Swashbuckling Coup in the Seychelles!

This past Sunday was the 21-year anniversary of a failed military coup in the Seychelles by a man nicknamed "Mad Mike." The Seychelles? Huh? Where's that?

Well I'm glad you asked, as the Seychelles is an archipelago in the Indian Ocean consisting of about 115 islands. In total, it has the smallest population of any African state.

The Seychelles

But on to the coup! Mike "Mad Mike" Hoare, the ringleader of the coup, was an Irish mercenary who had gained a reputation for himself in the Congo in the 1960s. With dubious involvement of South Africa and the US, on that day in 1981, he gathered a group of white middle-class mercenaries and dubbed them "Ye Ancient Order of Froth-Blowers," a beer-drinking rugby-playing group of gentlemen on vacation in the Seychelles. Little did the Seychellois (the demonyn for people from the Seychelles) know, but the bulky bags full of rugby balls intended for donation to children that the men carried had fake bottoms and were full of AK-47s.

"Mad Mike"

The men got on the plane that day intending to use those AKs to overthrow the government of socialist President France-Albert Rene, as overthrowing the socialists was pretty cool in the west back in those days.

Unfortunately for them, the last guy going through customs as they entered the Seychelles stuffed up and got his gun discovered. The customs agent ran away to sound the alarm and, in a burst of action movie fame, another man grabbed his disassembled AK-47, assembled it, loaded it, and shot the guy in the back before he could get away. Damn.

The mercenaries then found themselves in an extensive gun battle, so it became quickly clear that the mission had failed. So what did they do? An Air India jet full of passengers in the air above the airport had been told about the fighting but didn't have enough fuel to turn around, so landed in the Seychelles airport anyway. Mad Mike and his men negotiated a ceasefire and then hijacked the plane back to Durban. 

The following July, Mad Mike was sentenced to ten years in prison. His other colleagues got between six months and five years.

Random Kate Thoughts: Sometimes, truth is stranger than fiction. It would be really interesting to see a movie made about this some day. I love little stories like this, from places most people have never heard of, that are so exciting and full of intrigue! Every country has something interesting about it, even the tiny ones. :)