“Sad are the eyes, yet no
tears…” Image of Moise Tshombe in the opening titles of "The Wild
Geese" (1978). The opening sequence of "The Wild Geese" was
designed by Maurice Bindman.
The name Moise Tshombe is one
which is written in infamy.
It was Tshombe who led the resource-rich
province of Katanga to secede from the Congo and whose gendarmes executed Congo’s
charismatic Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba on Katangan soil. Both actions,
accomplished at the behest of the old colonial power Belgium, have left Tshombe
with the unfortunate legacy of being the archetypal colonial stooge.
Photograph of Tshombe the
former leader of the Katangan secession from Congo (1960-1963) and former Prime
Minister of Congo (1964-1965) while he was being held in detention in Algeria
following the hijacking of a plane on which he had been travelling while it was
above the Mediterranean Sea. Credits: The original photograph of Tshombe in
captivity appeared in the German news magazine Stern in 1969.
The turmoil which accompanied
Tshombe’s period as a political figure was marked by the activities of white
mercenaries who actively aided Tshombe’s bid for secession and who later
revolted against the central government led by General Joseph Mobutu who
dismissed Tshombe from his role as Congolese Prime Minister after the secession
was revoked.
It was no surprise that
elements of the Tshombe story and of mercenary behaviour were portrayed in the
Hollywood movie TheWild Geese.
Released in 1978, the film
includes scenes depicting the hijacking of an aeroplane carrying an African
political leader, as well as one in which the mercenaries react to “betrayal”.
Quite interestingly, the image of Tshombe in Algerian captivity appears for a
number of seconds in the opening titles. His face appears sullen as his eyes
gaze wistfully at the camera of his West German visitor. They speak of a man
who although stoic is ill-at-ease and contemplative of his impending doom.
It is an image that serves well
as a metaphor for the continuing state of his country.
This is a leaflet issued in the mid-1970s by a group calling itself Citizens
United For Border Security warning the Republican population of the presence of
the British Army's special Forces regiment, the SAS (Special Air Service), along
the border between British ruled Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
The SAS was deployed to Northern Ireland from 1968 to 2007, primarily, it is
claimed, in a plainclothes, intelligence-gathering role, focusing on countering
the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA).
The leaflet began to be distributed at the beginning of 1976.
In February 1976, John Biggs-Davison, a Conservative Party MP described it as a
"preposterous document".
But British Prime Minister Harold Wilson acknowledged the presence of 'D' Squadron
of the SAS in south County Armagh after 3 British soldiers were killed in
November 1975 and 10 Protestant workers were massacred at Kingsmill in January
1976. These events were part of a backdrop of increasing sectarian violence in
rural areas
The SAS kidnapped an IRA man named Sean McKenna in March 1976 in the Republic
of Ireland border area, and the following month it killed an IRA Staff Captain
named Peter Cleary. Then when an Irish forester named Seamus Ludlow was
kidnapped and murdered at the beginning of May, the Irish the Garda (police)
and the Irish Army set up a checkpoint on Flagstaff Road.
This would lead to the "Flagstaff Incident" of May 5/6,1976.
Two undercover SAS soldiers were apprehended at the checkpoint while on their
way to relieve two other colleagues on border duty. This was followed by the
arrest of a further four who had gone in search of the first two who were
suspected of been victims of an IRA ambush.
The subsequent arrests of eight British soldiers led to a diplomatic incident.
In March 1977, the eight SAS men were tried and found guilty of possession of
arms and ammunition without firearms licensing. The firearms were returned to
the British government after forensic evidence determined that they had not
been used in the commission of any crimes being investigated in the Republic.
There would be 54 further incursions into Irish territory by British forces in
1976 as they struggled to contain the activities of Republican guerrillas much
of which was centred in South Armagh.
It came to be known as “Bandit
Country”, a place rife with sniper activity, ambushes, kidnappings and
assassinations carried out by both insurgents and security forces. Arraigned
against the likes of McKenna and Cleary were formidable SAS men such as (the)
Captain Julian “Tony” Ball who was among the first of several SAS contingents
deployed to Northern Ireland in 1976 where he was stationed at Bessbrook base
(BBK) in South Armagh.
