In 1975, a French mercenary landed in the Comoros, a chain of small islands off East Africa, and decided he was going to run the place.
Bob Denard staged four coups, converted to Islam, built a farm, and controlled the country from the shadows for over a decade.
It was a story of Cold War deals, shifting loyalties, and one last coup that ended his run.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to the Comoros Islands, a tiny, remote archipelago in the Indian Ocean which became the unlikely setting for one of the strangest stories of the twentieth century.
[00:00:36] It's the story of a French mercenary who staged four coups in the same country, converted to Islam, took a new name, built a farm, was shot in the head twice, controlled the entire country from behind the scenes for over a decade, but then it all went terribly wrong.
[00:00:56] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:02] I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I imagine you might not know all that much about the Comoros Islands.
[00:01:11] If you could place them on a map, you're probably ahead of most people.
[00:01:16] They are the small group of islands in the Indian Ocean, about halfway between Madagascar and Mozambique, off the eastern coast of Africa.
[00:01:28] They are pretty small, roughly the size of London, and have this volcanic landscape: steep peaks, dense jungle, and black lava fields.
[00:01:41] Culturally, they have been shaped by centuries of African, Arab, and French influence. Traders and settlers landed and made their bases over the years, and in 1886, France took formal control of the islands. It would govern them as part of its overseas empire for nearly ninety years.
[00:02:05] But by the early 1970s, independence was clearly coming, and this corner of the Indian Ocean was about to become the setting for something far less peaceful.
[00:02:21] In 1973, the French government and the Comorian leaders had reached an agreement: there would be a referendum the following year.
[00:02:31] And sure enough, the referendum was held in 1974, with an overwhelming majority voting for independence.
[00:02:42] But one of the four islands, Mayotte, did not vote for independence, instead preferring to remain part of France.
[00:02:54] This kicked off new discussions, more complications that we don't need to go into for this story, but the thing to understand is this: France was still dragging its feet, and the head of the government under the territorial system, a man named Ahmed Abdallah, decided he had had enough.
[00:03:19] On the 6th of July 1975, he stood before the Comorian parliament and declared independence, unilaterally, without waiting for France's blessing.
[00:03:34] France was not best pleased.
[00:03:37] It didn't immediately recognise the new country, and it withdrew most of its financial support.
[00:03:45] And Ahmed Abdallah, well, he didn't last a month.
[00:03:50] After 27 days, he had been booted out of office in a coup led by a French mercenary called Robert Denard.
[00:04:00] Now, we will come to the coup, and the other coups, in a minute, but first let me paint you a picture of Robert Denard.
[00:04:10] He was born in 1929, in a small village in the Gironde, in southwest France.
[00:04:18] He was not from a military family, and he had no formal military education to speak of. But what he did have, from a young age, was a taste for action and a very flexible relationship with the idea of loyalty.
[00:04:37] He joined the French Navy as a young man, and then like hundreds of thousands of other young French men, served during the First Indochina War.
[00:04:49] So far, nothing particularly outrageous.
[00:04:53] He had clearly started to go down a slightly different path, however, as he was convicted of plotting to assassinate the French Prime Minister in 1954, and sentenced to 14 months in jail.
[00:05:09] On his release, he tried his hand at a more conventional life, becoming a salesman, but it wasn't for him. Life outside of Metropolitan France, it seemed, offered more excitement, more opportunities for adventure.
[00:05:27] He joined the colonial police in Morocco.
[00:05:30] And by the early 1960s, he had found his way into a very different kind of work.
[00:05:38] The Congo was falling apart.
[00:05:41] Belgium had granted the Congo independence in 1960, and within weeks the country was in crisis. Separatist movements, rival governments, a military that could barely hold itself together, and a prime minister who had been assassinated with the involvement of both Belgian and American intelligence.
[00:06:04] Into this chaos came a new kind of professional.
[00:06:08] The mercenary. And of course, Robert Denard.
[00:06:13] He arrived in 1961, after being recruited by a fellow Frenchman to fight for the secessionists. He was thirty-two years old, and it seemed that he had found his calling.
[00:06:28] Over the next fifteen years he fought in the Congo, in Biafra during the Nigerian Civil War, in Yemen, Benin, Chad and Angola. He organised coups, he trained militias, he led men into battle across half a continent. There is little record of the details of what he actually did, for obvious reasons, but given how long he did it for, how in demand he was, and that he survived for so long, he must have been pretty good at it.
[00:07:03] And almost everywhere he went, he had something he could count on: the quiet backing, the implicit approval, of France.
[00:07:15] This was part of the French government's system of Françafrique.
[00:07:21] The idea was simple: France would maintain its influence over its former African colonies not through direct rule, since that era was over, but through money, intelligence, and when necessary, through men like Bob Denard.
[00:07:41] And the mastermind of this, or rather the man with a direct line to both the French President and a vast network of informants, fixers, businessmen, and mercenaries, was called Jacques Foccart.
[00:07:57] He was reportedly known as Monsieur Afrique, or Mr Africa.
[00:08:03] Whenever something needed to be done in Africa, Foccart knew who to call. Importantly, this was always at an arm's length from the official government. Always with plausible deniability.
[00:08:20] And Bob Denard was one of Foccart's most reliable instruments.
[00:08:26] Now, Denard was not especially ideological, as will become apparent. He fought for whoever was paying, as long as the politics broadly aligned with French interests.
[00:08:40] What he wanted was action, autonomy, and money. For most of his life, he had all three.
[00:08:48] And even when things went wrong, he rarely paid the price.
[00:08:53] He was seriously injured four times, and was shot in the head twice. But he survived.
[00:09:02] In January 1977, he led a coup attempt in Benin that collapsed after three hours. A French court later sentenced him in absentia to five years' imprisonment, and a Beninese court gave him the death penalty.
