A BBC television documentary shown in May depicted a few days in the lives of a motley crew of 100 pound a month British mecenaries, many of them ex-British army, who are helping the break away Croatian Tudjman regime as part of an international brigade.
the programe, titled "The Dogs of War" and shown in the BBC's Inside Story series, put a part of the detritus of British Society under the spotlight. Carl, a military explosives expert from Merryside, who went to Croatia for something to do and had served as a mecenary in Sri Lanka, the Sudan, Surinam and a couple of places "too sensitive to mention". Dave, seemingly from Manchester, who wanted to experience the joys of "killing without compassion, like the Yorkshire Ripper. Roy, the kid with the inane grin whose mother thought he was "working at Euro Disney"; and the Welshman known as "Frenchie", now hospitalized after shooting himself in the foot with his own machine gun.
The only onw with any redeeming features was Kit, an ex-paratrooper and French Legionnaire from the northeast, who freely describes himself as a "vagabond" and found life in Croatia preferable to the one in prison that he faces if he returns to Britain.
Kit, his personal life obviously as big a shambles as he describes his woeking colleages, had no illusions about the fact that he was in the company of cut throats whose main lust was to spill blood. "these sods are just as bad as the other side" he concided in a candid moment.
The programme was worthwhile as a series of character scetches focussing on the socially and it appears mentally disoriented flotsam and jetsam of Britain's failing economy.
However, it was important in other ways.
MURDER AND DECEPTION
What was crucial was that it gave an insight into the way in which the
gangs
of freelance marauders, enlisted by the Croatians to plunge Yugoslavia into
bloody civil war, go about their business.
The British company, about 30 strong, was based in the town of Osijek, which was been the flashpoint for heavy fighting. One of its functions, the programme demonstrated, had been to provoke breaks in the cease fires arranged between the two sides in the conflict, in an attempt to throw the blame for continued shelling and violence on the overwhelmingly Serbian Yugoslav Federal Army.
These provocations bear the stamp of careful and systematic planning. The documentary proved this beyond doubt with footage showing a team of British and French mercenaries going out to lay explosives charges.
Radio news reports the next morning then said that "the shelling of Osijek was intense" and was "the worst violation of the cease fire since the current truce went into force."
The reality, explained the programmes commentary, was something different. The mercenaries had, in fact been in action laying explosives "to decieve the European Community observers who would assume it was the Serbs".
The British mercenaries are teh kind of people for whom fitting into normal social surroundings is anathema and for whom the mere thought of killing without feeling is attractive. They are the type of men who flocked into Hitler's Waffen-SS legions.
And like their predecessors they are being used as willing pawns in a game that is being played for staked much higher than they can begin to understand.
EDUARDO FLORES-FIXER FOR MURDE
handing out the orders to the British mercenaries in Osijek is a
sinister
young Spanish gentleman by the name of Eduardo Flores, a man whose name
crops up with ever increasing frequency in investigations of the deaths of
British photographer Paul Jenks and Swiss reporter Christian Wurtenberg in
January ... around the time the BBC team filmed the "Dogs of War".
In fact, Searchlight can exclusively reveal for the first time, information about Flores' well travelled background.
Only 32 years old and claiming to be without military experience (despite sporting para wings), Jorge Eduardo Rosza Flores commands the so-called International Brigade (PIV) based in Osijek.
To get there has been a long journey involving several political mutations and numerous contacts with the twilight world of armies, secret services and quasi fascist religious organisations.
Born in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, to spanish catholic mother and Hungarian Jewish father, Flores spent his formative years in Budapest, where in his teens he was an active member of the communist youth movement.
In fact, he is not without military experience, having done his military service in the Hungarian army as a border guard at Budapest airport, where he reportedly met the notorious international terrorist "Carlos".
In 1988-89 Flores' career took a new direction when he started to work with the Barcelona paper La Vanguardia as an assistent to Ricardo Estarriol, the paper's East European correspondant and an active member of the secretive rightist Catholic organisation Opus Dei.
Both men made regular trips to Vienna to visit the Opus Dei offices there and Flores mantained close contact with this historically pro-fascist Catholic organisation.
Before being assigned by La vangaurdia to Croatia, where he was to jettison his laptop computer in favor of a rifle, Flores was covering events in Hungary, Albania and Slovenia, the province in which German government insired seperatists had already begun to drive the first stakes into the hearts of Yugoslavia. Arriving in Croatia in late August 1991, Flores immediately announced that he had enlisted in the so-called Croatian National Guard and was posted to the village of Lazlovo, close to the Serbian border and populated by ethnic Hungarians.
