Chris McGreal attends the bizarre trial of two Russian pilots in Kinshasa
THE judge rattled his bell in a vain attempt to restore order in the crowded Kinshasa courtroom. But most eyes were on the Zairean television reporter who had marched to the bench and fired off the question on many lips.
“Everybody knows these men are guilty. Why are you wasting everybody’s time?” he scolded a defence lawyer.
As a murmur of agreement swept the room, the two Russian defendants looked despondently about.
“You can’t just determine who’s guilty. You can’t prejudge,” their lawyer said.
Some spectators agreed, but only because they harboured theories of cover-ups, gun-running and even sorcery in the presidential palace.
In the dock stood Nicolai Kazarine and Andrei Gouskov, Russian pilots who had been in Zaire just three days in January when their cargo plane barely lifted off from the heart of Kinshasa before dropping back to earth in the midst of a bustling market at the end of the runway.
As the propellers carved their way through the stalls, 225 people died. The carnage was so complete that only 66 bodies were identified.
The prosecutor, Jean Mukenge Bisumbule, alleges that the old Soviet Antonov plane was travelling at barely half the required speed when it lifted off. Mukenge blames an excess of vodka for the pilots’ slow reactions.
Kazarine, dressed in a worn T-shirt, frayed track-suit bottoms and flip flops, denies he was drunk. He claims the plane was grossly overloaded by a Zairean official who falsified documents and has since disappeared.
“The prosecutor accused us of being drunk without any proof. All these attempts to abuse us are to divert the court from the real causes of the catastrophe. The company overloaded the plane and wants to blame us,” Kazarine said.
The Russians have been in jail for three months, supposedly to protect them from victims’ relatives. But some survivors who attend each session of the trial, usually held on one day a week, say the real criminals are government officials who permitted a market at the end of a runway. Others, such as Dimba Lutomadio, who saw her 65-year-old mother killed and her younger sister lose an arm, see a conspiracy.
“This trial is a masquerade. The lawyers are creating confusion so we do not find out what really happened. They were not taking it seriously so we stopped them outside here and told them we would burn their cars. Now they have admitted that the plane was chartered by a general close to President Mobutu. Now we want to know where that plane was going and what it was doing,” she said.
While the charter company, African Air, insists in court that the flight was carrying food to southern Zaire, the pilots say from their cells that they were on an illegal mission to deliver supplies to Unita rebels in Angola.
“African Air couldn’t file a flight plan to Angola because these flights are illegal. That’s why they gave our flight plan as Kahemba [in Zaire]. I’ve done it many times before, but I don’t know if there were weapons on board – we didn’t check the boxes,” Kazarine said.
But the word in Kinshasa’s shanty towns is that President Mobutu sese Seko engineered the plane crash as part of some ritual Satanic sacrifice to bolster his power. The president is also blamed for a series of bus crashes, a train wreck and even a cholera outbreak.