Prisoner Exchange

November 1982

By Dr Jeremy Shearar*

On 14 November 2010 the Sunday Times printed an article by Mr. Leo Evans, describing the 'first exchange of  prisoners of the border war between South Africa and Angola', on 7 September 1987.

Mr. Evans is presumably unaware of an exchange which took place some five years earlier in November 1982.  Brokered by the Red Cross, both International and South African, it deserves recognition in the saga of the time, even if it did not herald a thaw in relations.

During the early years of the decade, South African forces captured several APLA troops, whom they detained at Mariental in Namibia (then South West Africa).  The Angolan Government did not press for their return, until the position was complicated by the capture of a Russian, by the name of Pestretsov, and a Cuban.  Two more Russians were held by Jonas Savimbi in his Jamba headquarters.  Their detention was an embarrassment to their respective Governments, who were anxious to have them out of the limelight.  Pestretsov was in any case becoming a thorn in the flesh for the SA defence authorities, as he seemed to fear he would be poisoned in the prison and had embarked on a hunger strike.  Loss of weight induced a dangerous decline in his health.

Nicolas de Rougemont, who as head of the ICRC contingent in South Africa, had access to the detainees, liaised with his colleagues in Luanda, and through them ascertained that the bodies of three South Africa soldiers were on ice in a Luandan morgue.  The SADF for its part was anxious to have them home and to provide closure for their families.

There commenced a long, arduous set of negotiations, involving the ICRC, the SADF, the Angolan authorities egged on by Cuba and the Soviet Union, UNITA, and the South African Department of Foreign Affairs.  So suspicious were all sides, that one was never sure that an agreement reached in the morning would survive the afternoon.  Since neither SA nor Angola was prepared for a visit from the other, it was finally arranged, with the tacit concurrence of Zambia, that the handover would take place in Lusaka.  A pair of Twin Otters would carry the coffins from Luanda and a C130 the APLA contingent from Mariental.  The officials would swap planes in Lusaka, to return home immediately as the Zambians refused to issue a visa to the South African official.

There remained the two Russians in Jamba.  Savimbi had no faith in the integrity of the ICRC or any agreement it claimed to have reached with Luanda.  He would not trust an ICRC agent to fetch them and insisted on a representative of the South African Red Cross.  Its head, George Kemsley, agreed to take the onus on himself, without leaking the news even to his closest associates.  He would go to Jamba and then deliver his cargo to Mariental.  A SAFAIR C130 would fly Pestretsov and the Cuban with de Rougemont and the South African liaison officer to Mariental, where it would embark the rest of the prisoners with a couple of APLA coffins and fly them to Lusaka.  Such was the plan.  To facilitate arrangements here, the Cuban was billeted with Pestretsov.  The former proved to be a competent chef.  His cooking was much appreciated by his hungry companion, who soon recovered his health.

As he drove to office three days before the operation, the South African official heard over the radio that George Kemsley had died of a sudden heart attack.  Without prior briefing, his putative successor, Dr. P. Smith, was rushed to Pretoria and agreed to leave the next day for Jamba.  Smith's pilot, who mistrusted the resistance movement's shaky airfield and the safety of the unrecorded flight of an unaccompanied civilian aircraft over Angolan territory, argued that both his plane and his licence were in jeopardy.  What if he were attacked by enemy forces who knew nothing of his mission?  Reluctantly he accepted the risk and the two Russians were safely delivered to Mariental.

We were not yet out of the woods.  Early next morning, passengers and crew duly boarded the C130 at Jan Smuts airport and took off for Mariental.  Twenty minutes out the aircraft developed engine trouble and was forced to double back.  No-one had the courage to tell the prisoners.  It soon became clear that repairs would take some time and that there was no chance of carrying out the round trip as planned. Postponement was out of the question; it seemed the enterprise had failed.

Then Safair came to the rescue.  A hurried check of its aircraft operation for the day revealed the presence of a C130 en route for Oshikati.  Without further ado the pilot was, so to speak, hijacked in mid-air and, as we would say today, 'redeployed' to Mariental.  There he picked up the Russians and the APLA prisoners, as well as all the purchases – bicycles, portable radios etc. - that they had made from the daily allowance a POW receives.

Back at Jan Smuts, the intervening leisure hours were whiled away mostly by playing darts.  It was agreed to risk a short outing to the Holiday Inn for lunch.  One can only imagine the consternation of the other patrons had they been aware of the Communist vipers in their midst.  Those same vipers were enjoying their first taste of alcohol in a long time.  It was only sherry but, added to the euphoria of coming freedom, soon went to their heads.  On the way back to the airport, they regaled the rest of the company with volleys of obscene Afrikaans words they had been taught in detention.

At last the others arrived.  Ninety-three young APLA detainees filed quietly out of the aircraft, shook hands solemnly with their ultimate warders, greeted them with a 'Bon dia' which sounded eerily like Botha, and equally quietly re-embarked.  It was heart-breaking to see how young most of them were, the brothers-in-arms of the child soldiers elsewhere on the continent.

The flight to Lusaka was uneventful and was greeted by the Head of the Zambian Red Cross, the wife incidentally of the Minister of Defence.  After the complicated exchange forms had been signed and registered, it was time to return.  However, the pilots of the Twin Otters refused to fly.  They had themselves only arrived a little before the C130, having suffered refuelling problems on the way, as a result of communications errors.  In terms of IATA regulations they needed at least seven hours rest.

The lack of visas was quickly brushed aside, but the hotels were fully booked.  In any case only the Pamodzi offered acceptable accommodation but it had been taken over by a horde of international journalists, who were following the US Vice-President, George Bush, on a Southern African tour.  He had interrupted it briefly to attend the funeral of Leonid Breszhnev in Moscow but was expected back shortly.  A night in the Pamodzi lounge loomed but, as it happened the ICRC representative had taken a room there and made a bed available to de Rougemont.  The night porter then announced that his room was vacant for the night and the other weary traveller was welcome to it.  Early the next morning, with their feet resting on two crates of coffins (one had gone missing), the representatives of the ICRC and the South African Department of Foreign Affairs were treated to a spectacular low-level flight home.

The coffins were duly uncrated in a cloud of alien cockroaches and handed over to the Defence authorities for identification.  There is, as far as the Department's records go, no indication that the two bodies could be irrefutably identified as the missing South Africans.  The efforts of the ICRC in Luanda to obtain such proof before the unequal exchange took place had been ineffectual but when one is negotiating with the enemy on humanitarian issues, even in times of conflict, some things have to be taken on trust.

• Dr Shearar was the Foreign Affairs official involved.