Sir G�s death rekindles memories of Samora Machel�s plane disaster
Correspondent | Friday August 15, 2014 15:24
Motswaledi died in a car accident on July 30 and was buried on August 8, 2014.
‘Sir G’ (as he was fondly called by a legion of admirers) and I last met at the Gaborone Club where he was in a group of soccer enthusiasts who often frequented the social evening football games.
Smiling as always, he greeted everyone he found chatting in the clubhouse, bought his soft drinks and left the room, trotting back to the playing field like an Olympic athlete on a victory lap before a cheering crowd of spectators.
His sudden death in what some regard as suspicious circumstances, as he returned from a business trip in South Africa, reminded me of the death and controversy that arose when Mozambican president Samora Machel died in a ‘mysterious’ plane crash in October 1986.
On that day it had been officially announced in Lusaka that Zambian airspace would be closed to both domestic and international aviation. No reasons were given for the move then.
But it soon emerged that ‘Frontline’ heads of state who included presidents Kenneth Kaunda and Samora Machel, were holding a secret meeting at Kasaba Bay, a tourist resort in northern Zambia.
(I am not sure if Sir Ketumile Masire, who was also a key member of the group, was in attendance).
It was at the height of the civil war in Angola.
So the purpose of the urgent meeting was to try to persuade then president Mobutu Sese Seko’s Zairean (now Congo DR) government to stop the supplies of military weapons from passing through his territory. They were being sent to Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA rebels who were fighting a guerrilla war against President Eduardo dos Santos’ legitimate government in Luanda.
I was by then working as chief sub-editor of the Times of Zambia based in Ndola. We were on duty that afternoon – it was around 3.30pm, I think - when we heard the sound of an approaching aircraft from the north as it flew over the city on its way to Lusaka.
A colleague remarked that since Zambian airspace had been declared closed, the plane could only be transporting the presidents who had been meeting.
At around 6.30pm, as I was checking telex machines for foreign news reports from international news agencies, I saw a ‘News Flash’ by Reuters from London, announcing that, “The plane carrying Mozambican president Samora Machel from a meeting in northern Zambia, has crashed in South African territory. He is feared to have died”.
All of us in the News Room were ‘unanimous’ that South Africa’s apartheid regime under P W Botha was responsible given the fact that Foreign Minister Roelof ‘Pik’ Botha and police commissioner, General Johan Goetzee, were the first people to arrive at the scene of the plane crash and had allegedly identified Machel’s body by his military cap.
Reports said the Mozambican president’s aircraft came down some 200 metres inside South African territory, near the west point of Maputo where the borders of Mozambique, Swaziland and South Africa meet. Later reports stated that the Soviet-built jet hit a hillside moments before it was expected to land at Maputo airport, and pilot error was initially thought to be the cause of the crash.
News of Machel’s death was first publicly made known by P W Botha on October 20, when he issued a statement in Pretoria, expressing his ‘deep regret and profound shock’, and describing Machel’s death as the loss of ‘an outstanding leader’.
The death of 34 of the 39 passengers and crew was later confirmed by one of the survivors - the Soviet flight engineer, whom South African government authorities had in fact assumed was the pilot.
A South African radio named 16 of the dead who had been identified at the time.
Machel was formally announced dead locally on Mozambique radio in the evening of October 20 by Frelimo Political Bureau member Marcelino dos Santos. By then the news that the president’s aircraft was missing and that he was feared dead, had already reached the country, where people were in mourning.
Machel’s body was flown back to Maputo by helicopter, and he was given a state funeral on October 28.
Born in Gaza province in 1933, Machel had been Mozambique’s president since 1975 when the country gained its independence from Portugal. He had emerged leader of Frelimo in July 1969 after the assassination of its founder, Eduardo Mondlane.
The Frelimo political bureau announced a 14-man commission of inquiry into the cause of the crash on October 22. In the meantime, delegations from Mozambique and the Soviet Union arrived in South Africa to arrange for the decoding of the aircraft’s flight recorders.
