and a chain with a no-entry sign bars the way to the access ramp. Sometimes at night, after bingeing on warm beer, callow South African
troepies
can be heard shouting insults at shadows across the river. ‘Castro is a cunt,’ is a particular favourite.
    Rundu is a magnet for profiteers and smugglers. You can get anything, if you know the right people. Sometimes the only currency you need is cans of fish or what the soldiers call ‘
Owambo piele
’ (Owambo penises): horrid tins of Vienna sausages in brine.
    Sector 20 HQ is where the army brass sit in their cushy offices, shuffling paper and sending young men out to kill and die. Many of the officers are little more than ‘civvies in uniform’. Somewhere along the line they get a degree and join the Defence Force. Before you know it, they have rank. They may have brains, but they are not fighters. Most never see battle, feel the fear, hear the screams, or smell the blood, rot and shit of the dead and dying.
    Chief of Staff Intelligence, better known as CSI, has offices at the base in Rundu. They are at the pinnacle of wartime intelligence gathering, accountable directly to the chief of the Defence Force. In his current role, Burman reports to a CSI co-ordinator, Colonel Fred Oelschig. Oelschig’s brother, Mo,