Israeli mercenaries in Cameroon
In November 2018, Eran Moas basked under the Caribbean sun
by an infinity pool stretching towards the horizon. The Israeli citizen was
taking a much-needed break by holidaying in the Bahamas with his wife and
children.
The beachside villa he rented did not come cheap at a cool
$20,000 a day, but this expense was of little concern to Moas. His personal
portfolio of properties includes a New York flat worth over $20 million, which
he bought without a loan, and a Los Angeles villa worth over $12 million. His
usual place of residence is a massive mansion in Cameroon’s capital of Yaoundé
where he reportedly travels around in a bullet-proof car escorted by a team of
bodyguards.
Moas enjoys this lifestyle thanks to his long-standing job
with the Rapid Intervention Battalion (BIR), an elite unit of the Cameroonian
army, as well as business ventures with the Cameroonian government. The BIR
operates under the direct orders of President Paul Biya, who has been in power
for 37 years. The Cameroonian battalion is known for the arduous training
regime its soldiers go through and their access to superior weaponry.
The BIR is also notorious for its ruthlessness. Human rights
organisations have documented extensive torture and arbitrary killings by the
unit. One of its former soldiers told African Arguments that he personally
witnessed two mass executions in the north of Cameroon in which a group of
about ten victims were forced to dig their own graves, then told to lie in them
before being shot dead.
The BIR’s actions have received particular attention since
the Anglophone conflict began in 2016. In this uneven fight between government
forces and poorly armed separatists, the unit has faced multiple accusations of
burning villages, raping women, conducting extrajudicial killings and torture.
These abuses prompted the US to cut some of its long-standing military aid to
Cameroon in February 2019 and have been strongly condemned by the UN, European
Union and others.
“The BIR is sort of Mr Biya’s private army because they are
not answerable to the regular army chain of command,” explains Kah Walla, an
opposition politician in Cameroon. “You have a dictatorial president, who has
shown himself to be repressive [and] then created a private armed force. And,
of course, this has increased the level of repression.”
Moas is not the only Israeli contractor to provide services
to the BIR. An investigation by African Arguments examined long-standing ties
between certain Israeli citizens and President Biya’s elite forces. These links
stretch from the 1980s up to today when the likes of Moas profit substantially
from the relationship. The investigation found no evidence of direct links
between these individuals and human rights violations.
A lavish lifestyle
Working with the BIR is a lucrative venture. The unit is
well-funded and widely believed to be financed through an “off-budget” account
of Cameroon’s national oil company. As such, its revenue could come indirectly
from oil companies drilling in Cameroon. This includes several British firms
such as one that struck a natural gas deal in 2018 worth £1.5 billion ($1.9
billion).
Israelis are involved in the training, command and supply of
weapons to the BIR, although the corporate structures through which they
operate are opaque. New soldiers are recruited for the unit every few years and
are trained in batches of one to two thousand. After graduating, soldiers have
been given Israeli-made assault rifles. One former BIR recruit, who graduated
in 2015, says that about a hundred Israeli trainers spent three months in
Cameroon training his cohort. The recruit says they told him they were each
paid around $1,000 a day.
The arrangement appears to be all the more profitable for
those at the top. Our investigation reveals that Moas has bought at least $32
million dollars-worth of property in New York, Los Angeles, Haifa and Yaoundé,
much of it without a mortgage. He also lives a lavish lifestyle. He bought
three $5,000 tickets to watch the Mayweather Jr. vs Pacquiao fight in May 2015
and his wife has been seen wearing a $60,000 diamond-encrusted Rolex.
Moas’ known real estate investments began in 2010 with the
$1.6 million purchase of a Los Angeles villa with a pool, stunning views of the
city and in-house cinema. He sold it for $2.7 million in 2014. In July 2015, he
bought a flat in New York on the 49th floor of a glass skyscraper on Billionaires’
Row. It was purchased for $20 million through a shell company. This way of
buying the property was likely intended to keep the purchase secret, but Moas’
name shows up on the firm’s tax filings which African Arguments obtained
through a freedom of information request.