[00:09:18] But neither sentence troubled him particularly.
[00:09:22] And this was a theme in his life; by the time he got into trouble, if he was ever caught and sentenced, he would be long gone.
[00:09:31] By 1975, he was forty-six years old, with bullet scars dotted over his body and a mercenary's career already behind him that most soldiers couldn't match in two lifetimes.
[00:09:45] Then someone called him about the Comoros.
[00:09:50] So, it is the 3rd of August 1975. Ahmed Abdallah has been president of the Comoros for twenty-seven days.
[00:10:00] Bob Denard arrives with a small group of mercenaries and removes him from power.
[00:10:07] The operation is almost comically swift. Abdallah is put on a plane to Paris. His government is dissolved. The whole thing is over before most Comorians have understood what has happened.
[00:10:22] Denard has been hired by a coalition of opposition political parties called the United National Front, six groups united mainly in wanting Abdallah gone. Their man, a figure named Said Mohamed Jaffar, is installed as president.
[00:10:40] He lasts five months.
[00:10:43] The problem is that the United National Front was always a loose arrangement. Among its members is a more radical faction, led by a socialist named Ali Soilih. Soilih has ideas. Very radical ideas, and no interest in sharing power with Jaffar, whom he considers too moderate, too willing to appease France.
[00:11:10] In January 1976, Soilih pushes Jaffar aside in another internal coup. And France cuts what little financial support it has left.
[00:11:23] And Ali Soilih, well he is an unconventional leader in almost every sense.
[00:11:30] In one of his first acts, he orders the burning of the French colonial archives, a dramatic, symbolic rejection of the old order. He nationalises land. He promotes the removal of the veil among women. He legalises cannabis, a drug he is personally a heavy user of.
[00:11:53] And he creates a youth militia.
[00:11:56] He calls them the Moissy. They are teenagers, trained by Tanzanian military advisers and armed with AK-47 rifles. He lowers the voting age to fourteen. He is a big fan of Chairman Mao, and this is his version of Mao's Red Guards, a cultural revolution in miniature, on three small volcanic islands in the Indian Ocean.
[00:12:24] The Moissy, as you might imagine, do not cover themselves in glory.
[00:12:30] Meanwhile, Soilih is losing his grip on reality.
[00:12:35] He is drinking heavily. He is using drugs. And he has begun consulting a witchdoctor for advice on matters of state.
[00:12:45] And this witchdoctor has some bad news for him: he tells Soilih that he will be overthrown by a white man with a black dog.
[00:12:57] Now, were I the sort of person who believed in prophecies from witchdoctors, I think I'd probably focus on the man rather than the dog part.
[00:13:07] Soilih, however, seemed more concerned about the canine aspect. He orders a campaign to kill every single dog on the Comoros Islands.
[00:13:18] The islands are scoured. Dogs are found and killed in large numbers. It does not, as you might imagine, resolve the underlying problem.
[00:13:30] And by 1978, the islands are in a pretty poor place: economically broken, starved of French support, and struggling to maintain any semblance of public order.
[00:13:45] Ahmed Abdallah, who has been living in Paris and plotting his return, he decides now is the time to take his country back.
[00:13:54] And the man he wants to help him is Bob Denard, the very same Bob Denard who removed him from power back in 1975.
[00:14:06] Fortunately for Abdallah, Bob Denard is more interested in getting paid than in holding a grudge, and he is more than happy to oblige.
[00:14:17] In May 1978, in the dead of night, a boat arrives off the coast of Grande Comore, the largest of the Comoros Islands.
[00:14:28] Denard steps ashore with fifty men, most of them former French paratroopers. He even, according to one report, brings a black dog with him, ensuring that the witchdoctor's prophecy will come true.
[00:14:46] The operation takes a matter of hours. Soilih's forces collapse almost without a fight, and Soilih is placed under house arrest.
[00:14:57] Sixteen days later, however, he is shot dead, reportedly while trying to escape, although few people believe it.
[00:15:06] Ahmed Abdallah is reinstated as president.
[00:15:10] And as for Bob Denard, well, something surprising happens.
[00:15:17] You might have thought this was just another contract for Bob Denard, and that he would be on the first plane out, waiting for his phone to ring and off on the next mission.
[00:15:28] No.
[00:15:29] Denard does not go home.
[00:15:32] He stays.
[00:15:33] He becomes a Comorian citizen. He converts to Islam. He takes a new name: Said Moustapha M'Hadjou. He marries a Comorian woman. Then another. And another. By the end, he will have seven wives and eight children.
[00:15:52] He builds a farm. 1,800 acres of volcanic land, growing crops, raising livestock. He becomes, by all accounts, a genuine farmer, someone who gets up early and knows his land and takes pride in it.
[00:16:09] There is more to this, though.
[00:16:11] He has also been given command of the Presidential Guard, an elite 500-man unit. In practical terms, this means he has military control over the country.
[00:16:26] Now, Abdallah is still nominally president. He gives speeches, receives foreign dignitaries, travels abroad to represent the Comoros at international meetings.
[00:16:36] But the man who actually holds the power is the one commanding the Presidential Guard.
[00:16:44] And not only this.
[00:16:45] Denard has business interests across the islands. He owns a private security firm, which holds contracts to protect South African-funded hotels that are being built on the islands. He operates a profitable commercial air shuttle between the Comoros and apartheid South Africa, which was heavily sanctioned at the time.
[00:17:08] When journalists visit and ask him about his role, he is charming and unhelpful. He talks about his farm. He talks about his family. He is a Comorian now, he says. He deflects questions about the coup, about his mercenary past and about the true nature of his authority.
[00:17:30] One reporter describes him as looking less like a mercenary warlord than a prosperous farmer who just so happens to own a great deal of land.
