Kisangani airport has valet bribing, a ransacked control tower and cobwebs in its cavernous terminal. Defeat and decay are in the air but so, the UN fears, is the threat of a massive African war. The National Post's Patrick Graham reports that big changes will be necessary if the blue helmets are to make Kisangani their peacekeeping base in Congo.

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In the computer room below the airport control tower, a rebel soldier leans over a small fire, making lunch. In the tower above, engineer Pierre Kinge puts a hand-held high-frequency walkie-talkie to his ear and contacts an approaching plane.

It's his only means of communicating with pilots hoping to take off or land from Banbgoka airport outside Kisangani. And it's not going to last long, since the walkie-talkie is on loan from the Red Cross, which wants it back in two weeks.

"After that, I don't know what we'll do," he says, as the transport plane taxis safely to a truck full of workers, waiting to unload the shipment of medical aid.

There is one alternative -- a large high-frequency radio that is hooked up to a car battery. It works, says Mr. Kinge, but the rebels who control the airport won't let them use it because it can reach Kinshasa, the Congolese capital.

Should the United Nations carry out its plan to put a substantial body of troops into Kisangani, the centre of a military confrontation between Uganda and Rwanda, Banbgoka airport, 17 kilometres west of Kisangani, would be of obvious importance.

But putting it to immediate use might be a problem. In the past two years, Rwandan and Ugandan troops have systematically looted just about everything that could be carried off, including the electronic equipment, wiring, doors and even parts of the floor. Although the former allies nominally support the rebellion against Laurent Kabila, President of the Democratic Republic of Congo, they have spent much of the past year scrapping over eastern Congo's enormous wealth, looting as they go. Landing at Banbgoka is a dangerous proposition.

An aid worker tells how a hysterical member of the control tower once ran up to him, yelling that the walkie-talkie's batteries had run too low to contact an aid plane, which was about to land -- on top of a large Russian Illyushin jet, which was preparing for takeoff.

The aid worker had to radio his base in Goma, a border town to the south, which was able to contact the plane, in time to avert a major accident.

For the moment, the control tower can just about handle the three or four planes that land every day. But there will have to be big changes if the international community decides to make Kisangani the central base of a proposed United Nations peacekeeping mission.

While the Ugandans and Rwandans were unable to cart off the 3,500-metre runway, they took just about everything else -- from the runway lights and radio signalling equipment to most of the washroom urinals.

In the control tower, now a glass-encased steam bath in the tropical heat, wooden crates fill the holes left in the floor after it, too, was stolen. The door is gone, along with the air conditioner and half the double-paned windows.

To make his point, Mr. Kinge lifts out the front panel of a computer from the air traffic console, which used to forecast the weather. Now it's just a loose collection of wires and dials.

Banbgoka was once a small gem of an airport, says an airline mechanic. It was built in the late 1970s by the military dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, who seemed to have a fetish for airports --the one serving Kinshasa, the capital, was among the best in Africa.

But when the country fell apart, Kisangani's strategic location as a regional hub made Banbgoka and Simisimi, a second airport built by the Belgians on the other side of the city, prime targets for any army wanting to control eastern Congo.

Like so much in Kisangani, after years of war and neglect the airport's decay borders on the picturesque, like a set from a film about the post-apocalypse.

The cavernous main terminal building has a ceiling heavy with cobwebs and puddles stain the floor. The bar serves lukewarm soft drinks and the bulbs in the 1970s-style gold-coloured chandeliers have disappeared -- not that it matters since there is no electricity.

The first-class lounge, housed in a small separate building, is overgrown with weeds. Next door, one of Mr. Kabila's presidential jets sits rotting and empty after a bird flew into an engine a few days before the rebellion against the leader began two years ago.

Down the way, a soldier shades himself under an abandoned Boeing 707 passenger jet, grounded by a small technical failure in the late 1980s and quickly looted of its windows, doors and engines.

Other than the UN and aid agencies' planes, the only air traffic consists of Soviet-built transport planes, Antonovs and Illyushins, manned by Russians who bring in everything from arms to coffee beans. They are much cheaper than South African or European crews. Many of the Russian planes are said to have been grabbed by their pilots when the Soviet Union collapsed, and put to work in Africa. A few months ago, one of them was shot down by Congolese government troops.

Despite a large shell hole in the wall of the passenger lounge, the airport has been spared the fighting that has destroyed much of Kisangani. Soon after the Ugandans began shelling the Rwandan-held city on June 5, an astute UN major from Mali had a quiet word with the officers from both sides who were guarding the airport. He pointed out that, with 130 troops each, they stood equal chances of losing. The officers saw the logic of the argument and the airport was spared the devastation visited on the downtown.

Both armies have withdrawn their troops, allowing rebel soldiers from the Rwanda-allied Congolese Rally for Democracy to move in.

Now, a new hazard has appeared in the terminal -- bureaucrats from an astonishing 12 levels of the rebel government. They descend on passengers with the intention of squeezing them for as much money as possible. Even the security staff charges a fee to search your bags.

Earlier this week, a man wearing a suit and tie, with a badge that read "Anti-Fraud," politely approached us in the passenger lounge. He persistently demanded a bribe. His family didn't have anything to eat, he said. Unpaid for months, like everyone else in Kisangani, civil servants working for the rebel government are forced to make ends meet as best they can. And a bribe here still costs less than a sandwich and a beer at most of Canada's major airports.