JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, April 24 -- The assassination two months ago of Congolese President Laurent Kabila was a great blow to the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe.
Kabila had been very accomodating to Zimbabwean commercial interests in the former Zaire in return for the support of Harare's 14,000 troops. His son and successor, Joseph Kabila, seems far more open to influence from Washington and the way has opened up for a possible end to the Congo's endless war, which would see the retreat of Zimbabwean and other foreign troops and might well threaten those commercial interests.
But it now emerges that Kabila's death was also a military disaster for Mugabe, who announced that the Zimbabwean Air Force would provide the fly past at Kabila's funeral. Five Shenyang F-6s (ie. the Chinese version of the Soviet MiG 21) were to be provided and there was an instant scramble by senior ZAF officers to perform the prestige duty and make potentially valuable contacts with the new Kabila regime before it settled in. Unfortunately, while most such officers are technically licensed to fly the F-6, few of them are still flying routine missions and their pilot skills are thus a little rusty.
The F-6 is a very fast aircraft of short endurance and thus has a very limited range. The flight from Gweru to Kinshasa required no less than five hops for each aircraft, so an Antonov tanker aircraft had to fly with them for continual refuelling at one airstrip after another. Because the Antonov is a slow and lumbering aircraft -- and because the F-6 has a very slow refuelling turnaround time -- this meant a very slow progress across Central Africa, with the last leg having to be made in the dark. One of the pilots -- a wing commander, without recent night-flying experience -- became disorientated and ejected from his aircraft, which crashed and was written off. (Amazingly, he was found alive in the jungle by Zimbabwean troops five days later.)
The remaining four F-6s performed the fly past and then had to head back to Zimbabwe. On an early leg at Lumumbashi airfield the first two F-6s landed successfully but the third, piloted by a group captain, misjudged his landing and ploughed his plane into the ground, writing it off. This left the fourth F-6 circling the airfield. He was told to divert to an alternative airstrip 30 minutes away, but informed ground control that he had only 20 minutes more fuel and would have to try to land on the Lumumbashi airfield, though the last 300 metres of it were now strewn with wreckage and was also wet. He got down but skidded off the strip and ploughed into a tree. Thus while all three officers survived, three F-6s were written off.
China is flying in five new F-6s and Libya is sending three Mig-23s -- all on credit. No Zimbabwean pilots are licensed to fly Mig-23s. This leaves the ZAF in a very poor state all its BAe Hawks are now grounded because they lack tyres and ejector seat cartridges. Only two Alouette helicopters remain serviceable, while of the eight Mil 35 helicopters the ZAF started with, only one can still fly. This leaves the ZAF with 12 F-6s, one Lynx (Cessna 337), six Bell and two Super Puma helicopters. Only one ZAF transport plane remains serviceable: all other transport aircraft to ferry Zimbabwean troops and equipment in and out of the DRC are now borrowed from Angola. These are mostly Antonovs flown by Russian pilots with Afghan experience. They groan into the sky, hugely overloaded, but the Russians seem to know what they are doing. Meanwhile there are constant reports of Russian mafia involvement in both the Congolese arms trade and diamond smuggling.