No stranger to Northern
Ireland where he was previously deployed with the King’s Own Scottish
Borderers, Ball often liaised with Captain Robert Nairac, a Grenadier Guards
officer who worked in intelligence and performed many undercover tasks. Nairac
was abducted outside a pub at Dromintee in south Armagh in May 1977
and spirited across the border by republican sympathiser where he was tortured
and killed.
Some Republicans remained
convince that Nairac, like his friend Ball, was a member of the SAS, but this
seems unlikely because the secretive SAS always “claim” their members in
death, and Nairac's name is not written among the relevant rolls of fallen SAS
soldiers.
YouTube is an incoherent as well as an extremely biased organisation.
Just over a week ago I uploaded a very brief newsreel about the funeral of
Shiekh Abbas Musawi, an early leader of Hezbollah, the Lebanese political party which has
a military wing.
I had discovered the reel late last year but uploaded it just before the
delayed funeral in February of Musawi's successor Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah.
But when I noticed that the video did not materialise, I checked and discovered
that YouTube had frozen the upload, claiming that it was suspected of
infringing their policy on "violent organisations".
I did not appeal until a few days ago.
Their joke of an "appeal" does allow you to provide any written
points, but I presume that a human intervenes at this point.
My appeal was allowed.
However, the appeal only allowed the newsreel to stay on my channel as a
"private" upload, meaning that it could not be viewed by the public.
I appealed again.
This time, and again with I presume human intervention, YouTube decided to totally
remove the newsreel and issue. a "warning". A warning is different
from a "strike" which puts a channel at risk of being taken down if
it gets up to 3 strikes.
You will note the arbitrariness of this decision.
1. If you appeal and we don't like the content we will impose a more severe
"punishment".
2. Hassan Nasrallah's funeral was streamed live on numerous YouTube channels
including those in the mainstream.
Was hours of such streaming "glorifying" Hezbollah?
3. I have previously uploaded funerals of the following:
. Bashir Gemayel, the assassinated Maronite Christian warlord
. Naval crew of the Israeli Naval Destroyer INS Eilat
. Memorial service in Israel for the crew of the INS Dakar
I set the INS Dakar video to Maurice Ravel's version of the "Kaddish"
and the Eilat one to Barbra Streisand singing "Avinu Malkeinu".
Gemayel would qualify as having presided over a "terrorist"
organisation. The military wing of the Kataeb Party (or Phalangist Party)
committed several massacres and other forms of terrorism during the Lebanese
Civil War.
Israel as a state has always had a terrorist doctrine which legitimises the
objective of killing innocent civilians during military operations. Israel's
"sacred terrorism" as an early prime minister named Moshe Sharett
termed it, has been set out or acknowledged by a range of its political and
military leaders beginning with David Ben Gurion who recorded in the
Independence Diaries that "women and children" were legitimate
targets and extending to the contemporary "Dahiya Doctrine" (Lebanon)
and "Mowing the Lawn Doctrine" (Gaza), the latter of which has
evolved into an outright policy of genocide.
Frankly, the case that the Israeli state is a terrorist one can be proven
beyond a shadow of doubt.
But the designation of what is a terrorist entity is full of contradictions.
Hezbollah exists because of Israel's repeated invasions of Lebanon and the
long-term Zionist objective of colonising south Lebanon up to the Litani River.
But the United States, at the urging of the Israel lobby in America and Canada,
removed the designation of terrorist organisation from Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK),
which targeted American military, diplomatic and corporate personnel during the
era of the Shah because it commits acts of terror against the Islamic
government of Iran.
Anyway, the revelant newsreel is uploaded at my channel on the Rumble platform.
I will find time to write an email and a letter to YouTube HQ reflecting on
what I have jotted down here. They are as loathsome as the arbiters of Facebook
who ruled at the outset of the Russian intervention in Ukraine that posts which
praised the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion in the context of the conflict would not be
censured.
That just about says it all.
In the meantime, we should all contemplate how a one-minute newsreel about the
funeral of Abbas Musawi in 1992 which would have been broadcast on mainstream
news channels around the world can all of a sudden be considered as praising a
"criminal organisation".
Volodmyr Zelensky (left) and Donald Trump at
the White House on Friday, February 28th, 2025.