Within weeks of his arrival, Flored had made an impact and had found allied in the shape of American Croatian Johnny "Bob" Kosic and one "Jura" a Hungarian from the village. Between them, on 3 October, they cooked up the idea of an international brigade, which gained instant recognition from Franjo Tudjman's Croatian authorities.
The conduit for the promp legalisation of the new force was Branimir Glavas, the head of the local militia in Osijek, which was to later become the base for Flores unit.
Foreigners began to flood in as recruits. Among them were the top Portugeuse sniper Alejandro Cunan Fernandez and Alejandro Hernandez Mora, a Spanish mercenary and an explosives and sabatoge expert. Also among the new arrivals was Stephan Hannock, the welshmen known as "Frenchie" because his claimed background in the French Foreign Legion.
Other recruits, who brought the brgade's strength to around 100, included a French group sent by the fascist Front National.
Other FN members found ther way into the ranks of the more explicitly fascist Black Legion, which is attached to the 15,000 strong Armed Croatian Forces (HOS) militias and based at Vukovar, about 22 miles from Osijek.
Journalists from across Europe have wanted to lift the lid on the freelance killers operating in Croatia. For Christian Wurtenberg and Paul Jenks, this curiosity was to prove fatal.
Wurtenberg working for a Swiss news agency, decided to investigate alleged links between Flores and trafficking in weapons and drugs by joining the International Brigade, despite oppostion from his editors.
In addition, he hoped to uncover evidence of right-wing extremists amongst the mercenaries who decorate their rooms with swastikas and to establish precisely who was paying them.
After serving with Flores' outfit for a few weeks. Wurtenberg secretly told Spanish television reporter Julio Cesar Alonso that very soon he would leave the brigade and return to Switzerland.
Days later, on 4 January, Alonso and a Porteguese televeision reporter, Joso Pinto Amaral, were taken from Zagreb's Hotel Intercontinental to the headquarters of the Croatian secret police. They were later interrogated.
After the questioning, Flored told the two journalists there was a mole in the brigade and that the mole was Swiss and "had to be got rid of", adding that his forces would not kill him but that they would be killed by Serbians in an ambush.
The journalists tried to warn Wurtenberg but found he had already been placed under arrest. Desperate, they travelled to Osijek only to be met by Flores who told them with a grin "By the way, we've got a loss - Christian. The Swiss problem has been sorted out."
The "sorting out" was brutal. According to teh autopsy at the Osijek hospital, Christian Wurtenberg "was killed on 6 January 1992 as a result of mechanical action with a blunt weapon and later strangulation with hands and rope".
Flores claimed later that Wurtenberg was murdered by "Chetniks" (Serbs) but in fact strangling is almost unknown among them. Prisoners simply have their throats cut.
Wurtenberg's computer went missing and his diary was returned to his family with vital pages ripped out, while the Croatian media launched a cover up of the cause of his death. When it leaked out some days later, alarm spread among the foreign journalists working in Zagreb.
On 13 January, Paul Jenks and a colleaugue Hassan Amini, visited the International brigade to ask questions about what had happened to Wurtenberg. The man they met was Stephen "Frenchie" Hannock who, in response to Jenk's persistent questions said "who knows ... who cares. I dont, for one and I know a lot more than you."
Flores was due to arrive so "Frenchie" asked the 2 photographers to leave. Nevertheless, Flores learned of thier presence and later went to the Osijek press centre to give them "his version" of the events surrounding Wurtenberg's murder.
He never met them, but four days later Paul Jenks was shot through the head at the front line in Briest, near Osijek. Officially he was killed by a Serbian sniper hidden some 900 metres away in the Serbian held village of Tenski-Antunovac, but the positions of Flores' International Brigade were much closer. The indications are that the range was far shorter than 900 metres and there are suggestions that the bullet did not enter his heead from the direction of the sniper.
A mere two days later after Jenks killing, Flores was on the telephone again to give "his version", telling Julio Alonso in Spain: "It is not very convenient being a journalist." Strong suspicions now exist about the roles of both the sinister Flores and "Frenchie" in the deaths of the two journalists.
Like the dirty war being fought by Flores and other rightist killer gangs in Croatia, the truth about the murder of Wurtenber and Jenks has been covered up.