After negotiations with South Africa over the release of the ‘black box’ flight recorders into Soviet hands, it was agreed that only one of the four would be sent to Moscow for expert analysis while the remaining three would be opened in neutral territory.
So the contents of the three recorders were examined in Zurich, Switzerland, n November 24 to 26 by experts from South Africa, the Soviet Union and Mozambique, with assistance from Swiss technicians and International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) representatives.
Reacting to Machel’s death when he spoke at a summit of frontline states, Kaunda declared that, “a number of our governments hold the South African government directly responsible for the tragedy until they prove the contrary”.
He referred to ‘circumstantial evidence’ to support their belief, particularly the fact that the Tupolev aircraft was monitored on South African radar from take-off in Mpala until the time of the crash. He also suggested the possibility that the ‘plane had been tampered with electronically in order to take it off course’.
For his part, Foreign Minister Joaquim Chissano, who was later elected Machel’s successor, said “armed banditry and apartheid” were the main culprits of the incident.
Other observers suggested that pilot error was a probable cause; weather conditions were also cited, but at the time of the crash these were said to have been favourable. Media houses in South Africa, the Cape Times in particular, highlighted the following factors:
The aircraft’s landing gear had been lowered in preparation for the descent to Maputo airport and the position of the aircraft impact suggested that the pilot had been expecting to land immediately;
After impact, there was no fire, as is usually the case in aircraft crashes;
The presence of a radian beacon at Namakwa may have been mistaken by the pilot for that of Maputo;
The pilot may have confused the lights of Maputo with those of Komatipoort (in South Africa);
Pilots in nearby Swaziland claimed to have overheard a radio conversation at about the same time of the crash which would have indicated the pilot was off course; and the efficacy of the navigational aids at Maputo airport was “believed to be in doubt”.
Finally the South African government suggested that the aircraft’s radar equipment was possibly obsolete, and may have “malfunctioned in the thunderstorm”, which was reported in the area on the night of the crash. The aircraft was reportedly manufactured in 1980 and Mozambican aviation experts denied claims of obsolescence.
Denying complicity in Machel’s death, foreign minister Pik Botha gave a detailed version of events, alleging, among other things, that alcohol had been found in the blood of at least two Soviet crewmembers during autopsies. Botha maintained that the Tupolev’s equipment was ‘dated and obsolete, and that the crew, in not adequately reading the instruments available to them, showed a serious lack of professionalism’.
The South African Foreign Minister further claimed that the aircraft was not equipped with an automatic ground proximity warning system, and the instruments showed that the jet was ‘locked-in’ to the Maputo radio beacon when in fact it was still 74kms from Maputo.
Botha added that the crew had been in verbal communication with the Maputo air traffic controllers.
However, despite these exculpatory assertions, most people across the globe remained unconvinced, I remember.
They felt strongly that the South Africans, with the help of their ‘cousins’ next door in rebel Rhodesia, could have ‘engineered’ the crash in the mistaken belief that a systematic ‘elimination’ of radical leaders like Machel, would slow down or even halt the liberation war that was being waged by Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress’s (ANC) Umkhonto Wesizwe and Robert Mugabe’s ZANLA forces operating from Mozambique.
This kind of thinking could not at the time be dismissed as far-fetched, given the apartheid regime’s policy of ‘hot-pursuit’. Under this policy South African and Rhodesian forces were unleashed on ‘search and destroy’ operations into neighbouring countries seen as ‘harbouring terrorists’.
For instance, in 1985 – a year before Machel’s mysterious plane crash - South African commandos raided Gaborone, killing 14 people and injuring many others.
This was despite repeated assurances by President Ketumile Masire and his government that Botswana did not harbour any of the so-called terrorists.
Similarly, Rhodesian Selous Scouts also invaded Botswana and killed Batswana in Lesoma near Kasane.
The release of Mandela in 1990 and the subsequent 1994 all-race elections did wonders to stabilise the southern African region.
But be that as it may, little or nothing much, from what I remember, seems to have been done to clarify the controversy surrounding Samora Machel’s death. Was he (like Sir G) a victim of circumstance? Only time will tell. (Sila Press Agency)
ALFRED MULENGA
Correspondent