The Armed Missionary

Dressed in a tan safari suit with a military cut, he sat at a table in the well of the crowded courtroom. There was a long, ugly scar on the side of his face --mute testimony to his occupation. As TV floodlights played on his shaved head, his eyes glanced over the galleries as if in search of a friendly face. He found none--only an Arabic sign with a verse from the Koran: "If you are to judge someone, be fair."

Then, as paratroopers trained rifles at the defendant's chest, the prosecutor rose to address the five-member military tribunal in the sweltering Khartoum People's Court. "In the name of God," he declared, "Rolf Steiner is an enemy of humanity and of the African peoples in particular. You will not try the accused alone, but the evil ideas, the organizations and the imperialist countries that are still seeking to exploit the Third World and drain its resources by aiding and creating mutinies and waging civil strife."

Khaki-Clad Knight. The scene in the Khartoum courtroom last August was memorable for more than its drama. It marked the first time that a white mercenary had ever been brought to trial in Africa. Last week the tribunal rendered its verdict: the German-born Steiner, 42, was guilty of aiding the 15-year-old rebellion of black southern Sudanese against the northern Arab government. Steiner was sentenced to death, but President Jaafar Numeiry immediately commuted the sentence to 20 years' imprisonment.

One reason Steiner was treated with leniency was that, in a 50,000-word confession, he freely admitted his role as the Anyanya rebels' commander in chief. The borderline area that separates the black Christian south from the brown Muslim north has become the scene of international intrigue on a grand scale, he said. He implicated, in varying degrees, CIA operatives, Peace Corps people, British intelligence, relief organizations, the Roman Catholic Church, Israel, Ethiopia and Uganda. Through his German-speaking Sudanese lawyer, Steiner pleaded that he was not a cold hired killer but a kind of khaki-clad White Knight destined to right the wrongs of black Africa.

Wolf Cubs. Destiny has thwarted Steiner: in seven wars he has never been on the winning side. His first military experience was in the World War II Nazi "Wolf Cubs," a branch of the Hitler Youth. Two years after the war ended he ran away from a Catholic seminary and joined the French Foreign Legion. He saw action in Korea, Indochina, the Middle East and Algeria. Steiner next went to Biafra. "They wanted to play a little bit of war," he recalled recently, "so I went there to play war."

He played all right. Considered juju (good luck) by the Biafrans, he rode around in a white Mercedes with a death's-head pennant fluttering from its hood. Though a capable military commander, Steiner was regarded by observers as something between a borderline psychopath and a gleeful good Samaritan. To command attention from his troops, he would fire submachine-gun bursts into the ground at their feet.

But when he found a two-year-old Ibo child cowering in some bushes, its parents lying dead near by, he personally nursed the boy back to health. After keeping some Biafran army brasshats cooling their heels outside his caravan one night, Steiner emerged soaked with sweat and water. "I have been bathing my baby," he declared deadpan. In contrast to this episode, a trembling young Arab woman whom Steiner held captive in the Sudan testified at his trial that he had snatched her baby and thrown it in a river.

Steiner was kicked out of Biafra in 1968. The next year he entered the rebel territory in the southern Sudan by way of Uganda. Quickly winning the rebels' confidence, Steiner was made commander in chief. Late last year, when he illegally entered Uganda to catch a flight to Europe, he was arrested. Uganda's President Milton Obote --who was overthrown two weeks later --turned him over to the Sudanese government.

Superior Man. "He was really a freak in this profession," reflected one of Steiner's old Biafra mates recently in Nairobi. "As a kind of self-appointed messiah, he thought he had a mission to fight for African underdogs. The runaway scholar of divinity was seeing himself as a kind of armed missionary, the superior man from the superior race playing savior to the persecuted." With a little more juju, Steiner may yet be out in time to fight another war.

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