What they discovered about the sources of funds, the role of Opus Dei, the involvement of extreme rightists and the weapons and drugs rackets may never be known. Flores and "Frenchie" have ensured that.
ANOTHER INTERNATIONAL BRIGADE
Flores's International brigade is not the only band of "soldiers of
fortune"
that has ensconced itself in Croatia. In Vukovar, just up the road from
Flores' detachment, is another calling itself the Black Legion.
At the head of the race to tout support for this "volunteer" group is the US-based nazi NSDAP-AO led by Gary Rex Lauek. Succesive editions of Lauek's broadsheet New Order have boasted of the presence of hardline nazis in Croatia.
In the March 1992 edition, Lauek, who functions as a leg man for the German neo nazi Bewegung, carried an urgent appeal under the title "Crroatia needs help".
The appeal sets out the international neo-nazi agenda clearly: "Many Croatians stand on the side of White Europe and also on the side of the Nationalist New Order on this continent."
Lauek pitches his appeal historically, praising the wartime Nazi collaborationist butchers of the Croatian Ustashi, who slaughtered more than a million Jews and Serbs. He lauds especially their role as cogs in Hitler's Waffen-SS killing machine.
However, the kind of help that Lauek alls for only becomes clear in later editoins. In an article in the July-August edition, a US nazi relates how the NSDAP-AO recieves letters from German nazi volunteers in Croatia who, according to the published letter, "belonge to an independent unit".
This information has recieved limited confirmation fron the German government which, in a written parliamentary reply to Bundestag member Ulla Jelpke, dated 14 April, stated that "around 30 German citizens are active as advisers to the Croatian National Guard."
Remarkably, however, this same parliamentary anser, from Foreign Office State minister Helmut Schafer, claims bizzarely for example that the German government has "no knowledge" either of former soilders of the East German army fighting on the side of Croatia or of illegal weapons being delivered from Germany.
Yet this flies in the face of evidence, presented before Schafer's reply by the German Interior Ministry, confirming esistence of the Black Legion and saying that this troop was under the comand of a former East German officer.
The interior Ministry also stated unambiguously that the German security services were aware that not only German but also other European nazis were making frequent visits to Croatia and that there were plans afoot to establish a "first aid corps" which had temporarily been short circuited by the preventive detention of top Nazi Gottfried Kussel in Vienna.
In fact, a 50 strong elite troop of German and Austrian nazi volunteers was due to depart on 14 January , but Kussel's arrest a few days earlier halted the operation.
Since then, reports the erman magazine Stern, the job has been taken over by the Hamburg based Nationale Liste, led by the nazi leadership contender Christian Worch, a contact of David Irving, and the Munich based National Block whose Fuhrer is Manfred Eichner.
Both these groups are part of the nazi Bewegung, of which Eichner is the "regional leader-South" as well as being one of the commanders of the Begwegung's illegal paramilitary SA.
Also in on the act is the criminal nazi Ewald Althans, Worch's deadly rival in the battle to replace Kussel. While Worsch assists in supervisng the would be recruits, Althans has set himself the role of find raiser both to finance his leadership contest and to help publicize the neo nazi involvement in Croatia.
Althans issued a press realease in May touting "spectacular action photos for sale". The photos on offer, more than 100 in all, "document neo nazi volunteers fighting in Yugoslavia on behalf of Croatian forces as well as neo nazo involvement in Iraq."
Althans asking price is $5000 and he further offers contacts with the neo nazis involved as well as video footage. Althans fund raising stunt is clearly part of an interantional drive: the contact telephone and fax numbers on teh press release belong to the toronto based Auschwitz liar and criminal Ernst Zundel, with whom Althans was residing in May and June.
As reported earlier in Searchlight, Croatia has become the focal point for fascists internationally. Reports are being recieved about attempts to recruit US nazis for military action and French fascists have also been engaged with the Black Legion.
Notable among them is the French nazi FNE member Micheal Faci, who boasted, to reporters that he was in charge of about 200 fascists including Austrians and Germans and more plausibly, that he himself killed two Serbs.
It is significant that, despite efforts to keep a safe distance from their more violent brethren, exponents of ballot box fascism have also saught to show their backing for the Croatian war against Yugoslavia.
As already explained, jean-marie Le Pen;s Front National (FN) has sent volunteers to Croatia according to Spanish sources. In the summer of 1991, Le Pen and the German Fascist MEP Harald Neubauer made a secret trip to Zagreb for talks with senior advisers to the Croatian leader Franjo Tudjman.