[00:17:41] But by 1989, the arrangement is beginning to crack.
[00:17:47] Abdallah has been president for eleven years. He is older, and he has started to believe, perhaps with some justification, that he has built enough of a constituency to govern without Denard at his side.
[00:18:04] He signs a decree ordering the Presidential Guard to be disarmed and integrated into the regular armed forces.
[00:18:14] It is a direct challenge. If the decree goes through, Denard loses his military dominance over the islands. His five hundred men become soldiers in someone else's army. He becomes just a man on a farm with a Comorian name and a complicated past.
[00:18:36] On the 26th of November 1989, Ahmed Abdallah is sitting in his office at the presidential palace.
[00:18:45] A shot is fired.
[00:18:47] Abdallah is dead, while Denard is wounded in the hand.
[00:18:53] The official account is that a military officer, acting alone and without orders, entered the office and opened fire. Denard, loyal Bob Denard, managed to return fire but could not save the president.
[00:19:10] Now, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that this official version is a fabrication, and suspicion has long fallen on Denard. When he was eventually tried in France in 1999 for the killing, he was acquitted, for lack of direct evidence.
[00:19:31] In any case, this time, France decides that Denard has gone too far.
[00:19:38] French paratroopers fly to the Comoros. They do not arrest Denard, but they make it very clear that now is the time to go.
[00:19:48] He boards a plane for South Africa.
[00:19:51] He is sixty years old. He has children in the Comoros. He has a farm. He has a name, Said Moustapha M'Hadjou, that he has been using for over a decade.
[00:20:03] And he is forced to leave it all behind.
[00:20:07] Now, if you had thought that was the end of the story for Bob Denard, no, there is more.
[00:20:15] In 1995, aged sixty-six years old, he sets sail for the Comoros, along with thirty-three fellow mercenaries, for what will be his fourth and final coup in the Comoros Islands.
[00:20:30] Denard and his thirty-three men take the country in a matter of hours.
[00:20:37] The sitting president, Said Mohamed Djohar, is removed from power.
[00:20:43] But Denard hasn't reckoned on one thing. The world has moved on.
[00:20:49] France has changed.
[00:20:51] In 1978, France needed him in the Comoros, or so its politicians may have felt. In 1989, France wanted him out but was willing to be polite about it.
[00:21:04] In 1995, things are very different.
[00:21:08] The Cold War is over. The old logic of Françafrique might not have disappeared completely, but it has shifted. A French mercenary staging a coup in a small island nation is no longer a quiet intelligence asset. It's an embarrassment, reported on by journalists, criticised in the European press, and impossible to deny.
[00:21:36] On the 4th of October, six days after the coup, French paratroopers land on Grande Comore. The operation is called Azalée.
[00:21:47] There is no fighting.
[00:21:50] Denard knows what this means. The army that has, for most of his career, backed him quietly from a distance is now facing him directly. He surrenders at three in the morning on the 5th of October, and he is flown to Paris.
[00:22:08] He is charged, tried and convicted of belonging to a criminal conspiracy. In June 2006, he is sentenced to five years in prison. The sentence is suspended and he will serve no time.
[00:22:24] He dies on the 13th of October 2007, aged seventy-eight.
[00:22:31] And as for the Comoros Islands, it remains one of the poorest and least developed countries in the world.
[00:22:39] Now, Bob Denard is not responsible for all of the woes of the Comoros Islands. He was, after all, a product of a system, a system that tacitly supported what he was doing, as long as it was useful to its interests.
[00:22:54] But it's hard to make the claim that he helped.
[00:22:58] Four coups, multiple presidents ousted, two presidents dead in suspicious circumstances.
[00:23:05] It's hardly surprising people called him “the wolf of the Indian Ocean”.
[00:23:11] OK then, that is it for today's episode.
[00:23:14] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:23:17] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:23:21] Have you heard of the Comoros Islands before? Have you ever been there?
[00:23:25] Let me know in the comments below, if you're listening to this somewhere where you can comment, and for the members among you, you can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:23:39] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:23:45] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to the Comoros Islands, a tiny, remote archipelago in the Indian Ocean which became the unlikely setting for one of the strangest stories of the twentieth century.
[00:00:36] It's the story of a French mercenary who staged four coups in the same country, converted to Islam, took a new name, built a farm, was shot in the head twice, controlled the entire country from behind the scenes for over a decade, but then it all went terribly wrong.
[00:00:56] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:02] I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I imagine you might not know all that much about the Comoros Islands.
[00:01:11] If you could place them on a map, you're probably ahead of most people.
[00:01:16] They are the small group of islands in the Indian Ocean, about halfway between Madagascar and Mozambique, off the eastern coast of Africa.
[00:01:28] They are pretty small, roughly the size of London, and have this volcanic landscape: steep peaks, dense jungle, and black lava fields.
[00:01:41] Culturally, they have been shaped by centuries of African, Arab, and French influence. Traders and settlers landed and made their bases over the years, and in 1886, France took formal control of the islands. It would govern them as part of its overseas empire for nearly ninety years.
[00:02:05] But by the early 1970s, independence was clearly coming, and this corner of the Indian Ocean was about to become the setting for something far less peaceful.
[00:02:21] In 1973, the French government and the Comorian leaders had reached an agreement: there would be a referendum the following year.
[00:02:31] And sure enough, the referendum was held in 1974, with an overwhelming majority voting for independence.
[00:02:42] But one of the four islands, Mayotte, did not vote for independence, instead preferring to remain part of France.
[00:02:54] This kicked off new discussions, more complications that we don't need to go into for this story, but the thing to understand is this: France was still dragging its feet, and the head of the government under the territorial system, a man named Ahmed Abdallah, decided he had had enough.
