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Where Coup Plots Are Routine, One That Is Not
March 20, 2004
By MICHAEL WINES
Correction Appended
MALABO, Equatorial Guinea, March 17 - This malarial West
African dictatorship quashed another coup attempt this
month, which is like saying the corner 7-Eleven served up
another Slurpee. Quashed coups (five since 1996) are a
political staple here, so routine that some say the
government stages and then quashes them to burnish its
image of invincibility.
But the coup this month was different. Nobody could make
this coup up.
The coup attempt of 2004 features a dysfunctional ruling
family, a Lamborghini-driving, rap-music-producing heir
apparent and a bitter political opponent in exile who
insists that Equatorial Guinea is run by a gonad-eating
cannibal. It is said to involve a Lebanese front company, a
British financier, an opposition figure living in exile in
Spain and some 80 mercenaries from South Africa, Germany,
Armenia and Kazakhstan.
Its messy denouement unfolded not in Malabo, Equatorial
Guinea's capital, but 2,100 miles away, aboard an American
jet in Zimbabwe.
With such a polyglot cast, this whodunit has become almost
a parlor game among Africa watchers. Not since Christmas
1975, when Moroccan palace guards shot 150 suspected
plotters in the city soccer stadium to a band's rendition
of "Those Were the Days, My Friend" has a botched takeover
set tongues wagging so briskly.
"Normally, the people involved are just rounded up, paraded
before the state media, and then they disappear forever,"
said Patrick Smith, the editor of the London-based
newsletter Africa Confidential, which has scooped
competitors on the coup's juiciest details. "This one is
the most extraordinary ever."
Until lately, few cared. Equatorial Guinea, a Spanish
colony for 190 years, was seen as a sweltering backwater,
so destitute that many citizens foraged for food. But in
the mid-1990's American drillers struck oil, and everything
changed.
Today, this Maryland-size nation has $5 billion in American
oil rigs and drilling gear parked offshore, pumping 350,000
barrels of petroleum a day. Washington is reopening an
embassy closed in the mid-1990's after the ambassador, a
vocal human rights critic, began getting death threats.
Most Equatorial Guineans remain subsistence-level
survivors. But the president since 1979, Teodoro Obiang
Nguema Mbasogo, owns mansions in Maryland and Virginia and
banks up to $700 million a year in oil revenues in
personally controlled accounts.
As Mr. Obiang said at a news conference on Wednesday in his
meticulously restored ceremonial palace, having money is a
mixed blessing, seeing as so many people want to take it
away. Participants in this month's quashed coup were
promised a share of the oil wealth if their takeover had
succeeded, he said.
Instead of benefiting those it is supposed to, "it is
causing them a lot of problems," he said through an
interpreter.
Yet, toppling Equatorial Guinea's government would be no
mean feat, because removing the president would barely
scratch the surface. The military is peppered with Mr.
Obiang's cousins and nephews. One of his sons is the
natural resources minister. A brother-in-law is ambassador
to Washington.
A brother, Armengol Ondo Nguema, is a top internal security
official and, according to a 1999 State Department report,
a torturer whose minions urinated on their victims, sliced
their ears and rubbed oil on their bodies to lure stinging
ants.
Finally, a second son, Teodoro Nguemo Obiang, is the
infrastructure minister and his father's anointed
successor. To the dismay of some relatives, he also is a
rap music entrepreneur and bon vivant, fond of Lamborghinis
and long trips to Hollywood and Rio de Janeiro, who shows
few signs of following his father's iron-fisted tradition.
On its face, this month's coup seems to threaten none of
these leaders. Indeed, the 80-odd mercenaries said to be
the coup's advance force are now in prisons in Zimbabwe and
Equatorial Guinea where, if human rights reports are any
guide, it is possible they will face torture, if not
execution.
Equatorial Guinea's government said Wednesday that one
captured mercenary, a German held in a Malabo jail, had
died of cerebral malaria in a local hospital. But this is
among Africa's most opaque regimes, and long one of its
most repressive. The only real constant is that appearances
are deceiving.
The outside world first learned of the coup attempt on
March 6, when Zimbabwe officials said they had seized an
old Boeing 727 jet with American markings after it stopped
in Harare, Zimbabwe's capital, on a flight north.