I jotted down the following
yesterday on a private social media page soon after watching the confrontation
between U.S. President Donald Trump and his vice president on the one hand and
Ukrainian President Volodmyr Zelensky on the other:
No question that Trump and
his vice president Vance were rough with Zelensky in front of the media.
They were "rude",
"brusque" and "abrupt".
But Zelensky DESERVED it.
This corrupt and
self-entitled weasel of a man has presided over the catastrophic loss of
Ukrainian men on the battlefield, as well as the inevitable dismemberment of
Ukraine because he WILLINGLY accepted the role of Ukraine as a proxy against
Russia at the behest of the previous U.S. administration.
The United States PROVOKED
this conflict through the long-term aim of expanding NATO to Russia's borders.
The countdown to strife was escalated by the US-backed coup d'etat in February
2014 which overthrew the democratically elected president of Ukraine who was
purportedly "pro-Russian" but who in fact was for Ukrainian
neutrality.
This coup which used
neoNazi and ultranationalist Ukrainian militias who brought to power a
Russophobic Ukrainian nationalist regime whose subsequent policies ALIENATED
and MARGINALISED the Russian-speaking Ukrainian population who took to arms in
a bid to SECEDE from Ukraine.
The 2014 coup effectively
kickstarted the Ukrainian civil war in which Russia only decided to intervene
in a major way in 2022.
Zelensky has played a major
part in PREVENTING peace and PROLONGING the war.
How so?
Zelensky was elected on a
PEACE platform. The idea was that he would seek to follow the Minsk peace
accords signed between the Ukrainian government and Russian-speaking
secessionists of the Donbas.
The Minsk agreements were
underwritten by the French and German governments but as Francois Hollande and
Angela Merkel later admitted, the agreement including the "Steinmeier
Formula" were never taken seriously and instead were looked on as devices
through which the US-led NATO would buy time and build up the Ukrainian armed
forces.
Zelensky did not insist on
peace and has continued on this path for TWO reasons:
1. Fear for his life
2. Personal profit
When soon after his
election Zelensky went to the parts of the Donbas occupied by the Ukrainian
military and pleaded with troops to withdraw, he was met with resistance on the
ground by so-called "veterans", a euphemism for ultranationalist troops.
They told him to his face that they would not withdraw (captured on film) and
later on his life was threatened by ultranationalists including Dmytro Yarosh.
Fast forward to April 2022
when Russia and Ukraine reached a provisional PEACE settlement after the
Istanbul talks Boris Johnson, acting as an emissary for NATO, flew into Kiev to
STIFLE the agreement which would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives
subsequently lost in the battlefield.
Zelensky was again
threatened by figures on the extreme political right in Ukraine and he passed a
law FORBIDDING negotiations with Russia while Vladimir Putin was leader of
Russia.
In the meantime Zelensky,
whose political career was initially bankrolled by the corrupt oligarch Ihor
Kolomoiski, has succeeded in increasing his personal wealth, a lot of which has
come from taking a percentage of the money flowing in from the US, NATO and EU
countries.
In fact in January 2023
when ex-CIA director William Burns visited Kiev, he did so to request that
Zelensky and others tone down the level of corruption.
He played his part in
PROVOKING a Russian intervention by increasing the launching of attacks in the
Donbas (confirmed by statistics provided by the OECD) and by declaring in
January 2022 that Ukraine would join NATO. He has also played his part in prolonging
a conflict in which close to a million Ukrainian military personnel have been
killed.
The level of Ukrainian
deaths far EXCEEDS those of Russia.
Trump and Vance KNOW this
and they both know that Zelensky KNOWS this.
Yet, all Zelensky has
continually done is to ask for more and more aid when in fact Ukraine does not
have the capacity to mobilise, train and equip an army after Russia has
succeeded in DESTROYING no less than THREE constituted Ukrainian armies since
February 2022.
The war has been LOST for a
longtime now.
Ukraine has absolutely no
chance of winning. It has lost a generation of males and is forced to kidnap
men off the streets to continue a losing struggle in which Russia has
ESCALATION DOMINANCE.
So yes, Zelensky DESERVED
the humiliating treatment meted out by Trump and Vance, although Trump needs to
take RESPONSIBILITY for the US's role in Ukraine's destruction.
The Supreme
Undercover by V. Alily. John Bull
Publishing, 2022, 240 pages, illustrations. ISBN 979-8843073428.