[00:03:19] On the 6th of July 1975, he stood before the Comorian parliament and declared independence, unilaterally, without waiting for France's blessing.
[00:03:34] France was not best pleased.
[00:03:37] It didn't immediately recognise the new country, and it withdrew most of its financial support.
[00:03:45] And Ahmed Abdallah, well, he didn't last a month.
[00:03:50] After 27 days, he had been booted out of office in a coup led by a French mercenary called Robert Denard.
[00:04:00] Now, we will come to the coup, and the other coups, in a minute, but first let me paint you a picture of Robert Denard.
[00:04:10] He was born in 1929, in a small village in the Gironde, in southwest France.
[00:04:18] He was not from a military family, and he had no formal military education to speak of. But what he did have, from a young age, was a taste for action and a very flexible relationship with the idea of loyalty.
[00:04:37] He joined the French Navy as a young man, and then like hundreds of thousands of other young French men, served during the First Indochina War.
[00:04:49] So far, nothing particularly outrageous.
[00:04:53] He had clearly started to go down a slightly different path, however, as he was convicted of plotting to assassinate the French Prime Minister in 1954, and sentenced to 14 months in jail.
[00:05:09] On his release, he tried his hand at a more conventional life, becoming a salesman, but it wasn't for him. Life outside of Metropolitan France, it seemed, offered more excitement, more opportunities for adventure.
[00:05:27] He joined the colonial police in Morocco.
[00:05:30] And by the early 1960s, he had found his way into a very different kind of work.
[00:05:38] The Congo was falling apart.
[00:05:41] Belgium had granted the Congo independence in 1960, and within weeks the country was in crisis. Separatist movements, rival governments, a military that could barely hold itself together, and a prime minister who had been assassinated with the involvement of both Belgian and American intelligence.
[00:06:04] Into this chaos came a new kind of professional.
[00:06:08] The mercenary. And of course, Robert Denard.
[00:06:13] He arrived in 1961, after being recruited by a fellow Frenchman to fight for the secessionists. He was thirty-two years old, and it seemed that he had found his calling.
[00:06:28] Over the next fifteen years he fought in the Congo, in Biafra during the Nigerian Civil War, in Yemen, Benin, Chad and Angola. He organised coups, he trained militias, he led men into battle across half a continent. There is little record of the details of what he actually did, for obvious reasons, but given how long he did it for, how in demand he was, and that he survived for so long, he must have been pretty good at it.
[00:07:03] And almost everywhere he went, he had something he could count on: the quiet backing, the implicit approval, of France.
[00:07:15] This was part of the French government's system of Françafrique.
[00:07:21] The idea was simple: France would maintain its influence over its former African colonies not through direct rule, since that era was over, but through money, intelligence, and when necessary, through men like Bob Denard.
[00:07:41] And the mastermind of this, or rather the man with a direct line to both the French President and a vast network of informants, fixers, businessmen, and mercenaries, was called Jacques Foccart.
[00:07:57] He was reportedly known as Monsieur Afrique, or Mr Africa.
[00:08:03] Whenever something needed to be done in Africa, Foccart knew who to call. Importantly, this was always at an arm's length from the official government. Always with plausible deniability.
[00:08:20] And Bob Denard was one of Foccart's most reliable instruments.
[00:08:26] Now, Denard was not especially ideological, as will become apparent. He fought for whoever was paying, as long as the politics broadly aligned with French interests.
[00:08:40] What he wanted was action, autonomy, and money. For most of his life, he had all three.
[00:08:48] And even when things went wrong, he rarely paid the price.
[00:08:53] He was seriously injured four times, and was shot in the head twice. But he survived.
[00:09:02] In January 1977, he led a coup attempt in Benin that collapsed after three hours. A French court later sentenced him in absentia to five years' imprisonment, and a Beninese court gave him the death penalty.
[00:09:18] But neither sentence troubled him particularly.
[00:09:22] And this was a theme in his life; by the time he got into trouble, if he was ever caught and sentenced, he would be long gone.
[00:09:31] By 1975, he was forty-six years old, with bullet scars dotted over his body and a mercenary's career already behind him that most soldiers couldn't match in two lifetimes.
[00:09:45] Then someone called him about the Comoros.
[00:09:50] So, it is the 3rd of August 1975. Ahmed Abdallah has been president of the Comoros for twenty-seven days.
[00:10:00] Bob Denard arrives with a small group of mercenaries and removes him from power.
[00:10:07] The operation is almost comically swift. Abdallah is put on a plane to Paris. His government is dissolved. The whole thing is over before most Comorians have understood what has happened.
[00:10:22] Denard has been hired by a coalition of opposition political parties called the United National Front, six groups united mainly in wanting Abdallah gone. Their man, a figure named Said Mohamed Jaffar, is installed as president.
[00:10:40] He lasts five months.
[00:10:43] The problem is that the United National Front was always a loose arrangement. Among its members is a more radical faction, led by a socialist named Ali Soilih. Soilih has ideas. Very radical ideas, and no interest in sharing power with Jaffar, whom he considers too moderate, too willing to appease France.
[00:11:10] In January 1976, Soilih pushes Jaffar aside in another internal coup. And France cuts what little financial support it has left.
[00:11:23] And Ali Soilih, well he is an unconventional leader in almost every sense.
[00:11:30] In one of his first acts, he orders the burning of the French colonial archives, a dramatic, symbolic rejection of the old order. He nationalises land. He promotes the removal of the veil among women. He legalises cannabis, a drug he is personally a heavy user of.
[00:11:53] And he creates a youth militia.
[00:11:56] He calls them the Moissy. They are teenagers, trained by Tanzanian military advisers and armed with AK-47 rifles. He lowers the voting age to fourteen. He is a big fan of Chairman Mao, and this is his version of Mao's Red Guards, a cultural revolution in miniature, on three small volcanic islands in the Indian Ocean.