Neubauer- true to hos nazi beliefs- declared "We are not the last of yesterday, but the first of tomorrow," while Tudjman's henchman, Hrvoje Sosic, defended the fascists visit with the statement that "negative attitudes to le Pen and his party are Bolshevik slanders."
Where Le Pen led, Belgian Vlaams Blok Fascist Filip Dewinter followed in January, visiting the Armed Croatian Forces (HOS) militia and announcing that "politically they are very close to us". Some of these visits were arranged with the help of British right wing Tories.
The evidence of fascist links with th government and militias in Croatia is overwhelming. Yet there has been little publicity and even less official investigation in the European Community from which most of the free boters >come.
A blind eye, it appears, is being turned to murder.
GERMANY-PLAYING FOR HIGH STAKES
IF there has been no activity by the police and security services in the
European Community to prevent the recruitment of mercenaries for Tudjman,
this has been more than compensated for with a campaign of gigantic
proportions against the Yugoslav federal government.
Closer examination of the EC's slavish backing - it does not even pretend to be even handed- for any faction that wants to give the break up of Yugoslavia a helping hand shows clearly that the general policy is being determined by the new, reunified and increasingly powerful Germany.
The Kohl government's support firstly for Slovenia and more recently for Croatia has been a startling replica, in broad terms , of the stance taken in the Balkans both by the Kaiser's regime and later by Hitler's nazi dictatotrship.
The German government policy which engineered ructions in Slovenia and then steamrolled the EC into giving the brak away province international recognition was repeated in Croatia's case during a meeting of EC foreign ministers in the Hague last november, when the liberal Foreign Minister hans Detrich Genscher peremptorily announced German plans to recognise the Tudjman regime.
The German declaration set the seal on any last surviving chance of preserving the Yugoslav state, even though at that stage the USA, France and britain hoped this could be achieved.
The regime which Genscher was so keen to recognise has an unbroken line of continuity from the Ustashi murderers of Ante Panelic during the second world war.
Its leader, Franjo Tudjman, is a hardline antsemite, proud that his wife is neither Jewish nor Serbian. Tudjman has open links with Le Pen's Front National in France and has written a book Wastelands-Historical Truths, defending Hitler.
such niceties mean little in Bonn and the tactic that pushed the EC into following Germany;s line with recognition of Tudjman on 15 january and drove the usa into reversing its earlier pro-yugoslav unity policy is now forcefully underway in Bosnia Herzegovina.
Revived german imperialism wants nothing less than the complete destruction of Yugoslavia in order to extend its influence and control over the entire Balkans region. hindered from direct intervention by its constitution, Germany is using the EC which it now dominates, as a Trojan Horse to project its own interests.
An editorial in the right=wing conservative Welt am Sonntag on 6 October spelled this out by branding the actions of the Yugoslav government as a campaign "against Western Civilisation", calling for military intervention by the EC and emphasising that failure to act militarily would render the EC a "paper tiger".
The intervention did not materialise but German policy got its way at the price of 14,000 dead, 250,000 refuggees and 1.2 million homeless.
Not content with this, in recent months political shifts in Bonn have denoted new flexing of muscles. Genscher has gone -too soft. The man who represented German strength in the postwar order and the age of treaties has been replaced by Klaus Kinkel, one of the new breed of nationalists around Kohl who want a more interventionist foriegn policy.
They are working hard to get it. The spearhead of the effort is the bid to weaken NATO - which was established originally to keep Germany under control - by taking US military forces out of European reckoning. The means to this end is the formation of the 40,000 strong so called European Corps. Composed of French and German units, it is to become operational on 1 Oct. 1995.
The aims of the Corps are supposedly to defend the western European allies and to take part in humanitarean and peace-keeping actions. It is envisaged that the Corps will come under the umbrella of the Western European Union, formally the "European pillar" of NATO.
Now all that is in the balance, with US officials expressing misgivings that Europe will be locked into a German defense structure and not the other way around. Standing by and watching this has been the NATO general secretary Manfred Worner, who does not oppose the concept of a European army.
In fact he takes a contrary view. In 1974 Worner addressed the concept's first incarnation: veterens of the Waffen-SS at a meeting in Stuttgart to discuss long term German security.
Behind all the official arguments about future European defence arrangements is an unspoken fear of the regenerated German militarism and dominance.