Nightwings by V. Alily. John Bull Publishing, 2023, 233
pages, illustrations. ISBN 979-8399828275.
The genre of historical
fiction received an inestimable boost in 1971 when the ex-Reuters journalist
and sympathiser for the cause of Biafran secession, Frederick Forsyth,
published his political thriller The Day
of the Jackal. It set the standard for writing a story within the confines
of an unchanged historical reality in which the survival of Charles de Gaulle
from an assassin’s bullet was assured, as much as Robert Harris’ Fatherland did for the genre of
alternative history which situated a murder mystery within an imagined
victorious German Third Reich.
With an emphasis on the
former genre Valentino Alily, a Nigerian-born author, merges both writing
species to some degree in two novels set against the backdrop of the Nigerian
Civil War. TheSupreme Undercover and Nightwings
respectively published in 2022 and 2023 are styled by the author as works of
‘faction’, that is “fiction woven around facts.” While the plot of The Supreme Undercover is centred on
intrigues at Federal Nigeria’s Supreme Military Headquarters where a Biafran
mole operates, the storyline of Nightwings
revolves around the mercy flights orchestrated by a range of organisations to
bring relief to the humanitarian catastrophe which developed within the
shrinking polity of Biafra. Like its predecessor, the theme of espionage lies
at its pith.
In The Supreme Undercover a host of fictitious characters interact at
a distance from real civil war era personalities such as Colonel Benjamin
Adekunle, the fierce Commander of the Third Infantry Division and Lieutenant
Colonel Emeka Ojukwu, the former military governor of the Eastern region who
became the head of state of the breakaway Republic of Biafra. The storyline
revels in a series of hypothesised causes of setbacks suffered by the Federal
side during the civil war, and rumours at Nigerian headquarters surrounding
several characters such as the Arab-Nigerien ‘Lieutenant Colonel Ali Ahmadu
Barah’ and ‘Brigadier Ibrahim Saliba Dabar’, a confidant of Major General
Yakubu Gowon, the head of the Federal Military Government. It reaches a
dramatic denouement featuring a series of escapes and assassinations on the eve
of the surrender of Biafra.
The plot of Nightwings centres on a race for time by
Biafran intelligence agents to discover sabotage in the midst of the relief
flights to Uli airport from destinations including Sao Tome and Libreville. It
is a task which reaches its climax in the throes of the crumbled dream of
Biafra. Before this, the author provides with a good measure of forensic detail
the work carried out by pilots, Holy Ghost Fathers and aid workers under the
severe circumstances of encirclement, blockade and famine. Scenes are crafted
to reflect the international dimension of the civil war and as with The Supreme Undercover the plot is
soundly developed to fit in with the chronology of developing events on the
battlefields.
While the plots for both
works are fictional, Alily, who comes from an extended family who have served
in the armed forces both of Nigeria and Biafra, strengthens his creativity as a
storyteller with the deployment of a tremendous amount of default knowledge of
military culture and the history of the war. Each book is provided with a
glossary of terms, maps and a range of bibliographic resources.
The use of espionage as the
central theme for a novel is of course a long-established one. But those which
are centred on the Nigerian Civil War are not only few and far between, they
have been written by non-Nigerians such as the Britons William Boyd and Jeremy
Duns. Boyd’s Solo which was published
in 2013 is actually an Ian Fleming estate-approved James Bond novel set in a
fictional African country which is a thinly veiled reconstruction of Biafra, while Duns’ Free Agent, published four years
earlier, provides the Nigerian Civil War as the backdrop of a Cold War era
intrigue involving the intended defection of a diplomat at the Soviet embassy
in Lagos where British Prime Minister Harold Wilson may be targeted for
assassination during a state visit in March 1969.
The area of espionage and
its role in the Nigerian Civil War has been under explored by Nigerian
academics and journalists. But the reason for this may indeed be that there are
no known feats of infiltration and counterintelligence performed by either
side. One missed opportunity as recounted by P.J. Odu, a Nigerian naval officer
who aligned himself to the Biafran state, was his regret in not leaving a spy
at naval headquarters after most of the navy’s personnel of Igbo origin defected
to Biafra. Some did choose to remain and served on the Federal side during the
war. And if an effective mole had been in place his first task would have been
to ensure that the landmark amphibious operation by the Nigerian Navy in Bonny in
July 1967 which effectively paved the way of Biafra’s encirclement would have
met with disaster.