[00:12:24] The Moissy, as you might imagine, do not cover themselves in glory.
[00:12:30] Meanwhile, Soilih is losing his grip on reality.
[00:12:35] He is drinking heavily. He is using drugs. And he has begun consulting a witchdoctor for advice on matters of state.
[00:12:45] And this witchdoctor has some bad news for him: he tells Soilih that he will be overthrown by a white man with a black dog.
[00:12:57] Now, were I the sort of person who believed in prophecies from witchdoctors, I think I'd probably focus on the man rather than the dog part.
[00:13:07] Soilih, however, seemed more concerned about the canine aspect. He orders a campaign to kill every single dog on the Comoros Islands.
[00:13:18] The islands are scoured. Dogs are found and killed in large numbers. It does not, as you might imagine, resolve the underlying problem.
[00:13:30] And by 1978, the islands are in a pretty poor place: economically broken, starved of French support, and struggling to maintain any semblance of public order.
[00:13:45] Ahmed Abdallah, who has been living in Paris and plotting his return, he decides now is the time to take his country back.
[00:13:54] And the man he wants to help him is Bob Denard, the very same Bob Denard who removed him from power back in 1975.
[00:14:06] Fortunately for Abdallah, Bob Denard is more interested in getting paid than in holding a grudge, and he is more than happy to oblige.
[00:14:17] In May 1978, in the dead of night, a boat arrives off the coast of Grande Comore, the largest of the Comoros Islands.
[00:14:28] Denard steps ashore with fifty men, most of them former French paratroopers. He even, according to one report, brings a black dog with him, ensuring that the witchdoctor's prophecy will come true.
[00:14:46] The operation takes a matter of hours. Soilih's forces collapse almost without a fight, and Soilih is placed under house arrest.
[00:14:57] Sixteen days later, however, he is shot dead, reportedly while trying to escape, although few people believe it.
[00:15:06] Ahmed Abdallah is reinstated as president.
[00:15:10] And as for Bob Denard, well, something surprising happens.
[00:15:17] You might have thought this was just another contract for Bob Denard, and that he would be on the first plane out, waiting for his phone to ring and off on the next mission.
[00:15:28] No.
[00:15:29] Denard does not go home.
[00:15:32] He stays.
[00:15:33] He becomes a Comorian citizen. He converts to Islam. He takes a new name: Said Moustapha M'Hadjou. He marries a Comorian woman. Then another. And another. By the end, he will have seven wives and eight children.
[00:15:52] He builds a farm. 1,800 acres of volcanic land, growing crops, raising livestock. He becomes, by all accounts, a genuine farmer, someone who gets up early and knows his land and takes pride in it.
[00:16:09] There is more to this, though.
[00:16:11] He has also been given command of the Presidential Guard, an elite 500-man unit. In practical terms, this means he has military control over the country.
[00:16:26] Now, Abdallah is still nominally president. He gives speeches, receives foreign dignitaries, travels abroad to represent the Comoros at international meetings.
[00:16:36] But the man who actually holds the power is the one commanding the Presidential Guard.
[00:16:44] And not only this.
[00:16:45] Denard has business interests across the islands. He owns a private security firm, which holds contracts to protect South African-funded hotels that are being built on the islands. He operates a profitable commercial air shuttle between the Comoros and apartheid South Africa, which was heavily sanctioned at the time.
[00:17:08] When journalists visit and ask him about his role, he is charming and unhelpful. He talks about his farm. He talks about his family. He is a Comorian now, he says. He deflects questions about the coup, about his mercenary past and about the true nature of his authority.
[00:17:30] One reporter describes him as looking less like a mercenary warlord than a prosperous farmer who just so happens to own a great deal of land.
[00:17:41] But by 1989, the arrangement is beginning to crack.
[00:17:47] Abdallah has been president for eleven years. He is older, and he has started to believe, perhaps with some justification, that he has built enough of a constituency to govern without Denard at his side.
[00:18:04] He signs a decree ordering the Presidential Guard to be disarmed and integrated into the regular armed forces.
[00:18:14] It is a direct challenge. If the decree goes through, Denard loses his military dominance over the islands. His five hundred men become soldiers in someone else's army. He becomes just a man on a farm with a Comorian name and a complicated past.
[00:18:36] On the 26th of November 1989, Ahmed Abdallah is sitting in his office at the presidential palace.
[00:18:45] A shot is fired.
[00:18:47] Abdallah is dead, while Denard is wounded in the hand.
[00:18:53] The official account is that a military officer, acting alone and without orders, entered the office and opened fire. Denard, loyal Bob Denard, managed to return fire but could not save the president.
[00:19:10] Now, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that this official version is a fabrication, and suspicion has long fallen on Denard. When he was eventually tried in France in 1999 for the killing, he was acquitted, for lack of direct evidence.
[00:19:31] In any case, this time, France decides that Denard has gone too far.
[00:19:38] French paratroopers fly to the Comoros. They do not arrest Denard, but they make it very clear that now is the time to go.
[00:19:48] He boards a plane for South Africa.
[00:19:51] He is sixty years old. He has children in the Comoros. He has a farm. He has a name, Said Moustapha M'Hadjou, that he has been using for over a decade.
[00:20:03] And he is forced to leave it all behind.
[00:20:07] Now, if you had thought that was the end of the story for Bob Denard, no, there is more.
[00:20:15] In 1995, aged sixty-six years old, he sets sail for the Comoros, along with thirty-three fellow mercenaries, for what will be his fourth and final coup in the Comoros Islands.
[00:20:30] Denard and his thirty-three men take the country in a matter of hours.
[00:20:37] The sitting president, Said Mohamed Djohar, is removed from power.
