Paul Fauvet
27 October 2008
analysis
Maputo — Apartheid may have died 14 years ago, but some of the Mozambican press still worship at its defunct altars.
The latest issue of the far-right weekly "Zambeze" once again accuses of "disinformation" those who do not accept the apartheid version of the 1986 plane crash that killed Mozambique's first president, Samora Machel and 33 others,
Every year, when the anniversary of the crash at Mbuzini, just inside South Africa, come round, "Zambeze" and its sister publication, the daily newsheet "Canal de Mocambique", can be relied upon to regurgitate the conclusions of the apartheid regime's own whitewash of an inquiry, which predictably blamed the dead Soviet pilot, and rejected all evidence pointing to the involvement of the apartheid military.
This would hardly be worth commenting on, were it not for the fact that this year "Zambeze" chooses to drag my name into its article, claiming that I do not anything about the South African radar system. Because I have written that the apartheid regime, through its powerful radar systems, was quite capable of tracking Machel's Tupolev-134, and thus of avoiding the accident, had it so chosen, I am accused of not knowing the difference between radar stations used to detect violations of air space and those used for air traffic control.
"Zambeze" fails to inform its readers that AIM's investigations into the capacities of the South African radars did not take place yesterday, but was written in 1986, within weeks of the crash, and in direct response to lies told by the then South African Foreign Minister Pik Botha.
It was Botha who, in a television interview on 1 November 1986, tried to explain away the behaviour of the South African radar operators. According to Botha, Machel's flight "just disappeared from the screen, No-one monitoring that radar could or would have imagined that here was anything strange about it".
"Every radar station has what we call an horizon beyond which it cannot see any object", said Botha. "You cannot see an aircraft once it has passed over a mountain for instance, and is on the other side".
"There are quite a number of flights in that vicinity of the Kruger Park and so on", he continued. So the radar operators "must be seeing virtually all the flights fading or disappearing at one stage or another".
In this thoroughly dishonest interview, Botha would have his listeners believe that there was a heavy amount of traffic around the Mozambique/South Africa border at 21.00 on a Sunday night (in fact, as far as is known, the Tupolev was the only aircraft in the area that night) and that the radars lost the presidential plane when it slipped behind a hill. Thus Botha painted a picture of a rather primitive and inefficient radar system.
It did not take AIM much time to find in the archives material showing that in fact the apartheid regime possessed a highly sophisticated, integrated military and civilian computer-assisted radar system, whose two prime purposes were to assist in South African air force strikes against the front line states, and to detect any plane entering South African airspace.
What is more, the South African press had written admiringly about the regime's radar capabilities. One of the main radar installations was at Mariepskop, 2,000 metres up, on the side of the Drakensburg mountains. On 8 February 1975, the Johannesburg "Star" wrote of Mariepskop: "Only metres away fromwhere the Drakensberg escarpment falls to the lowveld, the big scanner whirls silently around. It can pick up most aircraft movements from a large chunk of Botswana in the west, to Rhodesia in the north, to southern Mozambique and Natal in the east. Height finders are positioned nearby. They can calculate the height of any aircraft picked up by the scanner".
The information from the Mariepskop scanner was fed, in computerized form, to the headquarters of the apartheid radar defence system at Devon. "Virtually instant computer feedback from Devon can supply Mariepskop with the information needed to identify an aircraft . Besides Devon and Mariepskop, there are two other stations in the northern radar system, covering each other. The zones covered by the four stations overlap so that each base can see the one next door".
The computers at Devon try to work out if any intruding aircraft is hostile, the article continued, and, if they think it is, "the controllers at Devon can call on a whole range of defences, including Mirages and other jet fighters, surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft cannon"
Over the years the system became more sophisticated, notably through the acquisition of the Plessey AR-3D computerized radar system, which was integrated into the air defences in 1982. This was a fully mobile system, and, according to Plessey itself, the system "can be geographically arranged as needed to operate under command of the strategic HQ". It could be used for both offensive and surveillance purposes. Its inputs, Plessey boasted, "provide a complete picture of the air situation for the central command staff".
A complete picture. Not a picture with holes large enough for a Tuplev-134 to slip through.
Furthermore, the South African armed forces boasted of 24 hour surveillance of the border area. Paranoid about the possibility of a "communist attack", they ensured that there would be no holes in the radar system. The South African 1979 Defence White Paper put it this way: "The South African Air Force is constantly carrying out air reconnaissance. Various sensors are used in this process to obtain maximum information. Reconnaissance systems are constantly being modernized to keep abreast of operational requirements".
From documents in the public domain, it was clear that Botha was lying about South Africa's radar capability. South Africa kept the entire border area under radar surveillance, and thus the Tupolev was on the radar screens until the moment it crashed. The radar operators knew it was off course, knew it was heading directly into South African airspace, knew the mountains in the area presented a serious threat to the aircraft, yet no warning was given, no preventive action taken .
The computer centre at Devon would certainly have identified the plane as Machel's, After all, it was no secret that the President had gone to a summit in Zambia that day. The radars would have followed its outward journey, and would have caught it coming back.
Furthermore, South Africa even had a system of low altitude radars. Botha boasted about this publicly in March 1985, just 19 months before Mbuzini. This was supposed to monitor illegal flights, and one of the planes Botha said it followed landed on Inhaca island, in the bay of Maputo. In other words, these radars could even track planes down to sea level.
Yet by November 1986, Pik Botha had conveniently forgotten all his proud boasts about the regime's radar capacities. And the South African press censored itself: the material on the radars existed in its own archives, but it didn't want to use it.
In 1986 I wrote the following, and see no reason to change it now: "The South African authorities knew whose plane it was, they knew exactly where and when it crashed - yet they did not inform the Mozambican authorities for another ten and a half hours. The first message was sent to Maputo at 06.30 the following morning".
"Zambeze" also claims that I have "speculated" that the real intent of the South African military was to bring Machel's plane down in Swaziland. Its source for this is nothing that I have written, but an article that appeared on 20 October in the "Times of Swaziland", which claims that "Paul Fauvet recently articulated" the theory that the plane was intended to be shot down over Swaziland.
It seems peculiar that "Zambeze" needs to go to Swaziland to discover what an AIM journalist thinks or "speculates":. The "Zambeze" offices are about five minutes walking distance from AIM, and both possess telephones. Is it really too much to suggest that "Zambeze" talk to me rather than trying to guess my views from something that appeared in another country?
The "Times of Swaziland" article is written by a journalist named Innocent Maphalala, and I have no recollection of ever meeting or speaking to him. Whether his claim is truthful or not depends on how the word "recently" is defined.
For I did indeed once think it likely that the South African military wanted the plane to come down in Swaziland. Then they would simply have said "A Soviet manufactured plane, owned by Mozambique crashes in Swaziland - that's got nothing to do with us".
However this is no longer my view -the statements by Hans Louw, a former member of the apartheid death squad, the Civil Cooperation Bureau (CCB), make it probable that the plan was that the aircraft should crash in the Mbuzini area. Louw says he was a member of a clean-up team sent to the area to make sure than Machel was dead.
He first made these claims about six years ago, and has repeated them this year. He is a much more credible witness than Pik Botha, and his testimony needs to be taken seriously.
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