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LEAKED details from an unpublished United Nations report confirm the role of
Willem ``Ters'' Ehlers - former president PW Botha's last private secretary - in
the arms build-up in war-racked Central Africa.
The recently completed third report of the UN commission investigating
embargo-busting arms sales to Rwanda's defeated Hutu forces contains an
admission by Ehlers that he was involved in a June 1994 arms consignment from
the Seychelles to Goma, a Zairean provincial capital bordering Rwanda.
But Ehlers told the commission he had been under the impression the 80 tons of
rifles, grenades and ammunition, worth well over R1- million, was destined for
the Zairean armed forces, which would not have contravened the UN embargo.
The Washington-based Human Rights Watch Arms Project, whose earlier revelations
of the illicit arms flow to the region sparked the UN inquiry, this week called
on the UN to release the report publicly. Said Arms Project director Joost
Hiltermann: ``Suppressing this essential report on the role of arms trafficking
in Central Africa at exactly the moment when the region is going up in flames
suggests that the Security Council is less interested in promoting
international security than it is in covering its own failures.''
The organisation said the unpublished UN report, dated October 28, concludes
that ``arms have continued to flow from or through South Africa, Angola, Eastern
Europe and the former Yugoslavia, and Kinshasa, Zaire''. The Arms Project said
the international community had ``enlarged'' the ongoing conflict and
humanitarian crisis in the region by ``supplying arms to, or failing to impede
the rearming of, the perpetrators of the 1994 [Rwanda] genocide''.
Exerpts of the UN report obtained by the Mail and Guardian repeat the finding
that Ehlers, once seen as a likely future chief of the South African Navy but
seconded to Botha's office until Botha retired in 1989, was a broker in the
arms consignment which appears to have ended up with the defeated Rwandan Hutu
forces when they fled to Goma and other parts of eastern Zaire in mid-1994.
These forces have been held responsible for the massacre of up to a million
Rwandan Tutsis and Hutu moderates in the first half of 1994, and have again
been central to the latest conflict in Eastern Zaire, where Goma has been a
flashpoint.
The report says the UN commission interviewed Ehlers in Pretoria in September,
where he corroborated earlier evidence gathered by the commission. But he told
the commission he had believed the client had been the Zairean government, as
the client's representatives had been two Zaireans. The report pointed out,
however, that the one, Jean-Bosco Ruhorahoza, described himself first as
Rwandan, and later as Zairean, in Seychelles immigration papers. It also
pointed out that another member of the party which inspected the arms in the
Seychelles with Ehlers before it was flown to Goma was Rwandan Colonel
Theoneste Bagasore, who has since been arrested in Cameroon in connection with
his alleged role in the genocide. Bagasora pretended in some documentation to
be a Zairean functionary.
The commission's second report, published in March 1996, appeared critical of
the South African government for initially not having replied to requests for
information on Ehlers and other apparent violations of the embargo implicating
South Africa. But the latest report says the commission's ``various
interlocutors'' had told it that South Africa's arms industry was ``being brought
under increasing government control. However, individuals who had been involved
in the arms trade or the armed forces during the apartheid era were still
active in an individual capacity or in private industry.''
