The story of a West German 'mercenary' Rolf Steiner, who was the first 'mercenary' tried in Africa, Sudan 1971

 

The story of West German 'mercenary' Rolf Steiner, who was the first 'mercenary' tried in Africa, Sudan 1971

تدور النقاشات حالِيًّا حول مجموعة مرتزقة واغنر السوفيتية وانخراطها في إفريقيا. هذا صحيح بشكل خاص في السودان وجمهورية أفريقيا الوسطى وليبيا ومالي. لكن المرتزقة كانو منتشرون في أفريقيا منذ الستينيات. هذه هي قصة "المرتزق" الألماني الغربي رولف شتاينر ، الذي كان أول "مرتزق" يُحاكم في إفريقيا. وجرت المحاكمة في الخرطوم بالسودان عام 1971

Steiner on trial in Khartoum

Today, discussions are about the Soviet Wagner Mercenary Group and its African involvement. This is particularly true in Sudan, CAR, Libya, and Mali. But mercenaries have been common in Africa since the 1960s. This is the story of West German 'mercenary' Rolf Steiner, who was the first 'mercenary' tried in Africa. The trial took place in Khartoum, Sudan, in 1971. The story came to mind when I attended a regular Zoom meeting in Sudan on June 28, 2023, at Roman Deckert's invitation. Prof. Richard Lobban delivered a fascinating presentation on the Wagner group, particularly on Africa and Sudan. Prof. Fluehr-Lobban mentioned the trial, and it had the full transcript. Richard and Fluehr-Lobban attended the Khartoum trial as young journalists. At the end of the presentation, it crossed my mind that Richard Lobban, a freelance journalist, had walked 500 km and stayed for two weeks in the field with the Eritrean Liberation Front in 1972, which he wrote in an article I enjoyed reading. So I contacted them. The couple shared their experiences graciously. Their daughter Nicki did the great work of digitalizing the transcript. Fluehr-Lobban kindly shared with me trial documents, which I am sharing today.

Rolf Steiner was a professional 'soldier of fortune', born in Munich, Bavaria, on January 3, 1933. He participated in the Biafran Army during the Nigerian Civil War and later served with the Anyanya rebels in southern Sudan. Before that, he served in the French Foreign Legion in Vietnam and in Algeria.  He spent three years in prison and was eventually sentenced to death by the Sudanese courts, which was commuted to twenty years on "humanitarian" grounds. It was only through pressure from the West German government that he was finally released from prison and sent home on 31^st March 1974.

The doc can be downloaded below:

https://www.mediafire.com/file/60hlh2aix9y53yc/Consolidated+doc+on+mercenary+Rolf+Steiner.pdf/file

This document about the trial of West German Mercenary Rolf Steiner in Sudan 1971 contains three Parts*:

11. 1. Extract from a statement by H.E. Farouk Abu Eissa. Sudan Foreign Minister at a Press Conference, following the arrest of West German mercenary Rolf Steiner at Press Conference 18 January 1971 attended by the O.A.U. Secretary General H.E. Diallo Telli.

 2.     In the Twilight Zone between Kampala, Khartoum, and Cologne: New Findings on the Steiner-Affair by Roman Deckert

 3.   BOOK PROSPECTUS: MERCENARIES IN COLONIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL AFRICA: SELECTED CASES &THE TRIAL OF ROLF STEINER IN SUDAN, 1971  (including a complete official text of the original trial, with analysis and commentary by:  Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, Richard Lobban,  and Scopas Poggo

 Excerpts: 

Addressing the General Court Martial and the Judge Advocate, on Thursday August 5^th. 1971, the leader of the Prosecution, Sayed Khalafalla El Rashid said:-

“This is a unique case- it could be the first of its kind in the history of the African Justice. As such it constitutes a serious event in African history- with vital far-reaching consequences to the African continent and developing countries. The mission of your court will be very difficult and at the same time a sensitive one. You will not try the accused who stands before you only- but you are looking into an international crime which plagued the Third World, disturbed its life and endangered its achievements.”

The activities of the mercenaries led the African Heads of State and government to meet in Kinshasa (11^th-14^th Sept. 67). They passed a resolution condemning the mercenaries and demanded their evacuation from Congo. The African leaders requested the United Nations to interfere to uproot the mercenaries' criminal activities. The resolution called upon all other states to issue legislation to ban the movements of mercenaries.

The Security Council, on the other hand, has already taken two resolutions on the question of mercenaries. The first Resolution (Res. 226 1966) was taken on 14^th October 1966. This Resolution, based on the statement by the representatives of the Democratic Republic of Congo that Angola was being used as a base of operation for foreign mercenaries against the Congo, urged Portugal not to allow foreign mercenaries to use Angola as a base of operations and called upon all states to refrain from interference in the domestic affairs of the Congo.

