S. Africa's silent war in Iraq (mercenary)

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-mercenaries_salopek_bdoct07,1,2988737.story?ctrack=5&cset=true


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And in that hush lies a clue to this African nation's murky and angst-ridden participation in America's military adventure in the Middle East: Durant is one of thousands of South African police officers and soldiers, most of them white veterans of the old apartheid regime, who have left their jobs to work as private security contractors in Iraq -- a semiclandestine exodus of hired guns that has alternately embarrassed and alarmed the pacifist government here.

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The Sept. 16 killings of up to 11 Iraqi civilians by guards from the security firm Blackwater USA have rekindled intense debate in the U.S. over the propriety of outsourcing security responsibilities in Iraq to scores of private companies. But the acrimony in America can't begin to match the political hand-wringing that surrounds the issue in South Africa.

Sensitive to its apartheid-era reputation for exporting soldiers of fortune to wars across Africa, the young, black-led government in Pretoria recently drafted the harshest anti-mercenary bill in the world, a measure that would criminalize virtually all of its citizens working in Iraq.

And as the war grinds through its fifth year, there is growing concern that Iraq's drain on skilled police and military personnel may be crippling the nation's elite security services. Local media reports warn that tactical police units in major cities are being thinned by the stampede of officers to Baghdad. And a former South African military officer who runs his own security firm conceded that most of the nation's best special forces trainers now are on the U.S. contracting payroll in Iraq.

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Wages for private contractors who work as bodyguards, convoy escorts and oil field security workers in Iraq average about $10,000 a month -- more than 10 times the pay of a South African army or police captain.

Up to 10,000 in Iraq

Nobody knows how many South Africans have signed up for such hazardous duty. The foreign affairs ministry puts the number as high as 10,000, though industry experts and U.S. contracting firms say the figure is far smaller, more like 2,000 to 3,000 men. Still, even the lower estimate would make South Africans the third-largest contingent of armed foreigners deployed in Iraq after Washington's closest military ally, Britain.
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Iraq, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow

sitting high atop a mountain of dead people

I have an ex-pat SA friend who has claimed for at least two years that SA mercenaries were being hired there...and that they had bragged to her about it.

Now, we hear SA mercs going to Iraq. Is there a correlation?

They jumped at the chance to get rough with brown folks in another country.

The SA command is just the workings of empire.