The Sunday News
MOST of our fighting was with small arms and simple weapons. The AK rifle became every young man’s dream-stubby and reliable, it was far better than the long Nato rifle carried by the Rhodesians forces. Transporting heavy weapons through the Rhodesian air cover was terribly risky, and it was rare that we brought off conspicuous triumphs like the rocketing of the oil storage tanks in Salisbury and in Bulawayo-the Salisbury tanks burned for a week, a symbol of our success, but the Bulawayo reserve was unfortunately empty when Zipra hit it.
But our success against the Rhodesian Air Force was far greater than they allowed to be known at the time. We could not claim the credit that we deserved, because we needed to keep secret the fact that we had been given some Soviet surface-to-air missiles, Sam-7s. We deployed them first in defence of our camps in Zambia, and caught the enemy by surprise.
The first time we used them we knocked down two of their strike aircraft, the second time we got four. In all we shot down almost thirty of their planes and helicopters: the Rhodesian minister of defence was forced to resign, and they replaced the losses only by importing second-hand Hawker Hunters from Israel, with South African help. One of the Smith’s government great propaganda successes was in covering up the extent of the damage we had done them. The only times they would admit to losses of aircraft were when we brought down passenger planes, which we did on two occasions. These tragic incidents need explaining.
The Rhodesians used their civil airliners equally for carrying passengers and for carrying troops. The first time we shot one down was immediately after Smith’s troops had carried out a particularly brutal attack on the camps at Chimoio, in Mozambique, where well over a thousand of our young people died. Rhodesian television had shown pictures of Viscount aircraft in Air Rhodesia markings ferrying in their paratroopers for the attack. And a plane carrying armed soldiers is surely a legitimate target in a war.
Of course it was not our policy to shoot down civilian airliners: if we had wanted we could have done so often, but we carefully refrained from that. What happened is that we identified one of the same aircraft that had been shown on television loaded with troops. It landed at Victoria Falls, where we knew troops were stationed, and as it took off we shot it down with a Sam missile. Forty-eight people, most of them holidaymakers, died in the crash, eight survived. Ten of those who died were said to have been shot on the ground after escaping from the wreck. It was a tragic mistake. I felt it personally. One man was killed with his mother and father and his wife and children-the whole family wiped out. Their name was Gulab, Zimbabweans of Indian origin.
Mr Gulab was a good friend of mine, who often mixed me with airline tickets in ways that avoided alerting the police. I regret his loss very much.
The Rhodesian propaganda people ate once claimed that our anti-aircraft teams had killed ten survivors on the ground. This was obviously untrue, since the plane fell away from the firing point. Some of my Zipra boys did approach the crash site, and did help the eight survivors to get to safety, bringing them water and looking after them. l truly have no idea how the ten died. I do not believe they were killed by our people: I hope not.
I then made an error of a different kind. The following day the BBC telephoned me for a comment on the shooting-down. I told them as much of the truth as I knew. Then, fairly enough in the circumstances, they asked me what weapon the plane had been brought down with. Clearly I could not say it was a Sam-7: it was a secret that we had such things. To turn the question aside, I answered that we had brought it down by throwing stones, and as I said so I laughed a bit. I was not laughing at the death of those civilians, but at the evasive answer. The laugh was remembered, rather than my regret at those unnecessary deaths.
In retaliation for the first Viscount disaster, the Rhodesians mounted a savage raid on our Freedom Camp, just north of Lusaka. It was not a military training camp, but a genuine refugee camp for young boys. Most of the 351 who died were just youngsters.
Later on we brought down one of Air Rhodesia’s Viscounts, with serious loss of life. This time too civilians died because the Rhodesians used the same aircraft for civilian and for military purposes. Our intelligence people in Salisbury had identified the Rhodesian army commander, General Walls getting into the Viscount plane. The same aircraft was identified landing at Wankie, at Victoria Falls and at Kariba: General Walls was reported to be still on board. After take-off from Kariba the same plane passed our Sam emplacement on the hill: the missile team identified the plane by its number, fired and brought it down. Shortly afterwards another Viscount took off and flew past our missile crew, who did not fire because our spies had not identified it carrying a military target. General Walls had changed planes, and was aboard the second.
Walls and his staff officers were clearly a legitimate target. A few years later, when I was minister and he was commanding our post-independence army, I asked him why he had swapped planes. He just laughed. We talked about time when his troops raided my home in Lusaka and killed four people in the house, while I eluded him. We had each tried to kill each other, and in both attempts innocent people had been killed by mistake. It was that kind of war. I still wonder whether Walls had switched aircraft because they had intercepted our radio talk and knew it was a likely target. We, of course we could not say publicly that Walls was our target, we could admit either that we had a sophisticated radio link, or that we had spies in all the civil airports of Rhodesia.
One other attempt to shoot down a civil airliner was unsuccessful. The target was PW Botha, the South African defence minister, who was flying to Victoria Falls. That very day South African soldiers who were operating in the area were killed by our men on Rhodesian territory. Both was a legitimate target-but the missile malfunctioned, and missed his aircraft. He left in a hurry, without performing his task of inaugurating a swimming pool for the troops.
The worst thing about the war was the callousness it bred. It is true, and I regret it, that atrocities were committed by people on our side, by Zipra fighters as well as Zanla men.
This piece was extracted from the late Vice-President Dr Joshua Nkomo’s book — The Story of My Life.