[00:20:43] But Denard hasn't reckoned on one thing. The world has moved on.
[00:20:49] France has changed.
[00:20:51] In 1978, France needed him in the Comoros, or so its politicians may have felt. In 1989, France wanted him out but was willing to be polite about it.
[00:21:04] In 1995, things are very different.
[00:21:08] The Cold War is over. The old logic of Françafrique might not have disappeared completely, but it has shifted. A French mercenary staging a coup in a small island nation is no longer a quiet intelligence asset. It's an embarrassment, reported on by journalists, criticised in the European press, and impossible to deny.
[00:21:36] On the 4th of October, six days after the coup, French paratroopers land on Grande Comore. The operation is called Azalée.
[00:21:47] There is no fighting.
[00:21:50] Denard knows what this means. The army that has, for most of his career, backed him quietly from a distance is now facing him directly. He surrenders at three in the morning on the 5th of October, and he is flown to Paris.
[00:22:08] He is charged, tried and convicted of belonging to a criminal conspiracy. In June 2006, he is sentenced to five years in prison. The sentence is suspended and he will serve no time.
[00:22:24] He dies on the 13th of October 2007, aged seventy-eight.
[00:22:31] And as for the Comoros Islands, it remains one of the poorest and least developed countries in the world.
[00:22:39] Now, Bob Denard is not responsible for all of the woes of the Comoros Islands. He was, after all, a product of a system, a system that tacitly supported what he was doing, as long as it was useful to its interests.
[00:22:54] But it's hard to make the claim that he helped.
[00:22:58] Four coups, multiple presidents ousted, two presidents dead in suspicious circumstances.
[00:23:05] It's hardly surprising people called him “the wolf of the Indian Ocean”.
[00:23:11] OK then, that is it for today's episode.
[00:23:14] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:23:17] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:23:21] Have you heard of the Comoros Islands before? Have you ever been there?
[00:23:25] Let me know in the comments below, if you're listening to this somewhere where you can comment, and for the members among you, you can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:23:39] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:23:45] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to the Comoros Islands, a tiny, remote archipelago in the Indian Ocean which became the unlikely setting for one of the strangest stories of the twentieth century.
[00:00:36] It's the story of a French mercenary who staged four coups in the same country, converted to Islam, took a new name, built a farm, was shot in the head twice, controlled the entire country from behind the scenes for over a decade, but then it all went terribly wrong.
[00:00:56] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:02] I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I imagine you might not know all that much about the Comoros Islands.
[00:01:11] If you could place them on a map, you're probably ahead of most people.
[00:01:16] They are the small group of islands in the Indian Ocean, about halfway between Madagascar and Mozambique, off the eastern coast of Africa.
[00:01:28] They are pretty small, roughly the size of London, and have this volcanic landscape: steep peaks, dense jungle, and black lava fields.
[00:01:41] Culturally, they have been shaped by centuries of African, Arab, and French influence. Traders and settlers landed and made their bases over the years, and in 1886, France took formal control of the islands. It would govern them as part of its overseas empire for nearly ninety years.
[00:02:05] But by the early 1970s, independence was clearly coming, and this corner of the Indian Ocean was about to become the setting for something far less peaceful.
[00:02:21] In 1973, the French government and the Comorian leaders had reached an agreement: there would be a referendum the following year.
[00:02:31] And sure enough, the referendum was held in 1974, with an overwhelming majority voting for independence.
[00:02:42] But one of the four islands, Mayotte, did not vote for independence, instead preferring to remain part of France.
[00:02:54] This kicked off new discussions, more complications that we don't need to go into for this story, but the thing to understand is this: France was still dragging its feet, and the head of the government under the territorial system, a man named Ahmed Abdallah, decided he had had enough.
[00:03:19] On the 6th of July 1975, he stood before the Comorian parliament and declared independence, unilaterally, without waiting for France's blessing.
[00:03:34] France was not best pleased.
[00:03:37] It didn't immediately recognise the new country, and it withdrew most of its financial support.
[00:03:45] And Ahmed Abdallah, well, he didn't last a month.
[00:03:50] After 27 days, he had been booted out of office in a coup led by a French mercenary called Robert Denard.
[00:04:00] Now, we will come to the coup, and the other coups, in a minute, but first let me paint you a picture of Robert Denard.
[00:04:10] He was born in 1929, in a small village in the Gironde, in southwest France.
[00:04:18] He was not from a military family, and he had no formal military education to speak of. But what he did have, from a young age, was a taste for action and a very flexible relationship with the idea of loyalty.
[00:04:37] He joined the French Navy as a young man, and then like hundreds of thousands of other young French men, served during the First Indochina War.
[00:04:49] So far, nothing particularly outrageous.
[00:04:53] He had clearly started to go down a slightly different path, however, as he was convicted of plotting to assassinate the French Prime Minister in 1954, and sentenced to 14 months in jail.
[00:05:09] On his release, he tried his hand at a more conventional life, becoming a salesman, but it wasn't for him. Life outside of Metropolitan France, it seemed, offered more excitement, more opportunities for adventure.
[00:05:27] He joined the colonial police in Morocco.
[00:05:30] And by the early 1960s, he had found his way into a very different kind of work.
[00:05:38] The Congo was falling apart.
[00:05:41] Belgium had granted the Congo independence in 1960, and within weeks the country was in crisis. Separatist movements, rival governments, a military that could barely hold itself together, and a prime minister who had been assassinated with the involvement of both Belgian and American intelligence.
[00:06:04] Into this chaos came a new kind of professional.
[00:06:08] The mercenary. And of course, Robert Denard.
[00:06:13] He arrived in 1961, after being recruited by a fellow Frenchman to fight for the secessionists. He was thirty-two years old, and it seemed that he had found his calling.
