Angola

By the time this edition of Socialist Republic is published, the trial of “Colonel” Callan and his merry mercenaries will be over: their fates (immediate and for several, at least, ultimate) generally known. Whatever it may se, the way it will have been reached will nave justified itself, For the “EVENING HERALD’ however, Angola has “been too cold-blooded about the affair”. The mercenaries “should have een shot when captured, What is taking place .. Might... create the sort of legend and nyth about bounty hunters that we could 10 without.”

This is contradicted by the facts. Mercenaries have wen going to Africa, and even been killed there ince colonization, although they wore then the uniform of the occupying powers, With ndependence, particularly that of the Congo, hey remained, officially to protect the whites rom the warring armies: unofficially to bend the tick for such pro-imperialists as Moise Tshome, in imperialist countries, the mercenary was sortrayed as defending, somehow, an objective white racial superiority that spineless netropolitan governments had been over-hasty m renouncing. Even the breed's defeat in Angola could have been explained away by eference to Russian arms Revolutionary Justice By puttings its captives on trial, the Angolian government is acting to demystify the situation. Despite being held only months after the end of a civil war, the trial appears to be one of scrupulous fairness as the white legal observers have had to admit, From it there is revealed what was never published before: the psychology of the average mercenary. With Georgiouw-Callan in the dock appear twelve other figures of equal squalidity, All are individuals who have tried to make up for their failures in life, not by working to change the system or, even, by robbing those who profit by it, but by acting as that system's agents in despoiling what they imagined to be inferior races, Callan himself, given pre-trial charisma by interviews with his ex-mistresses, is now denounced by his old British Army comrades, The myth of the mercenary as defender of civilisation will now be less easily reasserted.

There are two other points of particular relevance fo Jreland, Firstly, Angolon justice & dearly superior to what can be expected from the judicial system in either part of Ireland, There is no evidence that the accused have suffered anything like the irregularities that occurred in the niral of Noel and Marie Murray.

Secondly, and, perhaps, more generally important, it is no accident that Callan-Greorgiou himself learnt his trade in the British Army in Northern Ireland nor that the far more sinister recruiter of mercenaries, John Banks, appears to have played the role of agent-provocateur, if not worse, over the recent arrests of Sinn Fein leaders in Luton, A mercenary is one who kills for money, He can still be a mercenary in the service of the State governing his nation, Mercenaries are needed by capitaliem: the freelances are merely logical developments of the answer to the need,