Machel’s death: More questions than answers

Machel’s airplane crashed on October 19 1986. The hollow pipes – one for each person that died – seem to moan when the wind passes, as though in mourning.
A statue of the late statesman will be unveiled in his country’s capital Maputo today, the anniversary of his death.

On Monday a memorial service was held at the crash site near the town Mbuzini in northeast South Africa.
South Africa President Jacob Zuma said Machel paid with his life in the “shocking mysterious” crash for helping South Africans to fight apartheid.
“He used his own freedom and country’s independence to assist those who were under the yoke of slavery, colonialism and apartheid,” Zuma told his Mozambican counterpart Armando Guebuza and the Machel family.

Mozambican students still sell DVDs of Machel’s impassioned speeches on Maputo’s streets and the government declared 2011 “Samora Machel Year” as a testimony to his enduring popularity.
“There’s something in his vision of what Mozambique could be like that speaks to young people today who weren’t born then,” says academic Colin Darch, who worked at the country’s Eduardo Mondlane University in the 1980s.

Born in Chilembene Village in Southern Mozambique, Samora Moises Machel worked as a nurse before becoming a revolutionary. He fought for liberation from the 400-year-long Portuguese colonial rule and became the first president at independence in 1975.
“He was very clear about creating a culture of discipline and hard work,” says his widow Graca, who served under him as education minister and is now married to former South African President Nelson Mandela.

Machel included women and people of all races in the nation-building project of the ruling party Frelimo, in stark contrast with Mozambique’s apartheid neighbour.
“It was very inspiring and encouraging for me as a South African to see this non-racial spirit working,” recalls Albie Sachs, a former South African constitutional court judge who lived in Mozambique at the time and nearly died in a bomb attack himself for his activism against the white-minority government.

But socialist policies and a crippling civil war from 1977 funded secretly by South Africa forced Mozambique to its knees. The months preceding the crash had been a time of rising tension in southern Africa.
Mozambique’s civil war was getting worse.
South Africa had reneged on the Nkomati Accord, a non-aggression pact signed in 1984.

Mozambique kept its side of the agreement by forcing ANC exiles to leave the country, but Pretoria soon resumed its support for the Renamo rebels fighting the Frelimo government in Mozambique.
In the meantime, Malawi had been collaborating with white South Africa by aiding Renamo.
The situation came to a head when President Machel threatened to deploy missiles on his border with Malawi. Dan Moyane, a South African-born journalist who worked in Mozambique in the 1980s, had initially been offered a seat on Machel’s plane in order to report on the summit in Zambia.

However, he was bumped off at the last moment when more members of the government delegation were required to travel. Moyane recalls the sense of shock when the news of Samora Machel’s death in the plane crash was confirmed.
“There was stunned silence in Maputo. A sense of disbelief. And then we began asking questions – who was on the plane, who didn’t fly?”

The South African-appointed commission of inquiry, headed by Justice Margo, blamed the Russian pilots of the Tupolev Tu-134.
But in Mozambique, the findings did nothing to remove the suspicion of foul play.
In 1998, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) launched a special investigation into Machel’s death.

However, it was unable to reach a firm conclusion and said that a number of questions had been raised, including the possibility of a false beacon.
Ambassador Abdul Minty, South Africa’s Deputy Director General of Foreign Affairs, who worked with the British Anti-Apartheid Movement for three decades, gave evidence to the TRC and remains convinced that a decoy beacon caused the plane to crash.

“From the research I’ve done, my understanding was that an electronic decoy was utilised to give the pilots false information about the maps and the region,” Mr Minty says. The plane had been on its approach to Maputo, but veered off course, and crashed a few hundred metres inside the South African border.
Mr Botha argues that the issue of a decoy beacon was specifically investigated, and found to be technically impossible. He says there has been no firm evidence to suggest anything other than pilot error as the cause of the crash.

“The people of Mozambique, including Graca Machel and her family, need to know what happened,” says Mr Minty. “We in the anti-apartheid struggle need to know. It’s part of our history, so it’s critically important to establish the truth”.

But Mozambicans believed South Africa brought it down. “We have evidence from people: within minutes South African military forces were on the scene,” Graca Machel adds. The crash shattered the newly-independent country’s morale. – ANP/AFP.