Alily’s efforts provide a
pathway towards popularising a genre which if developed among a pool of
sufficiently talented and historically informed Nigerian writers, would not
only serve as a reservoir of entertainment, but also as a tool of education.
History, many Nigerians are ruefully aware, has for decades been a neglected
part of the basic curriculum.
There could of course be
pitfalls associated with the growth of this sort of literature. In Nigeria
where the narratives and facts associated with the war are still vigorously and
poisonously contested, the difference between fact and fiction can often be
extremely blurred. Also, key facts that could serve as a point of unifying
divergent views about the conduct of the war can often be left out. For instance,
while Nightwings provides a
compelling background of the dedication and willpower associated with effecting
airlifts, it inevitably leaves out the fact that the war was prolonged by a
“Keep Uli Open Campaign” by mercenaries on both sides of the conflict. The pact
between highly paid foreign pilots on both sides ensured that the Federal air
force did not knock out the landing strip.
That being said, Valentino
Alily has produced two highly suspenseful and entertaining books, that reflect
the dab hand of a creative writer and the ferocious attention to detail of a
seasoned researcher.
They deserve the attention
of a wide book reading audience.
Arrived a few days ago:
General Sir Frank Kitson’s memoir titled Intelligent Warfare
"I did think just a little bit more like a terrorist than some of our
commanders".
- General Frank Kitson (1926-2024).
General Frank Kitson's memoir
was published in December 2024, eleven months after his passing at aged 97.
Back in 1977 Kitson wrote his military autobiography Bunch of Five, but
it contained nothing about his service in Northern Ireland which was an
extremely sensitive subject at that time.
Most will presume that he addresses it in this work which he wanted published
only after his death. They will wonder if he covers the formation and
activation of the notorious Military Reaction Force (MRF), a British Army counterinsurgency
unit or "counter-gang" of which he was almost certainly the brains
behind.
The precursor to the Special Reconnaissance Unit (SRU), the Force Research Unit
(FRU) and 14 Intelligence Company, the purpose of the MRF was to take the fight
to the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in the strongholds of the Republican
community.
It meant that Kitson, according to Paddy Devlin of the Social Democratic and
Labour Party, “probably did more than any other individual to sour relations
between the Catholic community and the security forces”.
But while Kitson was later in
his lifetime subjected to lawsuits from families from the Republican community
for his role in the loss of innocent life, researchers have yet to find evidence
of the MRF commencing its shooting until after then Brigadier Kitson left
Northern Ireland in April 1972 to take up a post at Warminster.
Even the shooting of the
innocent Conway brothers on April 15th, 1972, for long erroneously attributed
to the MRF, had in fact been committed by a three-man team from The Kings Own
Scottish Borderers regiment led by Captain Julian “Tony” Ball.
Nonetheless, Kitson whom
General Sir Mike Jackson opined “very much set the tone for the operational
style in Belfast”, remains culpable to many Republicans who view him as the
spiritus rector of the enduring covert policies of British Army
intelligence which had a devastating impact on the Roman Catholic community.
I will most definitely be writing a review of the book.
Ranks of Frank Kitson:
1946 - 2nd Lieutenant 1948 - Lieutenant 1953 - Captain 1960 - Major 1964 - Lieutenant Colonel 1969 - Colonel 1970 - Brigadier 1976 - Major General 1980 - Lieutenant General 1982 - General
Arba
Lijoch (meaning "40 children" in Amharic)
were a group of 40 Armenian orphans who had escaped the fate of millions of
Armenians who were systematically killed and deported by Ottoman Turks.
Crown Prince Ras Tafari, later Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia,
encountered them while visiting the Armenian monastery in Jerusalem. He was so
impressed by their abilities as a marching band that he obtained permission
from the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem to adopt and take them to Ethiopia.
They arrived in Addis Ababa in 1924, and Selassie oversaw their continued
education.
Led by Kevork Nalbandian, Arba Lijoch became the Royal Imperial Brass Band.
Nalbandian went on to compose the music for "Ethiopia Hoy", the
Imperial National Anthem from 1930 to 1974.
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