NONE of Rakesh Saxena's deals matched the toppling of the military dictatorship in Sierra Leone last year.From his apartment in Vancouver, Saxena, who owns a diamond mine in the troubled West African country, allegedly paid off British mercenaries to mount the coup, in the process sparking off a diplomatic furore in London, and forcing foreign secretary Robin Cook to call an inquiry.
It transpired that British foreign office diplomats secretly endorsed the coup, but did not tell their superiors about it. The British authorities are currently probing the role played by a British-based private security force, Sandline International Inc, headed by Tim Spicer, a former lieutenant-colonel who is a British war hero.
Saxena wanted to restore the Ahmad Tejan Kabbah government that had been overthrown last year by troops led by Major Johnny Paul Koromah. The coup was condemned by the global community, as president Kabbah had come to power through elections that ended six years of civil war in early 1996. Last October, the United Nations imposed an arms embargo on Sierra Leone, and Nigerian peacekeepers conjured a plan to overthrow the junta.
According to The Toronto Star, two months after Kabbah fled to neighbouring Guinea, one of his officials wrote to Saxena in Vancouver asking for help. Kabbah wanted logistics and training to turn his militia, manned by Kamajor hunters, into an effective fighting force. Saxena, reportedly, turned to Lt Col Spicer, who agreed, for $60,000 a week, plus expenses.
Saxena's correspondence with Spicer appeared in the Canadian media, and soon enough Saxena was denying that he was bankrolling a coup. He insisted that he had merely commissioned a study of the security situation in Sierra Leone.
British newspapers reported this May that Saxena paid Sandline $2.18 million as down payment for the coup, and that the Kabbah regime in exile paid another $5.08 million to complete the deal in which Bulgarian arms were flown to Africa in February, and funneled to the Kamajor militiamen via Nigerian peacekeeping forces stationed in neighbouring Liberia.
The same month, Nigerian troops and the Kamajors launched a two-pronged attack against the Sierra Leone junta and finally wrested back control after bloody fighting that left 200 civilians dead in two weeks.
Soon afterwards, when the British authorities opened an investigation into Sandline's role in the coup, as it had breached the UN arms embargo, Lt Col Spicer claimed he was acting with the approval of the British government and, in the process, implicated four diplomats, two senior British army officers, and the British High Commissioner for Sierra Leone, Peter Penfold.
In fact, Penfold met Sandline officials at their London office in January, where he was briefed about the entire operation. The affair ultimately embarrassed the new Labour government, and humiliated Cook who did not know what was going on in his own backyard in the foreign office. Prime minister Tony Blair subsequently promised a more ethical foreign policy, and tighter supervision of arms sales.