[00:06:28] Over the next fifteen years he fought in the Congo, in Biafra during the Nigerian Civil War, in Yemen, Benin, Chad and Angola. He organised coups, he trained militias, he led men into battle across half a continent. There is little record of the details of what he actually did, for obvious reasons, but given how long he did it for, how in demand he was, and that he survived for so long, he must have been pretty good at it.
[00:07:03] And almost everywhere he went, he had something he could count on: the quiet backing, the implicit approval, of France.
[00:07:15] This was part of the French government's system of Françafrique.
[00:07:21] The idea was simple: France would maintain its influence over its former African colonies not through direct rule, since that era was over, but through money, intelligence, and when necessary, through men like Bob Denard.
[00:07:41] And the mastermind of this, or rather the man with a direct line to both the French President and a vast network of informants, fixers, businessmen, and mercenaries, was called Jacques Foccart.
[00:07:57] He was reportedly known as Monsieur Afrique, or Mr Africa.
[00:08:03] Whenever something needed to be done in Africa, Foccart knew who to call. Importantly, this was always at an arm's length from the official government. Always with plausible deniability.
[00:08:20] And Bob Denard was one of Foccart's most reliable instruments.
[00:08:26] Now, Denard was not especially ideological, as will become apparent. He fought for whoever was paying, as long as the politics broadly aligned with French interests.
[00:08:40] What he wanted was action, autonomy, and money. For most of his life, he had all three.
[00:08:48] And even when things went wrong, he rarely paid the price.
[00:08:53] He was seriously injured four times, and was shot in the head twice. But he survived.
[00:09:02] In January 1977, he led a coup attempt in Benin that collapsed after three hours. A French court later sentenced him in absentia to five years' imprisonment, and a Beninese court gave him the death penalty.
[00:09:18] But neither sentence troubled him particularly.
[00:09:22] And this was a theme in his life; by the time he got into trouble, if he was ever caught and sentenced, he would be long gone.
[00:09:31] By 1975, he was forty-six years old, with bullet scars dotted over his body and a mercenary's career already behind him that most soldiers couldn't match in two lifetimes.
[00:09:45] Then someone called him about the Comoros.
[00:09:50] So, it is the 3rd of August 1975. Ahmed Abdallah has been president of the Comoros for twenty-seven days.
[00:10:00] Bob Denard arrives with a small group of mercenaries and removes him from power.
[00:10:07] The operation is almost comically swift. Abdallah is put on a plane to Paris. His government is dissolved. The whole thing is over before most Comorians have understood what has happened.
[00:10:22] Denard has been hired by a coalition of opposition political parties called the United National Front, six groups united mainly in wanting Abdallah gone. Their man, a figure named Said Mohamed Jaffar, is installed as president.
[00:10:40] He lasts five months.
[00:10:43] The problem is that the United National Front was always a loose arrangement. Among its members is a more radical faction, led by a socialist named Ali Soilih. Soilih has ideas. Very radical ideas, and no interest in sharing power with Jaffar, whom he considers too moderate, too willing to appease France.
[00:11:10] In January 1976, Soilih pushes Jaffar aside in another internal coup. And France cuts what little financial support it has left.
[00:11:23] And Ali Soilih, well he is an unconventional leader in almost every sense.
[00:11:30] In one of his first acts, he orders the burning of the French colonial archives, a dramatic, symbolic rejection of the old order. He nationalises land. He promotes the removal of the veil among women. He legalises cannabis, a drug he is personally a heavy user of.
[00:11:53] And he creates a youth militia.
[00:11:56] He calls them the Moissy. They are teenagers, trained by Tanzanian military advisers and armed with AK-47 rifles. He lowers the voting age to fourteen. He is a big fan of Chairman Mao, and this is his version of Mao's Red Guards, a cultural revolution in miniature, on three small volcanic islands in the Indian Ocean.
[00:12:24] The Moissy, as you might imagine, do not cover themselves in glory.
[00:12:30] Meanwhile, Soilih is losing his grip on reality.
[00:12:35] He is drinking heavily. He is using drugs. And he has begun consulting a witchdoctor for advice on matters of state.
[00:12:45] And this witchdoctor has some bad news for him: he tells Soilih that he will be overthrown by a white man with a black dog.
[00:12:57] Now, were I the sort of person who believed in prophecies from witchdoctors, I think I'd probably focus on the man rather than the dog part.
[00:13:07] Soilih, however, seemed more concerned about the canine aspect. He orders a campaign to kill every single dog on the Comoros Islands.
[00:13:18] The islands are scoured. Dogs are found and killed in large numbers. It does not, as you might imagine, resolve the underlying problem.
[00:13:30] And by 1978, the islands are in a pretty poor place: economically broken, starved of French support, and struggling to maintain any semblance of public order.
[00:13:45] Ahmed Abdallah, who has been living in Paris and plotting his return, he decides now is the time to take his country back.
[00:13:54] And the man he wants to help him is Bob Denard, the very same Bob Denard who removed him from power back in 1975.
[00:14:06] Fortunately for Abdallah, Bob Denard is more interested in getting paid than in holding a grudge, and he is more than happy to oblige.
[00:14:17] In May 1978, in the dead of night, a boat arrives off the coast of Grande Comore, the largest of the Comoros Islands.
[00:14:28] Denard steps ashore with fifty men, most of them former French paratroopers. He even, according to one report, brings a black dog with him, ensuring that the witchdoctor's prophecy will come true.
[00:14:46] The operation takes a matter of hours. Soilih's forces collapse almost without a fight, and Soilih is placed under house arrest.
[00:14:57] Sixteen days later, however, he is shot dead, reportedly while trying to escape, although few people believe it.
[00:15:06] Ahmed Abdallah is reinstated as president.
