Your editorial gives sound advice to Public Enterprises Minister Alec Erwin, Rooivalk flop (April 4). Unfortunately, it does not appear so far that the minister has done a reality check.

A successful Denel tender to supply Turkey with 50 Rooivalk attack helicopters would have been a great coup for Denel, especially after a long list of failed sales attempts.

And so, realistically, one would have expected Erwin to follow the Turkish announcement rejecting the Rooivalk with his own announcement to scrap the project forthwith.

The South African National Defence Force (SANDF) too should have immediately announced its own intention to mothball its 12 Rooivalk, which had been foisted on it by former defence minister Joe Modise in the forlorn hope of improving the aircraft’s marketability.

Denel’s spokesperson, Sam Basch, has now come up with the suggestion that the Rooivalk could be deployed in peace-support oper-ations in Africa! An attack helicopter in peace-support operations!

The only country that equipped its so-called peacekeepers — in reality gung-ho Rangers — with attack helicopters was the US in Somalia in 1993. This turned out to be a disaster for the US and far more so for the people of Somalia. Do we really want to follow the bad US example on our own continent?

Human rights-committed South Africans will rejoice at the Turkish decision not to buy the Rooivalk.

The most likely people against whom the Turkish military would have put the Rooivalk to use would have been the Kurds of southeast Turkey, whose cultural rights have long been denied by successive Turkish governments. And should the Kurds of northern Iraq declare their independence in the future, the Turkish government, fearing for its own territorial status, would be tempted to intervene — maybe with attack helicopters.

South Africans must ensure that our government does not make us complicit in crimes against humanity and/or human rights abuses through its indiscriminate weapons transfers.

Gunvant Govindjee
Parktown 

With acknowledgements to Gunvant Govindjee and Business Day.