The second Resolution (Res. 239 1967) of 10^th July 1967 condemned any state which persisted in permitting or tolerating the recruitment of mercenaries and providing facilities for them. This resolution was based on a complaint from the Congo that mercenaries were being used despite the previous Security Council resolution and appeals.

The third Resolution by the Security Council was Resolution 241 (1967) taken in November 1967. In this resolution, Portugal was condemned for not abiding by the two previous resolutions.

In the meantime, the Organization of African Unity was actively engaged in finding ways to implement its resolution of September 1967 and the evacuation of mercenaries from Rwanda, where they had fled after the defeat in the Congo. A committee of ten states (Ethiopia, Congo, (Kinshasa) Central African Republic, Congo (Brazzaville), Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Zambia, and Sudan, had been elected in the meeting to find ways and means to solve the problem of the mercenaries. Sudan was made chairman of the committee.

This committee reached a resolution that the mercenaries should go back home on condition that they would never return to Africa. Their respective governments promised not to allow them to return to Africa once more. As a result of this decision, the mercenaries (118) were repatriated- they belonged to different nationalities in the following order: - 54 Belgians, 29 French, 16 Italians and the rest were Israelis, Portuguese, South Africans, Greeks, British, West Germans, Spanish, Swiss and Rhodesians.

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A Disclaimer by Roman Deckert

 Roman Deckert mentioned that he met and interviewed Steiner a few times and he was always very, VERY adamant that he was not a mercenary in what was then Southern Sudan, arguing that by its very definition a mercenary is fighting for money. To complicate matters further, he actually used to be a mercenary when he was in France's foreign legion, but in fact Roman did very thorough archival research in Germany (in the archives of the German Federal Foreign Office, the Stasi files and other  government records), the National Archives of the US and the UK, in Montreal in the private archives of Prof. Storrs McCall who was at Makerere at the time and collected many documents on the Southern Sudanese Anyanya and Anjidi rebels, He  got a comprehensive Steiner-related correspondence between then MI6-agenst Anthony Divall and Beverly Barnard and interviewed many contemporary witnesses and he states he  could actually never find any implication - let alone evidence - that Steiner received a salary for his activities in Southern Sudan. No doubt he got some of his expenses paid for by conservative Christian circles who were pro-Southern Sudan activists, but that surely does not qualify as a mercenary's salary. The lack of proof is obviously no guarantee for his innocence in that regard.

Roman states that Steiner was connected to Western intelligence agencies, first and foremost the French service. There were  also strong indications that the West German BND was very interested in getting info through him from the inaccessible areas of Southern Sudan at a time when Numeri had helped East Germany to achieve international recognition. There are also strong hints at CIA involvement and after all it was the MI6 agents Divall and Barnard who facilitated his first trip, before they turned vehemently against him. Despite all of this, again there are no strong enough signs that he acted as a paid intel operative, but rather as a person of interest for intel agencies to skim off info from him, especially since he again and again proved to be very stubborn-minded and hard to steer for any puppet-master. 

Roman added that Steiner always argued that he went to Southern Sudan as an idealist to support the underdogs of a suppressed minority but one strong indication in his favour may be that he refused to take a low profile on this political issue during the trial despite the pleas of his lawyer Salim Issa whom Roman interviewed in 2000.

Roman indicated that a decade ago he  was approached by a reporter from Germany's Sunday paper Welt am Sonntag. Though it is published by the right wing Springer publishing company (not the academic one but the one that also published Europe most-circulated tabloid, the horrible BILD) Roman  was very positively surprised that he went to great lengths to do a very thorough research. Unfortunately the 6-full-pages-long-read reportage is behind a paywall but even the main headline includes his claim that he was not a mercenary: https://www.welt.de/geschichte/plus246065626/Rolf-Steiner-Ich-bin-kein-Soeldner-ich-bin-Legionaer.html

In the above  and other documents Steiner claimed that he had a difficult childhood during the Nazi-regime because of an alleged Jewish background of his father and that he had some traumatising encounters while passing by the concentration camp of Dachau which all made him loathe Germany, wherefore he joined the Foreign Legion. Roman  cannot vouch for the truthfulness of those claims, but thinks that one has to take them seriously. Roman further added that while he did play a terrible role as an OAS member in Algeria (I lived in Algiers for a year and have no sympathies for him on that front, because he never really renounced it). Roman  could never find any Nazi tendencies despite the best efforts of East German propagandists to attribute that kind of stuff to him.  

 

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