Unita’
John Grobler, Tangeni Amupadhi and Chris Gordon
Details emerged this week of a large consignment for South African military vehicle (SAMil) all-terrain trucks, allegedly flown to Angola in violation of a United Nations arms embargo by a South African company, Interstate Airways.
The tough SAMil trucks, developed exclusively by the state arms conglomerate Denel under battle conditions in northern Namibia during the 1980s, have long formed the logistical backbone for the rural-based Unita movement.
The origin of the reconditioned military trucks may cause red faces in South Africa’s arms industry.
If Denel – one of very few possible sources – supplied them, it would be in contravention of South African government policy.
The fleet of trucks – thought to be part of a R32-million order for logistical and related military equipment – was apparently flown out of Mmabatho airport during 18 days of operations in December last year by Interstate Airways, various sources in the aviation industry said.
The company is owned by Johnny Perreira, who has been held incommunicado in Luanda central prison since January along with four other South Africans.
His alleged deal was crash-landed under curious circumstances when a DC-4, chartered from a Belgian company by Perreira and carrying construction material, was forced down over Menongue in south-eastern Angola on January 20.
Well-placed sources said the DC-4, flown by pilot Peter Bietske, was intercepted within minutes of entering Angolan airspace by short-range aircraft, Albatross R-139s.
With no radar available in the Unita stronghold of Cuando Cubango, the Angolan Air Force would have had to have advance warning that the plane, flying out of Maun, Botswana, was on its way.
Although he could not be reached for comment, former Executive Outcomes pilot Carlos da Silva was identified as one of the pilots which shot down the DC-4.
The two other aircraft used in the mission were also flown by former Executive Outcomes pilots, all of them speaking Afrikaans during the interception operation.
The eight men were held for 12 days in Menongue before being flown to the former Executive Outcomes operational base at Cabo Ledo, about 120km south of Luanda, and then moved to the capital city.
Reports emanating from Luanda security circles shortly after the plane was captured said that Bietske “was singing like a canary”, confessing to more than 300 covert flights into Angola to supply Unita at Bailundo and Andulo.
Serious questions were also raised about why Bietske changed flight co-ordinates shortly after take-off from Maun, which took him within range of the official military airfield of Menongue.
Bietske and two of his crew members have since been released by the Angolan authorities. Bietske, flight engineer Mark Jeffrey and co-pilot Heribert Stucke were flown at their own expense to South Africa six weeks ago, and are thought to be in Cape Town.
But a wider and more international effort at closing down covert arms supplies to Unita – using Executive Outcomes staff – also points in the direction of the UN, affirming allegations that the UN has for a long time possessed a list of South Africans planes used to violate its embargo on fuel and arms to Unita.
Earlier this week, Kenyan ambassador Njuguna Muhugo, who is responsible at the UN headquarters in New York for monitoring the arms embargo against Unita, was quoted in the international press as saying that illegal flights into Angola had been severely reduced over the last few months.
In December last year, there had been 186 illegal flights out of South Africa into Angola, he said, but this has been reduced to about 40 flights for January to February this year. “There will be much less in the future,” he said, without providing details of how this will be achieved.
This month the South African police said they have teamed up with Angolan counterparts in an attempt to plug the supply routes to Unita. But the same police would not comment this week on the investigation, saying it was too “sensitive”.
The SABC reported last week that a police investigation has shown as many as 50 flights go to Unita-held territory every month from various airports.
At the time of going to press, civil aviation authorities were unable to say how many flights they have sanctioned to Angola since October. But they insist all were done according to the law.
Some of the flights are said to be carrying weapons, but these manage to evade detection by civil aviation, border police, customs and excise as well as immigration because operators give false destinations or say they are ferrying mining equipment, food and clothes.
The questions raised by the large SAMil vehicle shipment allegedly shipped out from Mmabatho are the most perplexing.
After many Gauteng airports like Lanseria had tighter controls imposed on them in the form of customs and police officials, it appears that less-monitored airports like Mmabatho became the preferred point of exit for clandestine shipments.
Said an official at Lanseria, from where Perreira’s Interstate Airways had previously operated: “We’ve been burnt by Johnny [Perreira] before … but I personally don’t know of anything happening here during December. If they were doing anything illegal, that’s a matter for the police.”
The Institute for Security Studies said South Africans involved in supplying arms to Unita had been crossing through Botswana and Zambia to southern Angola. However, they are also increasingly using Entebbe airport in Uganda as a “major trans- shipment centre for central Africa and Angola”.
“The brokering agent places the order from South Africa, and arranges for the transport through Tanzania, Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ugan-da and to a lesser extent direct flights to Angola from the supplier country,” said the institute.
However, Unita’s supply line in western Zambia dried up recently after the Angolan government publicly made threats it would take action if Zambian authorities failed to stop the rebels from using their soil. But Unita merely moved closer to the Zambian copperbelt and are reportedly operating from there.
Unita is also said to have increasingly turned to transcontinental arms suppliers, mainly through Eastern Europe, as sanctions slowly seem to make an impact. The sanctions seem to affect fuel supplies and the Angolan rebels are facing a critical situation. Some aircraft are said to have been grounded in Bailundo because Unita has no fuel.
Meanwhile, the fate of the five South Africans held in Luanda since January may depend on a much larger game of realpolitik and international conspiracies to keep Unita supplied with arms in the quite probable event of a possible dry-season offensive by the Angolan government, or to prevent this from happening.
For the families of the men caught in the middle, the past four months have been torture. “We just don’t know what to do – anything we say may have a negative impact [on the detainees],” said Sue van der Eecken, wife of veteran pilot Marnix van der Eecken, one of five.
But Perreira, his 19-year-old employee Rudi Swanepoel, Willem Allan and hitch-hiker and veteran pilot Van der Eecken have yet to be formally charged.
They could face heavy fines and immediate expulsion for the technical offence of violating Angola’s airspace. No response could be obtained from Angola in this regard.
Sue van der Eecken said she was the end of her tether. “Physically, he is still okay,” she said of her husband, who is held in high esteem in South African aviation circles.
“But he is going to need psychological counselling – if we can get him out of there.”
And the young Swanepoel, his friends said, had been under the impression that he was going to Brazil, but ended up in an Angolan jail.