Bob Denard

Bob Denard was a French mercenary who took part in coups in the Comoros four times across twenty years, and the question of whose instructions he was following has never been fully answered. He was born Gilbert Bourgeaud in the Gironde, served in the navy in Indochina, was imprisoned briefly for a plot against a French prime minister in Morocco, and found his trade in Katanga in 1961 fighting for the secession against the United Nations. He fought in Yemen, Biafra, Angola, Rhodesia and Benin. His long association was with the Comoros: in 1975 he overthrew Ahmed Abdallah weeks after independence and installed Ali Soilih; in 1978 he came back, killed Soilih and restored Abdallah, then stayed to run the presidential guard as effectively the second man in the country for eleven years, converting to Islam and taking the name Said Mustapha M'Hadju. Abdallah died in 1989 in a shooting in which Denard's guard was implicated, and French pressure removed him to South Africa. He returned in 1995 with thirty men to depose President Djohar, and France sent a thousand troops to arrest him. He was tried repeatedly in Paris and convicted late, receiving suspended sentences; the courts heard consistent evidence that French services had at minimum tolerated his operations, which was the informal instrument of policy known as Francafrique. He was found guilty in 2006 over the 1995 coup and was too ill with Alzheimer's to serve the sentence. He died the following year. He held several passports and used at least a dozen working names across his career. French governments of both left and right declined to prosecute him for decades, and the trials only became possible after the Cold War removed the argument that he was containing Soviet influence. He wrote memoirs that are unreliable on precisely the points that matter.

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