Sitting on the patio of his lavish home in suburban Pretoria, Eeben Barlow poured tea and basked in the late summer sun, looking more like a successful businessman than a hardened, elite Special Forces operator of the now defunct Apartheid-era South African Defense Force (SADF). In fact, he is both.
At the center of Barlow's synthesis of commerce and soldiering skills is his highly successful private corporate army known as Executive Outcomes, or EO. The activities of EO, the clients it serves, and the global transnational corporate elite (including the DeBeers diamond cartel, Texaco and Gulf-Chevron) which fund its operations, offer an intriguing look into the realities of the emerging world order.
"As a private corporate entity, EO is able to operate without the restrictions of any particular nation's flag leading our soldiers into battle," says Barlow. "Organizations such as the UN and the Organization of African Unity (OAU) can make use of EO without partiality in negating the speedy resolution of conflict in any given country utilizing our services. Our employees have over five-thousand man years of military knowledge, combat and training experience."
EO is able to provide private counter-insurgency operations, peacekeeping forces, and the muscle for corporations to control gold and diamond mines, oil and other natural resources in a variety of failed states which stretch to the four corners of the world.
"We offer a variety of services to legitimate governments, including infantry training, clandestine warfare, counterintelligence programs, reconnaissance, escape and evasion, special forces selection and training and even parachuting," adds Barlow. EO is equipped with Soviet MiG fighter jets, Puma and East Bloc helicopters, state-of-the-art artillery, tanks and other armaments. Barlow pointed out that EO boasts an array of no less than 500 military advisors and 3,000 highly trained multi-national special forces soldiers.
In its short history, EO has fought in South and West Africa, South America, and the Far East. An example of one of its initial tasks was to assist a South American Drug Enforcement Agency in conducting "discretionary warfare" against local drug producers. Other EO operations, stretching from Angola to Sierra Leone to Sri Lanka and Papua New Guinea, always involve millions of dollars of cash payments augmented by mining, logging and oil rights to lucrative geologic deposits.
"It's kind of ironic that when Eeben fought for Apartheid, the white race, anti-communism and Christianity, he wound up without any money and was shoved out the door," says Willem Ratte, a former member of the elite Rhodesian Scouts and the man who trained and honed Barlow's superlative fighting skills. "Now that he's fighting on behalf of the interests of the multinational corporations, he's become a wealthy man," adds Ratte.
"We've undergone a paradigm shift in consciousness, in our interpretation of reality," says respected South African political analyst Ed Cain, editor of the erudite journal Signposts. "We are living in the post-Christian era. The free world and the 'former' communist world are being merged. There are no more countries, no more Japanese, no more Mexicans. There are only rich and poor, hi-tech and low-tech, Northern and Southern Hemisphere. It’s almost like a new form of virtual Apartheid."