Stealthy sanctions buster!

The Affretair Saga

In 1974 the London Sunday Times exposed Affretair, a cargo airline based and registered in Gabon, but doing sanctions busting trade for the rebel Rhodesians. The Sunday Times reporters were in touch with us as they established that having exposed the airline for illicit trade with Rhodesia, it had moved its operations from London to Amsterdam Schiphol airport.

The AABN Sanctions Task Team then sprung into action and informed Dutch Economic Intelligence (ECD) about the matter, requesting that action be taken to impound and confiscate the Affretair DC-8. They came back to us after an investigation saying that all Affretair papers were in order, that there was nothing to suggest that goods either came from or were being flown to Rhodesia, so there was nothing that they would do.

We doubted this. Why was it that the airline had moved its operations from London to Schiphol after the Sunday Times exposure? Furthermore we were informed by the reporters of the Sunday Times that there was strong evidence pointing to Affretair link to the Rhodesian regime, but that this was not strong enough to work on. They asked for our assistance to do further investigative work.

Our investigative Task Team did surveillance of the Affretair crew at Schiphol and established that they were staying over in the Schiphol Hilton. We also were able to establish, through staff at the hotel, that the Affretair pilots were using Rhodesian-issued flying licences. With copies of these in hand we leaked the information to the press, and then contacted the ECD once more with a request to investigate and take action against Affretair. We told them that we had seen the Rhodesian issued flying licences which they, the ECD, could retrieve from the newspapers concerned. Again, nothing happened.

We made another push and found an official of Olympic Airlines. Olympic Airlines was chartered to do all the ground servicing work for Affretair in Athens as well as at Schiphol, and our contact was prepared to assist us in getting hold of the bills of lading that indicated the type of goods, origins and destinations. Again, there was no direct proof but the goods being transported to Rhodesia were highly suspicious. Included were light vehicles that were being used by the Rhodesian Army as well as aircraft spare parts. We needed no further proof.

But the ECD remained reluctant to act. Instead they were inclined to take action against the AABN Task Team. They wanted to know how we got hold of the flying licences. There followed many discussions about what constituted sufficient proof hard enough to institute an investigation, our protestations that this already existed, and that they should go ahead and impound the DC-8 and unravel the mystery by extensive investigation of the goods on board. In our view it could easily be established that the aircraft spare parts, for example, were meant for a special type of aircraft which were non existent in any other African country, even South Africa, but Rhodesia.

It was our view that the British did not wish to have the embarrassment of having Affretair exposed on home turf and had requested the Dutch to close their eyes and let the aircraft free passage without further ado. We worked on the theory that the British were in control over spare parts supply for the Rhodesian Air Force and wished to continue doing so in order to ultimately pull the choke on the Rhodesians when it strategically suited Britain as the disputed colonial power. What was then needed was to convey this suspicion to the Zimbabwean liberation movements which happened in the corridors of the international conference against sanctions busters in Amsterdam, 1974. Things being as they were, with the two Zimbabwean liberation movements not cooperating with one another, we worked through the representatives of ZAPU only with the request that they inform the ANC before they decided to take any hard action, if at all. At the same time we planned the attack on Beit Bridge, a plan which was also in abeissance, pending final checking out of plans with the ANC.

The Affretair issue then slipped of the radar with some contingency, and admittedly rather crazy suggestions were made. Affretair was discussed with PLO allies in Algiers. As this information, and the contingency plans mentioned above are nowhere recorded and, if so, airbrushed or kept under wraps by whichever intelligence outfit in possession of the real facts, consider the only reason for mentioning them as a demonstration of what so-called AIRBRUSHING of the facts is all about. When one hits deep dips like in this issue of Affretair it is never possible to clinically deal with them and not at the same time AIRBRUSHING facts which were already in the public domain, but which in one way or another needs to be negated. There are enough of these in the so-called “Okhela Saga”, a saga about an organization which was invisible but became visible by accident, and a mad poet in Paris scribbling our further ridiculous stories.

But besides these mad fringes in the discussions, they were hypothetical and only discussions. There was one Dutch newspaper, De Volkskrant, which planted words into our mouths and suggested that our frustration with the ECD refusing to act on Affretair could mean that we were planning “direct action” ourselves. Maybe this newspaper was serious about its suggestion. We however, were certainly not a band of adventurists. Nor were we out to alienate the working class as mooted by Joe Slovo when he held Sietse Bosgra to a tribunal hearing about taking action against individual firms, rather than collectively.

What is true though is that through our discussions of options, all options, serious, melodious and the rest, was that we started realizing that as a solidarity movement the Dutch AAM (AABN) was standing on the frontier between solidarity work and work that required either the consent or collaboration of partners in the area targeted for solidarity. After our experiences with the ANC we could not regard it as a serious partner for more militant forms of solidarity, on par for example what the French solidarity movement provided for the FLN in Algeria.

The solution was to engage militants within South Africa directly. It was becoming progressively clear to us that solidarity work was actually contained and finally bridged by the intentions of the host country, in the instance of rebel Rhodesia and Apartheid South Africa, by British security interests. Or should we say, in the case of South Africa, any breach through solidarity could only be achieved if western interests were involved and secured through outfits like the IMF. The solution was as it revealed to be – when Oliver Tambo gave his assent to forming a link between militants on the sanctions front abroad and those working within South Africa, we jumped at the opportunity.

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