As James Rollo of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London puts it; "What we see, some among us with a shudder, is Germany taking the helm in Europe." Economically and politically, Germany already has the helm. The big questions in the future will be the military ones. The french government hopes to contain Germany (while targetting its short range missles on it) through the joint force and the WEU. Britain and the USA want to pin down Germany through a continuing NATO presence. Germany, meanwhile, plays both ends against the middle by claiming to stand both.
Francois Heisbourg, director of the International Institute of Strategic Studies, suggested in may that the German government might see the Franco-German corps as a way of changing the German constitution to permit deployments outside the NATO area.
Such steps are already well under way, shored up by the mushrooming aggressive nationalism that Kohl's government has done so much to foster.
The German government and military are actively discussing plans to change the character of the German armed forces. The German Defence Ministry policy documents of 20 january this year spells out that the new aims of the Bundeswehr in protecting German interests will be "prevention, limitation and termination of every kind of conflict which could harm the integrity and stability of Germany."
At the conference of Bundeswehr commanding officers, held in Liepzig from 12 to 14 may under the motto "Change and Awakening - the Bundeswehr. Troops of Unity.", Defence Minister Volker Ruhe reassured 400 officers that their future was guarenteed and told them that Bonn had earmarked more than 100 million pounds to improve the Bundeswehr infrastructure in the former East Germany.
He also told them that "while there is no popular supprt for German military action outside the United Nations framework, in the long run this is possible."
At the same conference, Bundeswehr chief Klaus Naumann told his audience"We have nothing to hide." In fact Naumann was alarmingly frank in mapping out the future. German soilders shoud be prepared for operations outside germany, which were "no longer a distant option" but could occur at any moment.
he went on to say that officers had a duty to the troops to prepare them for the extremes of physical and psychological stresses associated with such military actions.
Similar sentiments were expressed at a gathering of more than 1200 officer cadets up to the rank of Leutenant in Hanover on 28 May, by the Inspector General of the ARmy, LT general Helge Hansen, who emphasized that "the German army is not being demolished. Quite the contrary." Echoing the message delivered in Liepzig by Naumann, he went on to say"if the defense of Germany needed to take place outside Germany, courageous officers would be required".
"At the front, and fighting man to man, the new officers would have to face new tasks under changed conditions to help Germany's Defence, Alliance making and political capacities".
Coupled with the burgeoning militarism, which at presentis concentrated on changing public opinion and preparing the armed forces psychologically, there is hieghtened activity by the federal German intelligence Services.
In addition to smearing anti fascists inside Germany, the intelligence service is, according to well placed former NATO intelligence sourcfes, busy establishing itself in countries of the former Eastern Bloc, especially those with German minorities.
The cover for this intelloigence penetration is the network of German cultural centers that is being set up. "the object" a Searchlight source said" is to create conditions of destabilization to lay the ground for future intervention. "
In the light of the intensified Sudeten-German clamour surrounding the German - Czech treaty and its rejection by top right wing conservatives liek the german Finance Minister Theo Waigel, wwho on 6 June branded the wording of the treaty as a "provacation against germany", this assesment is not far fetched.
Voices of the protest agianst the new imperialist "great power" politics of Germany are being heard. For example, the Roman Catholic peace movement Pax Christ has labelled the new armed forces plans as a "security risk" and "a new stage in the militarisation of society."
Similarly, the former Admiral of the German Fleet, Elmar Schmaling, publically accused Naumann and the Defence Ministry of preparing aggression.
Drawing attention to a Defence Ministry document describing "the pressure of immigratioin by impoverished masses" as a threat to Europe. Schmaling demanded to know from Naumann "wether these masses would be liquidated by Bundeswehr soldiers on the spot...before they could storm the European paradise."
Many Germans have real fears that, now that the USSR has gone, the whole postwar order has been shattered. With Germany once more unified, they fear that there are no more restraints on its ascent to superpower status and that the long term outcome will be a new war or at the very least military intervention to regain "lost territoreies" like Silesia and East Prussia, as the result of provocations.
This is no exageration, jan Parys, the Polish Defence Minister, expressed concern about future German policy to a meeting of the Minitry;s Defence Council and a leaked report by the Polish intelligence service warned that Germany "cannot be trusted" and stated that " its intentions are not known".
That was in February. Now the intentions of German revanchism are
becoming
clear enough to be seen by anybody who bothers to look.
(Searchlight extends its thanks to friends in Spain for their vital efforts
in researching this material)