OWN CORRESPONDENT, Pretoria | Monday 11.00am.
SOUTH Africa’s first lady Graca Machel said in Pretoria on Sunday she knew the apartheid government was responsible for the 1986 plane crash which killed her former husband and the ex-president of Mozambique, Samora Machel.
“We may not find evidence, but I know they did it,” she said on SABC television.
Machel, who married President Nelson Mandela last August, said the previous government must come clean about its hand in the crash, in which 35 people were killed.
“There is no need to name the political reasons. We just have a human need as his family to know (what happened),” said the 53-year-old Machel.
Samora Machel’s plane was en route from Zambia to Mozambique when it crashed into a hillside at Mbuzini, just inside the South African border, in mysterious circumstances on October 19, 1986.
Mandela’s new government, elected in the first all-race vote of 1994, has declared the site a national monument.
Its Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) said last year it was possible the plane crashed after its navigational system was duped by a false radio beacon used by the former apartheid defence force.
The TRC, exploring human rights abuses committed during the apartheid years, recommended the circumstances of the crash be reinvestigated.
A 1987 inquiry by the previous government found that the crash was an “accident” caused by a misunderstanding between air traffic control in Maputo and the plane’s Soviet air crew.
But a Russian investigation concluded the plane was guided into the mountain by a “decoy signal stronger than the signal at the airport in Maputo,” the TRC said.
The apartheid government supported Mozambique National Resistance (Renamo) guerrillas fighting against Machel’s Marxist Frelimo government and had accused President Machel of harbouring anti-apartheid guerrillas.
Turning to her recent marriage to Mandela, Graca Machel said she was very happy with the popular South African president.
She said the 80-year-old Mandela was likely to continue working in his retirement, after South Africa’s second democratic election in June.
“He is a political animal — he will not rest at all,” she said.
Machel is known for her work on the effects of war on children. — AFP