Reports since the Zimbabwe independence elections indicate that mercenaries who were fighting with the Smith regime's security forces are now moving to South Africa and Namibia. In a report from Salisbury, a Mozambican correspondent said that hundreds of mercenaries, most of them South Africans and Americans with others from Western European countries had already crossed the border into South Africa and would be sent on to Namibia to join Jonas Savimbi's UNITA forces. The UNITA rebels operate in Angola out of bases in northern Namibia, as an extension of the South African Defence Force.
The all-white Rhodesian Light Infantry and Special Air Service, and the racially mixed Selous Scouts, are all believed to have contained substantial numbers of foreign mercenaries. Mercenaries were also employed in Rhodesia on private farms and by commercial firms. In Namibia, mercenaries are known to have been active for some time, mainly as private security guards on farms and factories.
According to SWAPO Secretary of Defence, Mr. Peter Nanyemba, A Special Unit made up of mercenary and criminal elements from Namibia, Angola, South Africa and Rhodesia, including former members of the Selous Scouts, is being trained at Benoni in South Africa, and is being armed with the same weapons and dressed with same uniforms as guerillas of SWAPO's People's Liberation Army.
It was recently revealed that in January 1980 a Belgian mercenary employed in Namibia by the state-owned electricity corporation SWAWEK, had carried out a raid on the Ruacana hydroelectric scheme in southern Angola, together with 11 others.
Mr Jacques Migeotte, a former French Foreign Legion paratrooper, said that he and his "friends" had carried out the raid as a "patriotic deed" to restore electricity supplies to Windhoek and other parts of Namibia. The men, who included the Site Manager at Ruacana, two soldiers and eight Ruacana workmen - six of them white Angolans - had flown across the northern Namibian border in a SWAWEK helicopter and jammed the sluice gates at a dam 1½ km inside Angola. Enough water had been diverted down a pressure canal to turn the power generator turbines at the Ruacana power station. Mr Migeotte said that the raid had been carried out without the official sanction or backing of the South African authorities.
Since Angola's independence, the Angolan government has refused to close the sluice gates on the Kunene River, thus preventing the illegal South African administration in Namibia from operating the Ruacana hydroelectric scheme at full capacity. For six to eight months of the year, during the dry season, Namibia receives its electricity from coal-fired power stations in Windhoek and Walvis Bay.