The following year, Moas bought a $12 million villa in
Hidden Hills, an exclusive gated community in Los Angeles, according to
Dirt.com (the article has since been removed). This property was also purchased
through a shell company, whose address is listed as ”c/o Kohli & Partner”,
a law firm based in Switzerland that was revealed in the Paradise Papers to
represent various dubious clients.
None of this seems to have made much of a dent in the
family’s budget. Later that year, they stayed in a villa at the Four Seasons
Bahamas Ocean Club, costing around $20,000 per night. They returned the
following year.
More recently, Moas’ ambitions seem to have gone beyond his
job with the BIR. In April 2018, a mysterious company called Portsec SA
obtained a $43 million contract to build security infrastructure around
Cameroon’s port of Douala. The company is registered in Panama, a secrecy
jurisdiction, and no owners are listed on its website, but two sources we
talked to point to Moas as the person behind the deal. According to a document
leaked to Cameroonian activist Boris Bertolt, Portsec obtained the contract via
a “special tender” from the president’s office. The document is blurry, but the
address for the company can be deciphered as “c/o Kohli & Partner”, the
same Swiss lawyers Moas used for his Los Angeles purchase.
We could not trace a direct line between Moas’ Cameroonian
interests and his real estate purchases, but he does not appear to have other
significant sources of income. Called on his Cameroonian cell phone, he hung up
after we introduced ourselves and he did not respond to questions sent to his
Whatsapp account. The Port of Douala and the Kohli & Partner law firm
didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment.
Cameroon’s close links with Israel stretch back far before
Moas entered the scene. They can be traced to 1984 and a failed coup. President
Biya, who had been in power for just two years at the time was nearly toppled
by his own army. He reportedly suspected that Cameroon’s former coloniser
France had supported the attempted overthrow and thus looked for new partners
to ensure his security.
He first turned to Israeli businessman Meir Meyuhas, a
former secret agent working for Israel, and later Meir’s son Sami. The father
and son had an exclusive license from Israel’s Ministry of Defence to negotiate
arms deals with Cameroon. This particular arrangement ended in 2001, but the
supply of Israeli arms into the country continued. Several sources told Efrat
Lachter of Israel’s Channel 12 that the Mehuyas are still behind military
exports to Cameroon.
We were not able to reach the Meyuhas for comment.
According to various BIR soldiers, each new recruit since
2009 has received a brand-new firearm produced by Israel Weapon Industries
(IWI), an Israeli arms manufacturer. These have included ACE 21, Galil, and
more recently Tavor assault rifles, which cost around $1,900 each. Israeli
companies also provide the BIR with armed personnel carriers – such as the
Saymar Musketeer and Thunder – and equip the Presidential Guard.
But Israel’s involvement in Cameroon’s armed forces go much
deeper than just arms deals. In fact, an Israeli, Abraham Avi Sivan, created
the BIR unit in 1999, initially under a different name. Sivan had formerly
commanded several elite units in Israel’s army before pivoting to the private
sector as Israel’s defence attaché to Cameroon. In his retirement from civil
service, he trained and supervised Cameroon’s Presidential Guard and worked to
establish the BIR under the command of Cameroon’s defence minister and
President Biya himself.
In 2010, Sirvan died in a helicopter crash near Yaoundé. Since
then, the identities of his replacements have been carefully guarded, though
various names – including likely fake ones such as “Maher Heretz” – circulated.
One name in particular has been reported by various sources.
A former brigadier general
“General Erez Zuckerman was at the top,” said one former BIR
soldier, who recalls hearing from colleagues that this man would replace Sivan
around 2012. This account was confirmed by several others. “It’s like when a
new president has taken power in [a] country; the name was circulating without
even you seeing the person,” he added.
Zuckerman is a former brigadier general in the Israeli army.
Unlike Sivan, his career did not end brilliantly. In the 2006 Lebanon War, his
division made spectacular mistakes, leading him to resign in disgrace, saying
“I have failed”. After quitting the army, his friends told reporters “he’ll
probably run his family’s farm; they own a herd of cattle”. Instead, the former
Israeli commander turned to the BIR.
