LOOKING BACK AND GOING FORWARD

I never thought I would find myself having a blog but since the publication of my book “Executive Outcomes – Against all Odds” (Galago, 2007), the feedback I got from across the world made me realise that a blog might be a good way to give some insights into the current situation. The book, as well as some of the reviews, can be found at http://www.galago.co.za/

Writing the book was however never a guarantee that people would read it. Today still, there are bookstores in South Africa that refuse to carry the book and book reviewers who refuse to review it. This despite the fact that I can prove what I wrote but those so-called journalists who wrote scathing reports about myself and EO cannot prove what they wrote. Some of them even had the gall to threaten to sue me…something I am sorry they didn’t do because a court of law would expose their duplicity even more.

Truth has a strange way of resurfacing several years later as I discovered when The Star newspaper in South Africa published a full-page apology to me.

Of course, running Executive Outcomes (EO) had me labelled as a “communist”, “mercenary”, “right-winger”, “conservative”, “racist”, “nigger-lover”, and even worse. Although I initially found the entire name episode directed at me a rather bitter pill to swallow, I eventually figured out that people were confusing what I considered to be right with their political and business agendas. Furthermore, wherever EO worked in a country where diamonds were a resource, the disinformation against the company started. I wonder why other countries’ diamonds were of such interest to a specific mining company, South African Military Intelligence and the South African Department of Foreign Affairs, not to mention their association with a company acting as an advisor to all three of them.

Be that as it may, I shall refrain from continuing with that tedious subject as I covered it in some detail in my book. Instead, I shall rather focus on defence and security issues at hand and particularly in Africa and the Middle East and give my opinion and thoughts on what is happening.