>From air force technician to air-cowboy, Gert de Klerk is now challenging SAA. Stefaans BrUmmer reports
GERT de Klerk, the self-made millionaire head of Avia Airlines, South Africa’s only independent carrier to have secured a London passenger route, jump-started his career making clandestine cargo flights to Angolan rebel territory in the 1980s.
Seen by some as South Africa’s answer to Richard Branson, the flamboyant British boss of Virgin Airlines, De Klerk has challenged the might of South African Airways and obtained a licence to ply the lucrative London route three times a week. De Klerk has, in fact, been talking to Branson about possible co-operation.
Avia’s inaugural Boeing 747 flight to London’s Gatwick Airport took off last week amid great media fanfare. But what the media, including the Argus group newspapers, neglected to mention was that De Klerk is involved in one of South Africa’s largest defamation suits yet — he wants about R6-million from Argus’ Pretoria News which, he says, implicated him in post-1992 clandestine flights to Angolan rebels Unita.
South Africa officially renounced its earlier clandestine support of Unita after the rebels rejected their 1992 election defeat and resumed the war.
It has been established that De Klerk, a former South African Air Force (SAAF) technician, had close links with the South African military during the apartheid years — including an arms embargo-busting exercise on behalf of the SAAF between 1990 and November 1993.
De Klerk’s court challenge, instituted last year, followed a set of Pretoria News articles published early in 1993 when neighbouring countries claimed evidence of continued clandestine flights to Angola. The newspaper speculated that Unita was still being supplied from South Africa, contrary to official policy.
The Pretoria Supreme Court action is on hold pending an application by Pretoria News to the Constitutional Court for a decision on whether freedom of speech guarantees apply “horizontally” between private parties, rather than only “vertically” between the state and private parties.
De Klerk could not be reached for comment this week, but in preliminary legal proceedings did not dispute assertions that his air charter company Wonder Air flew pre-1992 clandestine missions on behalf of the old South African Defence Force (SADF) to Angola. De Klerk’s laywer, Braam van der Walt, refused to comment, saying the matter was sub judice. State documents in possession of prominent Johannesburg lawyers confirm Wonder Air flights during the 1980s to several destinations in Unita territory.
A senior officer of the South African National Defence Force’s intelligence branch has confirmed to the Mail & Guardian that De Klerk used to “fly for us”.
The flights would have formed part of South Africa’s unofficial participation in the Angolan war, on the side of Unita, in the 1970s and 1980s. Front companies and sympathetic private companies were used to disguise aspects of the SADF’s role.
One acknowledged front company that undertook such operations was Pasload Flights. It was disbanded together with the SADF’s notorious Directorate of Covert Collection in 1992 after a Goldstone Commission investigation. A former Pasload Flights pilot confirmed this week that Wonder Air had serviced Pasload aircraft, and Directorate of Civil Aviation registration records show that three Pasload DC3 transport aircraft were transferred from Wonder Air to Pasload in 1987 and 1988.
The SAAF this week confirmed that De Klerk had been involved in an arms embargo-busting excercise on its behalf, after Mail & Guardian inquiries about the transfer of two more DC3s from Wonder Air to the SAAF.
Directorate of Civil Aviation records show that the vintage DC3s, property of the SAAF, were registered in the name of Wonder Air in February 1990, only to be re-registered to the SAAF in November 1993.
A SAAF representative said the aircraft had been the prototypes in a SAAF programme to upgrade the aircraft from piston to turboprop-driven, a conversion for which Wonder Air held the local franchise. He said the registration of the aircraft to Wonder Air had been necessary “as a result of the (arms) embargo”.
Though the aircraft were re-registered with the SAAF in 1993, they still sport their civilian registration numbers and it appears that even after that re-registration they were still listed with the Directorate of Civil Aviation to be flown under the charter licence of Avia Air Charters, another of De Klerk’s companies and the holding company of Avia Airlines.
Neither the SAAF nor De Klerk’s lawyer Van der Walt could explain why it had been necessary to have the aircraft on Avia’s charter licence. The SAAF said the aircraft had never been used for charter work by either Wonder Air or
De Klerk this week visited Harare after an approach by the Zimbabwe Defence Force, which also wants its ageing DC3- fleet upgraded to turboprop. He reportedly has stakes in 17 companies, including a diamond concession in Angola. He owns a private airstrip, large enough to land DC3 and DC6 aircraft, next to the Pretoria-Pietersburg highway.
The chief of another air charter operation this week described De Klerk as “a maverick (who) gets the job done … with initiative and guts”.
An Avia insider said De Klerk “plays his business quite close to his chest”.
Aircraft specialist publication Aero Africa said last month: “Back in the good old days of covert cross-Kalahari flights into Jonas Savimbi’s Jamba, Gert de Klerk made an adventurous living using ancient Douglas DC6 freighters. Few of his crew are prepared to admit the flights ever took place, let alone divulge the nature of the cargo. Nowadays it’s the stuff of airport bar tales, forever anecdotal, forever shrouded in a cloak of mystery and mostly hidden from the media.”