Inside and waiting on the tarmac outside, the government
said, were 67 mercenaries, mostly South Africans and
Angolans. They were said by Zimbabwe to have landed in
Harare to pick up a cache of weapons illicitly purchased
from government weapons makers.
Mr. Obiang's security men then announced that they had
arrested 15 more people - Germans, Kazakhs and others - in
Equatorial Guinea, thwarting a plot to kill the president
and take over the government. It soon became clear that the
flight had originated in South Africa, and that
intelligence officials there, in Zimbabwe and in Angola had
tipped Mr. Obiang to the impending coup.
Two mercenaries stood out. In Zimbabwe, the plane had been
met by Simon Mann, a British expatriate and onetime aide to
senior British military leaders. Mr. Mann is a flamboyant
soldier of fortune, a figure in books and even a cameo
actor in a war movie. In the 1990's, two companies tied to
him, Executive Outcomes and Sandline International,
reclaimed Angolan oil fields and diamond mines from rebel
armies and imposed peace in war-racked Sierra Leone in the
absence of a United Nations force.
In Equatorial Guinea, the crucial plotter was identified as
Nick du Toit, a South African special forces veteran who
once worked for Executive Outcomes. This time, Mr. du Toit
worked for Mr. Mann in a company called Logo Logistics. An
official in that company, who goes by two names, has told
reporters that it bought the Boeing 727 in Kansas this year
as part of an innocent contract to protect gold miners in
the Democratic Republic of Congo - not to overthrow a
government.
Whatever the truth, Mr. du Toit appeared on
state-controlled television in Malabo last week to make a
dramatic, seemingly case-closing confession. The entire
plot, he said, was hatched by Severo Moto, an Equatorial
Guinean opposition figure and longtime fomenter of quashed
coups who lives in exile in Madrid. Mr. Moto's coup was
said to be financed by $5 million from a British
businessman, washed through a front company in Lebanon.
"It wasn't a question of taking the life of the head of
state, but of spiriting him away, taking him to Spain and
forcing him into exile," said Mr. du Toit, who has not been
seen since.
Mr. Moto makes no secret of his hatred of President Obiang:
on Spanish radio this month, he called him a demon who
"systematically eats his political rivals."
"He has just devoured a police commissioner. I say
`devoured,' as this commissioner was buried without his
testicles and brain," he said, adding that Mr. Obiang
hungered for his body parts as well.
"We are in the hands of a cannibal," he warned.
That
said, Mr. Moto also told Spanish radio that he had played
no role in the latest coup against Mr. Obiang. In turn, his
denial underscored an intriguing omission in Mr. du Toit's
own confession.
According to Africa Confidential, Mr. Smith's London-based
newsletter, the same Mr. du Toit who is accused of plotting
to overthrow the government held a contract with that same
government to train Equatorial Guinea's paramilitary and
customs forces. The contract was reported to have been
signed by Armengol Ondo Nguema - President Obiang's half
brother, the head of internal security and perhaps the
nation's most feared man.
Some Guinea watchers say Mr. du Toit played a deadly game
clumsily, trying to penetrate Equatorial Guinea's inner
leadership as part of the coup plot, and lost. Others find
it inconceivable that the wily Mr. Armengoldid not know
what Mr. du Toit had up his sleeve, and say he was either a
willing participant or was stringing Mr. du Toit along.
There is nothing to indicate that Mr. du Toit's contract to
train the military of the government he sought to overthrow
is untoward. Indeed, President Obiang said at Wednesday's
news conference that he knew "for sure" that his brother
was not involved in any way with any venture involving Mr.
du Toit.
"I think it's not true," he said. "Because if it was like
this, I would have known."
Still, a jefe in a place like this always looks over his
shoulder. After all, the sole successful coup here occurred
in 1979, when Mr. Obiang himself, then a lowly lieutenant
colonel, overthrew and executed the self-proclaimed "Unique
Miracle," Francisco Macias Nguema.
Mr. Nguema was his uncle. It was a family affair.
An
article yesterday about a foiled coup attempt in Equatorial
Guinea misstated the status of a company tied to one of the
mercenaries accused in the plot. Sandline International, a
private military contractor cited for its activity in
Africa in the 1990�s, is still functioning; it is not
defunct.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/20/international/africa/20GUIN.html?ex=1081172929&ei=1&en=392fb3e03d6e5364
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