British firms pulling strings.

As Britain proposes to increase its military presence in Sierra Leone to brigade strength (5,000 troops), a new report in the London-based Punch magazine has said "duplicitous dealings involving a tangle of British companies, suggest that Sierra Leone's civil war is really an ugly scramble for mineral wealth, with international mining conglomerates pulling all the strings, despite the pious words about Britain's 'ethical' foreign policy".

In September, Britain mounted a daring raid in Sierra Leone to rescue its soldiers taken hostage by the rebel West Side Boys who had only in June benefited from Britain's military largesse of weapons and other materiel. One British soldier and 25 rebels died in the raid.

But the Punch report, published in its 4-17 October issue, says: "Amid [the] breathless coverage of the [raid], complete with maps of West African swamps, one of the key facts about Sierra Leone was lost: namely, that the country is teeming with mercenaries. Many blame the country's woes on the ubiquitous presence of the mercenaries, who even now are working alongside the [British] Ministry of Defence, which is re-training and re-arming the Sierra Leone national army."

The report, written by Pete Sawyer who has just returned from Sierra Leone with a TV crew, continued: "Now new evidence seen by Punch suggests that, three years ago, business interest may have exacerbated the civil war in the relentless drive to control Sierra Leone's diamond resources, by providing support to both sides in the conflict."

The report names one British company and two associate companies (run from the same office in Chelsea, London) who were at the centre of two recent British parliamentary investigations. The boss of the parent company had told the parliamentary investigators that: "Everything that my company did, we did in good faith and we did believing that what we were doing, was in the best interests of President Kabbah and his government."

But documents seen by Punch show that while the parent company "was planning its operation to reinstate President Kabbah, two associate companies -- a commercial security company a mining outfit -- were providing weapons to the rebels.

"The rebel aid was arranged to allow a valuable diamond mining concession [at Koidu] to stay in operation. We can show that a former British intelligence operative, a key source for both the Foreign & Commonwealth and the Ministry of Defence, was aware of, and sanctioned at least some of, the aid."

The Koidu concession had an estimated $1.5 billion worth of diamonds in the ground and was a prime target for the rebels. "Yet for eight months, following the [AFRC coup that overthrew Kabbah in 1997], the concession was left alone."

The reason is that, according to Punch, the British company that held the concession rights had "provided [pound]160,000 worth of assistance to the AFRC between May 1997 and February 1998]."

Johan van Zyl, a South African, and a former employee of the company, was directly involved in the duplicitous operation. After he was sacked "without warning" in October 1988, he threatened to spill the beans. But he was killed in mysterious circumstances in his native South Africa in November 1999.

Documents left behind by van Zyl, and seen by Punch, show that in July 1997, the British company had "supplied a 40-foot long container of ammunition to the AFRC rebel junta" at the same time as the parent company had been contracted by Kabbah's government to remove the AFRC from power.

The parent company yet "continued to provide an MI-17 helicopter and aircrew to the Sierra Leone government for 'operational tasking'. The fee was US$2,000 per hour, excluding fuel costs." Today, according to TV footage shot by the Punch and seen by New African, the helicopter and its mercenary crew are still flying and "fighting the rebels" even as the British soldiers continue to train the Sierra Leone national army, and the British government plans to increase its troop strength to 5,000 in the country.