Mercenaries

A grizzled, limping soldier of fortune ended his latest power grab in Africa on Thursday by quietly leading his band of white mercenaries into French custody. The subdued surrender on the Comoro Islands off Africa's eastern coast came after a lightning invasion of French troops ended a short-lived coup by Bob Denard, two dozen mercenaries and about 300 allied Comoran soldiers.

A man in a dusty track suit elbowed his way through the crowd that had formed as soon as U.S. soldiers pulled up in this war-damaged village on Baghdad's southern outskirts. The man, who gave his name as Nasir, told the soldiers that he used to earn a living as a wedding singer. But the masked gunmen who took over Hawr Rajab in the name of their austere version of Islam considered such work sacrilegious and burned down his house.

Forget election promises, advertising, televised debates or even cheap mud-slinging and pork-barreling. The first thing you need to win an election in Nigeria is plenty of guys with guns. And nowhere are there more thugs for hire than here in the Niger Delta, where resentment of the government is high and the stakes are even higher -- it's home to the nation's vast oil reserves.

Mercenaries may be an answer in Darfur, as suggested by Max Boot (Opinion, May 31). But the real problems with U.N. efforts to stem violence in the world is the United States' stubborn refusal to consider the United Nations as anything other than a corrupt bureaucracy that caters to liberal causes and is ineffective in everything. The U.N. has not traditionally had the money, expertise or military wherewithal to effectively deal with the world's problems as it should. But the U.S. does.

Some of his critics called him a man without a nation in search of a good fight. Emilio Kosterlitzky was the classic soldier of fortune, a Russian imperial sailor who jumped ship to enlist in Mexico's army. He wound up working for the FBI in Prohibition-era Los Angeles, hunting down bootleggers and rumrunners. Born in a czarist Russian Army camp, he lies buried in an East Los Angeles cemetery.

Sixty suspected mercenaries detained in Zimbabwe have been charged with immigration and firearms violations, their lawyer said. They were among 70 men detained March 7 after authorities seized their airplane in Harare, the capital, and accused them of plotting a coup in Equatorial Guinea. Lawyer Jonathan Samkange said today that Zimbabwean law had no provision to charge the men with plotting a coup against the government of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo.

"U.S. Looks at Organizing Global Peacekeeping Force" (June 27) sees the new proposal as a shift by the Bush-Rumsfeld regime toward multilateralism. The concept would cast aside multilateral understandings developed over 50 years and embodied in cautious and realistic organizations such as NATO and the U.N. We would arrogantly cover our ears to the views and experience of "Old Europe." Instead, whenever a naive U.S. administration so desired, other people's lands would be occupied by a "coalition" of "New European" mercenaries willing to be our ground soldiers.

A band of mercenaries staged a predawn incursion in the Comoros off the coast of Mozambique on Wednesday, a defense official said. Government troops killed five of the attackers, he said. The unidentified assailants numbered between 15 and 30, said Mahamout Soilih. They were hooded and apparently armed. Troops managed to quell the incursion on Moheli island, he said. One government soldier was wounded, Soilih said. "Five bodies have been brought to Moroni.