The mansions of Mann &Thatcher.The poisoned land of the fighters

[emad]

Rory Carroll in Pomfret
Saturday September 18, 2004
The Guardian

Snip:

Some call it South Africa's Siberia, a dumping ground for the unwanted, but those condemned to live in Pomfret lament that some of them were wanted - as warriors.Marooned on the dust-blown fringe of the Kalahari desert in South Africa's Northern Province, Pomfret is a village of 3,000 outcasts eking out existence in cracked houses with no running water.

Two decades ago they lived in Angola where the apartheid regime enlisted the men into a black foreign legion, 32 Battalion, to fight against liberation movements in Namibia and their native Angola.

They lost the wars and moved to South Africa but here too a liberation movement took power. It allowed the Angolan soldiers and their families to stay at their former army base in Pomfret but regarded them as race traitors.Stranded on an asbestos-poisoned wasteland 100 miles from the nearest town, this was the price of fighting for the white man.

Earlier this year former members of 32 Battalion repeated that folly for a Briton - and his backers - whose lifestyles are at the opposite end of the wealth spectrum. This time they took orders not from Afrikaner generals but from a British mercenary, Simon Mann, who allegedly dangled a monthly pay cheque of £4,200, a fortune here.
Now the village is counting the cost of accepting his offer in absent husbands and fathers. The same court in Zimbabwe which last week jailed Mann for seven years jailed his foot soldiers for 12 months.For relatives it was a disaster: while their men languish in Harare's fetid Chikurubi prison they will struggle for food, clothes and medicine.
More:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/zimbabwe/article/0,2763,1307478,00.html