SEVEN HUNDRED South Africans serving in Britain’s Armed Forces will have to abandon their careers or surrender their citizenship under draconian new anti-mercenary legislation being enacted by South Africa’s Parliament.

The new Bill, designed to scotch South Africa’s reputation as a rich recruiting ground for “dogs of war”, was approved by 11 votes to one by the Parliament’s defence committee this week despite an impassioned appeal from Paul Boateng, the British High Commissioner.

If the Bill is approved by the full assembly, as now seems probable, it will end a tradition of South Africans serving with the British military that goes back to the First World War, and leave Britain’s Armed Forces overstretched.

Many of the 700 are serving with British forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Second Lieutenant Ralph Johnson, 24, one of the three British soldiers killed in Afghanistan this week, was born in South Africa. Sholto Hedenskog, 25, a Marine killed in Iraq in 2003, was also South African. It was the activities of a former British soldier, Simon Mann, that inspired the Bill. In 2004 Mann, a former SAS officer, began an unsuccessful coup against President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasago of Equatorial Guinea using 70 mercenaries recruited in South Africa. He is now in prison and Sir Mark Thatcher, the son of the former British Prime Minister, was fined £265,000 for helping to finance the attempted coup.

The legislation, which will greatly strengthen South Africa’s previous anti-mercenary laws, is driven by politics as much as security.

The ruling African National Congress, which came to power in 1994 after decades of apartheid rule, fought in exile alongside Angola’s former Marxist army against such apartheid-era forces as the Buffalo Battalion, the Reconnaissance Commandos and the Parachute Brigade.

It is from such units that many South African fighters serving abroad have since been recruited. Many were subsequently recruited by the Angolan Government to hunt down and kill the rebel leader Jonas Savimbi, in cooperation with Israeli special forces. Britain’s Armed Forces welcomed South Africans from the mercenary company Executive Outcomes, who with just a few hundred men and a few helicopters helped in the defeat of the Revolutionary United Front rebels in Sierra Leone.

When the Bill was introduced late last year Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, South Africa’s Foreign Minister, said: “We don’t like the idea of South Africa becoming a cesspool of mercenaries.”

On Thursday Mr Boateng made an unprecedented appearance before the defence committee to argue that South Africans serving in the British military should be exempted.

He said that passage of the Bill would damage Britain’s co-operation with South Africa on defence issues, but his appeal was rejected.

One ANC MP, Somangamane Ntuli, told Mr Boateng that the specialised training South Africans received in Britain’s Armed Forces could “be used in a dirty manner” . . . How or where they used their skills had to be regulated.

A South African journalist who attended the hearing said he was “astonished at the short shrift that the High Commissioner was given by committee members. Unless some kind of extraordinary pressure can be brought to bear on Defence Minister Mosiuoa Lekota, the defence committee’s decision will stand”.

Britain’s Ministry of Defence yesterday sent the 700 South Africans warnings that they may have to return home.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office said that it was making urgent representations to the South African Government in a last-ditch effort to have the Bill amended.

“We don’t think the South African Government is ideologically opposed to their citizens serving in the British Army,” one official said. “It’s just that their legislation aimed at banning mercenaries has drawn us into the dragnet.”

Britain’s Armed Forces have become increasingly dependent on Commonwealth citizens over the past 20 to 30 years, and in the past seven years the number recruited by the Army has risen by 3,000 per cent. The sweeping new legislation will also criminalise between 5,000 and 10,000 South African hired guns serving in various capacities in Iraq.

PAST HEROES

Jan Christian Smuts fought against British forces in the Boer War. Became a British general serving in Africa in the First World War and later joined Lloyd George’s Cabinet. Made Field Marshal during Second World War

Explore World News

• World Agenda

• Iraq News

• US & Americas News

• Europe News

• Middle East News

• Afghanistan News

• Asia News

• Africa News

• Ireland News

Times Recommends

• No apology for Germany’s own Nazi victims
• Intricate web of fear and hope tying down deal
• Victims remembered a year after Mumbai attacks