Selous Scouts
Origins
The Selous Scouts (no relation to the
short-lived Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland Armoured Car Regiment which had previously borne the name) provided the
most aggressive (and feared) arm of the Rhodesian military
machine. The Scouts were named after the British explorer Frederick
Courteney Selous and their motto was pamwe chete - the Shona for
"all together", "together only" or "forward
together". The Selous Scouts are now generally pictured as the
most effective arm of the Rhodesian security apparatus.
Certainly the number of
casualties caused - whether directly inside Rhodesia, often through providing targets for Fireforce
attacks, or on many of the more
violent external raids, - was greater than all other arms of the Rhodesian security apparatus
combined. That they were disbanded so swiftly in 1980 (without any ceremony) and their
continued portrayal in Mugabe's Zimbabwe as, essentially, poorly-trained thugs,
certainly indicates the strength they were believed to wield. Certainly some of
the activities that former members of the Scouts got up to after war's end would
dispute the assessment that they were poorly-trained. Thuggish, possibly, but
well-trained at least.
Reid-Daly and Flower, who headed Rhodesian Intelligence
did not get on - Flower looking towards a political solution for the
struggle, whilst Reid-Daly seemed to believe simply that through
increasingly esoteric actions, the war could be won - seeing the
struggle as essentially military, rather than political. The standard
apologia on the Scouts would note that a far higher proportion of
Africans served in the force than any other Rhodesian unit, and that
many were "turned terrs". The actual number of African troops
serving in the Scouts is still debated.
Two examples are worth focusing on in some detail
demonstrate
the ways in which this history is being either rewritten, or simply
ignored. Both
are related to the "sanitisation" of the Scouts, and the
Rhodesian struggle more generally. Reid-Daly completely
ignores the increasingly well-documented role played by the Scouts in
perpetrating Rhodesia's chemical and biological war. The book Plague
Wars goes some way towards demonstrating the role performed by the
Scouts as being among the first Rhodesian troops to use biological
weapons during the war.
Otherwise, Edward Piringondo. A Scout from the earliest
days in 1973, he was
eventually nominated for Rhodesia’s highest gallantry award , the
Grand Cross of Valour; only two other soldiers were to receive this
award; Acting Captain C . F. Schulenberg (Selous Scouts)
and Major Grahame Wilson, second-in-command of the SAS (sometimes rather
esoterically known as "The Phantom Major"). Piringondo died
"on operations", and is listed on the Rhodesian roll of honour
as "KOAS Detonation of Explosives" (he was apparently blown up
while trying to plant a bomb at a church, part of the Rhodesians’
increasingly unsubtle propaganda campaign against ‘Marxist’ ZANU
before the 1980 elections). Piringondo receives no mention at all in the
earlier Selous Scouts - Top
Secret War, and only the most perfunctory mention in Pamwe
Chete - in neither of these is there any mention whatsoever of the
man, his life, or his fate.
Activities
Robert Taber wrote in the "War of the Flea" in the late
1960's that the '...counter
insurgents could not match the insurgents tactics." Today they not only
try to match but sometimes they succeed in being more progressive in
their use of methods than the insurgents. Initial attempts at "psuedo operations"
in Rhodesia (psuedo operations were when members of the security forces
masqueraded as guerillas - this approach had initially been tried during the Mao
Mao years in Kenya) had apparently been carried out unsuccessfully as early as 1967,
but it would only be several years later that it was decided the role to be
played by the Scouts would be a valuable one. The later attempts to recruit
African servicemen from the RAR - presumably due to the relatively low numbers
of "turned terrs" were resisted by regular servicemen.
One of the less savoury activities is chronicled
in the following link : Project
Coast. Whilst Basson was to cause even greater damage later on, it is fair
to say that Rhodesia, and the Selous Scouts, offered him an excellent
starting-point. (For more, check my review
of the book "Plague Wars"). A long article in the South African Sunday
Times (31 October 1999) claimed that the witness, a mercenary now living in
Texas, saw Basson injecting men with an unknown substance before they were
thrown out of the plane over Mozambique in 1979. The group he saw included
South African recces and an American intelligence officer. The group who had
been injected were clearly still alive, and semi-conscious. His assumption was
that this contamination would then be spread among the guerrilla forces in the
area.
Otherwise, the Scouts have been linked both to the
initial and continuing Rhodesian use of chemical and biological warfare. Reid
Daly again fails to mention these.
After war's end, perhaps due to
the reputation that had been created and possibly with more than a grain of
truth, former Scouts were implicated in a number of unsavoury activities, many
connected with the death-throes of apartheid South Africa. The assassination of
the Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme in 1986 - a strident anti-apartheid campaigner
- has been linked to a former Scout, then working with BOSS (the South African Bureau of State
Security). A number of other South African related sources have also been
implicated. Captain Anthony White remains an intriguing character
who,
amongst other activities, seems to have run an exceptionally
unprincipled logging operation in Mozambique, played a
role in the increasingly well-documented ivory poaching activities performed by
the Scouts during the war (ironically, many of his former colleagues were to work for the
National Parks organisation in Zimbabwe - it is fairly safe to assume that any
who still remain there would probably not admit to their past) and seems to have been involved in
Palme's assassination.
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