The former BIR soldier says Zuckerman visited each of
Cameroon’s military bases to introduce himself. He recalls that he first saw
the new general in the Bakassi region, near the border with Nigeria. “He came
with a helicopter in 2012,” he said. “By then we already knew who he was.”
The last time the soldier saw Zuckerman was in February 2018
at the military’s Salak base in northern Cameroon. “It was like an inspection
to see how work is being done,” he said, explaining that Zuckerman gave orders
to officers. The BIR has been shown to conduct torture at Salak, and the US has
an ongoing investigation into the presence of its own soldiers at the base.
Another soldier said that he saw him twice in Yaoundé in May 2019, including
once at a military base.
Zuckerman admitted to African Arguments that he had worked
as a military adviser in Cameroon but said he hasn’t returned there since 2017.
He declined to respond to further questions.
At some point, Zuckerman appears to have handed over the
lead to Eran Moas. By contrast to his predecessors, Moas wasn’t a career
military man. When he arrived in Cameroon in 1998, he initially worked for the
Israeli conglomerate Tadiran to maintain the communications systems of the
army. He was later hired by the Cameroonian military directly.
In this role, he likely first worked under the supervision
of Avi Sivan. In 2004, an Israeli journalist reported on his visit to an ape
sanctuary near Yaoundé that had been established by Sivan and received
“enormous support” from Moas. The reporter noted that Moas was driven around in
“a jeep of the Cameroon army, chauffeured by a member of the Presidential
Guard, who wears Israeli Paratroop wings and has on red Paratrooper boots”. He
wrote that Moas was “known as captain or general in these parts”.
A controversial relationship
According to Israeli human rights lawyer Eitay Mack, who
campaigns to increase transparency in Israel’s defence exports, the arrangement
between the BIR and Israeli’s trainers is highly unusual.
“It’s a very rare situation that Israel is approving someone
to conduct a unit,” he says. Mack explains that Moas, Zuckerman and their
colleagues would need formal licences from the Israeli government for their
work in Cameroon. Mack says it’s unlikely they would circumvent this
requirement.
“Nobody is ready to violate [this rule] because it would be
considered as a criminal security offence,” he says. “It’s like being a
traitor…[Moas] is doing it with a license from the Israeli government for sure.
He is not doing it on his own as a private citizen.”
The Israeli Embassy in Yaoundé directed us to the Ministry
of Foreign Affairs in Israel. Their spokesperson said they would not comment,
adding “we don’t have to give an explanation”. The Ministry of Defence refused
to provide specific information but said that export licenses are “subject to
constant scrutiny and periodic assessments by the senior echelons of the
Ministry of Defense and Ministry of Foreign Affairs”.
Mack believes the Israeli government’s position on the
matter may be strategic. “Paul Biya is one of the most reliable friends of
Israel in [the whole] African continent,” he says. “The payoff is [for
Cameroon] to support Israel openly in international forums…Cameroon is an
important part of helping Israel to get legitimacy…It’s all part of the
geopolitical fight with the Palestinians.”
In March 2018, Mack filed a petition to the Israeli Supreme
Court to cancel all export licenses to the BIR and freeze the awarding of new
ones. The court ruled a few months later, but the judge issued a gag order
which means Mack cannot share the outcome of the case. But according to one
source within the BIR, most of the soldiers who graduated in 2019 were given
Croatian rifles, not Israeli.
If Israel has stopped its defence exports to Cameroon, it would
make any military training by Israeli citizens illegal too, according to Mack.
It may be too little too late, however. “There are so many Israeli weapons over
there, and the unit already [has] Israeli knowledge, so the effect [would be]
limited,” he says.
For opposition figure Walla too, much damage has already
been done. “It’s a very bizarre setup to have an armed force [with] a foreign
national as a commander,” she says. “Even if these are private Israeli
consultants, or they belong to private firms, most of them are former Israeli
military officers…It places Israel in a position where, within the Cameroonian
population, they are seen as part of this repressive force.”
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