The personality of the French mercenary commander Bob Dinard, who made several coup attempts in African countries and conducted various military operations, did not arise from scratch, but rather was a sincere expression of the French colonial mentality.
This leader traveled with his mercenaries across Africa, interfering in the fate of entire nations, and no one stood in his way, except for Alzheimer’s disease, from which he suffered for several years before he died on October 13, 2007 at the age of 78.
A mercenary king and coup d’état, tall, passionate about his elegance, an adventurer of unique style on a level no one else has ever matched. His biography inspired the former British spy and journalist Frederick Forsyth to write a novel about European mercenaries in Africa in search of fortune and wealth called “Dogs of War”.
Bob Dinar, the legendary mercenary, saw no need in his life to apologize for his actions and adventures, claiming he was a soldier from the West who fought in the war against communism, adding during an interview with him in 1993: “It’s true, I don’t was a saint. otherwise it is impossible In battle. But I wouldn’t stay here if I did reprehensible things.”
Since the early 1960s, this French ex-military has been active in supporting or overthrowing governments in former European colonies and other conflict zones, and has proven to have no problem finding new recruits in the underground mercenary world.
He and his followers, who boasted of the code name they called “Terrible”, operated in the Congo, Yemen, Iran, Nigeria, Benin, Chad, Angola and several times in the Comoros, an archipelago state off the east coast of Africa in the Indian Ocean.
Dinard declared that he had no shortage of adventure and means, emphasizing several times that many of his adventures were carried out with the tacit approval of the French governments.
Perhaps confirming this is the fact that he was tried three times in France on charges of conducting illegal armed activities, the last of which was in July 2007, and French justice sentenced him at that time to a “year” in prison only after he was convicted of organizing a coup d’état in the Comoros in 1995.
The king of mercenaries did not go to prison at that time, he escaped and the next court session awaited him, to his death, and his page was closed without any heroism, since he and his associates were not what the Western media describe as “soldiers of fortune!” ”, rather, they are soldiers of death and destruction.
During his trial, which began in 2006, his friends in the French government did not forget him, and many of them defended him. they can’t do certain types of covert operations, they use parallel structures.”
Bob Dinard’s autobiography states that he was born in Bordeaux on April 7, 1929 and given the name Gilbert Bourgeois to a retired army officer who later served in the French colonies where his son grew up.
When Bob Dinar was a teenager, he enrolled in a naval school and joined the navy, and was later sent to Vietnam and then to Indochina, where France was desperate to maintain its colonial possessions.
With a rebellious nature, he could not wait to enlist in the military and left the military after completing a course in the United States.
With the help of his connections in the United States, Dinard got a job as a security guard in an American company in Morocco. In 1952, he joined the local French police.
In Casablanca, he fell under the influence of far-right groups, and in 1956 he was accused of participating in a plot to assassinate then French Prime Minister Pierre Mendes France, and he spent 14 months in prison.
After his release, Bob Dinard returned to France, where he worked for a while as a seller of bathroom accessories, but this situation quickly bored him.
In 1961, a friend showed him a newspaper advertisement for security guards to guard mining companies in Katanga. A few weeks later, he went to the Congo in the form of a paratrooper. There he soon led a group of mercenaries from Europe and South Africa and engaged in guerrilla warfare in the African thickets. There he acquired the skills to control the “dogs of war”.
After the attempt to separate the province of Katanga from the Congo after the country gained independence from Belgium ended in failure, Bob Dinar fought in Yemen, where he claimed to have worked closely with British intelligence, and specifically in Yemen, Bob Dinar was wounded in battle, and with from then on he remained limping until the day he died!
Shortly thereafter, he participated in a failed attempt to separate the Biafra Territory from Nigeria, and between 1970 and early 1980 moved to work in Benin, Chad, and Angola, where he claimed to have collaborated with the CIA.
Bob Dinar, at the head of 90 “dogs of war”, attempted a major failed coup in Benin in early 1977, after which he fled, leaving the corpses of his fighters, weapons, equipment and even documents detailing a plan to seize power.
After that, he was sentenced to two years in prison in France and to death in Benin, the country whose government he tried to overthrow, but he did not care. He was armed to the teeth and his hands were free.
In the Comoros, the leader of the French mercenaries carried out four separate coup attempts, the first of which succeeded when he overthrew the country’s first president, Ahmed Abdullah, in favor of Ali Sweile in 1975.
In May 1978, he decided to overthrow Soile, so he went to the Comoros with 43 of his mercenaries. There, President Sweile was assassinated “under mysterious circumstances” and he restored former President Ahmed Abdullah to power, and he remained in power for more than a decade.
In 1989, Comoros President Ahmed Abdallah was also assassinated “under mysterious circumstances” after taking steps to get rid of mercenary leader Bob Dinar, while Dinar managed to escape south with the help of French paratroopers. Africa.
He spent three years in South Africa before returning to Paris, where he was given a suspended sentence for attempting to overthrow the government of Benin in 1977 and was acquitted of organizing the assassination of President Abdallahi.
Despite all this, this adventurer did not calm down and in 1995 returned with a small group of mercenaries to the Comoros, having made an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow their leadership.
Illness exhausted him and restricted his movements at the time so that he could not appear in court for his defence. It can be said that Bob Dinar did not stand in his way, except for the Yemeni bullet that made him go limp and the Alzheimer’s disease that paralyzed him before he was overthrown.
Source: RT