[00:15:10] And as for Bob Denard, well, something surprising happens.
[00:15:17] You might have thought this was just another contract for Bob Denard, and that he would be on the first plane out, waiting for his phone to ring and off on the next mission.
[00:15:28] No.
[00:15:29] Denard does not go home.
[00:15:32] He stays.
[00:15:33] He becomes a Comorian citizen. He converts to Islam. He takes a new name: Said Moustapha M'Hadjou. He marries a Comorian woman. Then another. And another. By the end, he will have seven wives and eight children.
[00:15:52] He builds a farm. 1,800 acres of volcanic land, growing crops, raising livestock. He becomes, by all accounts, a genuine farmer, someone who gets up early and knows his land and takes pride in it.
[00:16:09] There is more to this, though.
[00:16:11] He has also been given command of the Presidential Guard, an elite 500-man unit. In practical terms, this means he has military control over the country.
[00:16:26] Now, Abdallah is still nominally president. He gives speeches, receives foreign dignitaries, travels abroad to represent the Comoros at international meetings.
[00:16:36] But the man who actually holds the power is the one commanding the Presidential Guard.
[00:16:44] And not only this.
[00:16:45] Denard has business interests across the islands. He owns a private security firm, which holds contracts to protect South African-funded hotels that are being built on the islands. He operates a profitable commercial air shuttle between the Comoros and apartheid South Africa, which was heavily sanctioned at the time.
[00:17:08] When journalists visit and ask him about his role, he is charming and unhelpful. He talks about his farm. He talks about his family. He is a Comorian now, he says. He deflects questions about the coup, about his mercenary past and about the true nature of his authority.
[00:17:30] One reporter describes him as looking less like a mercenary warlord than a prosperous farmer who just so happens to own a great deal of land.
[00:17:41] But by 1989, the arrangement is beginning to crack.
[00:17:47] Abdallah has been president for eleven years. He is older, and he has started to believe, perhaps with some justification, that he has built enough of a constituency to govern without Denard at his side.
[00:18:04] He signs a decree ordering the Presidential Guard to be disarmed and integrated into the regular armed forces.
[00:18:14] It is a direct challenge. If the decree goes through, Denard loses his military dominance over the islands. His five hundred men become soldiers in someone else's army. He becomes just a man on a farm with a Comorian name and a complicated past.
[00:18:36] On the 26th of November 1989, Ahmed Abdallah is sitting in his office at the presidential palace.
[00:18:45] A shot is fired.
[00:18:47] Abdallah is dead, while Denard is wounded in the hand.
[00:18:53] The official account is that a military officer, acting alone and without orders, entered the office and opened fire. Denard, loyal Bob Denard, managed to return fire but could not save the president.
[00:19:10] Now, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that this official version is a fabrication, and suspicion has long fallen on Denard. When he was eventually tried in France in 1999 for the killing, he was acquitted, for lack of direct evidence.
[00:19:31] In any case, this time, France decides that Denard has gone too far.
[00:19:38] French paratroopers fly to the Comoros. They do not arrest Denard, but they make it very clear that now is the time to go.
[00:19:48] He boards a plane for South Africa.
[00:19:51] He is sixty years old. He has children in the Comoros. He has a farm. He has a name, Said Moustapha M'Hadjou, that he has been using for over a decade.
[00:20:03] And he is forced to leave it all behind.
[00:20:07] Now, if you had thought that was the end of the story for Bob Denard, no, there is more.
[00:20:15] In 1995, aged sixty-six years old, he sets sail for the Comoros, along with thirty-three fellow mercenaries, for what will be his fourth and final coup in the Comoros Islands.
[00:20:30] Denard and his thirty-three men take the country in a matter of hours.
[00:20:37] The sitting president, Said Mohamed Djohar, is removed from power.
[00:20:43] But Denard hasn't reckoned on one thing. The world has moved on.
[00:20:49] France has changed.
[00:20:51] In 1978, France needed him in the Comoros, or so its politicians may have felt. In 1989, France wanted him out but was willing to be polite about it.
[00:21:04] In 1995, things are very different.
[00:21:08] The Cold War is over. The old logic of Françafrique might not have disappeared completely, but it has shifted. A French mercenary staging a coup in a small island nation is no longer a quiet intelligence asset. It's an embarrassment, reported on by journalists, criticised in the European press, and impossible to deny.
[00:21:36] On the 4th of October, six days after the coup, French paratroopers land on Grande Comore. The operation is called Azalée.
[00:21:47] There is no fighting.
[00:21:50] Denard knows what this means. The army that has, for most of his career, backed him quietly from a distance is now facing him directly. He surrenders at three in the morning on the 5th of October, and he is flown to Paris.
[00:22:08] He is charged, tried and convicted of belonging to a criminal conspiracy. In June 2006, he is sentenced to five years in prison. The sentence is suspended and he will serve no time.
[00:22:24] He dies on the 13th of October 2007, aged seventy-eight.
[00:22:31] And as for the Comoros Islands, it remains one of the poorest and least developed countries in the world.
[00:22:39] Now, Bob Denard is not responsible for all of the woes of the Comoros Islands. He was, after all, a product of a system, a system that tacitly supported what he was doing, as long as it was useful to its interests.
[00:22:54] But it's hard to make the claim that he helped.
[00:22:58] Four coups, multiple presidents ousted, two presidents dead in suspicious circumstances.
[00:23:05] It's hardly surprising people called him “the wolf of the Indian Ocean”.
[00:23:11] OK then, that is it for today's episode.
[00:23:14] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:23:17] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:23:21] Have you heard of the Comoros Islands before? Have you ever been there?
[00:23:25] Let me know in the comments below, if you're listening to this somewhere where you can comment, and for the members among you, you can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:23:39] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:23:45] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
