Making a killing: Israeli mercenaries in Cameroon

https://africanarguments.org/2020/0...es-in-cameroon/

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”.