Angola

Behind the lines

Robert Moss

'Fir Angola, independence is an end, not a beginning,' Dr Jonas Savimbi, the leader of Unita — the guerrilla movement that controls most of southern and central Angola — told me in Nova Lisboa last week. The humiliating scuttle of the last Portuguese officials from Luanda on Monday night did not bring the dawn of a new nation in black Africa. It plunged Angola from Portugal's imperial twilight into the full darkness of civil war, a three-sided war involving, directly or indirectly, a score of outside powers, that has already proved to be as savage and still more important — in its strategic and economic implications — than the struggle for the Congo in the early 1960s.

In their hasty abdication of colonial responsibility, the Portuguese are left to bear an even

heavier burden of guilt than the Belgians in 1960. 'They ran like rabbits.' This was the sour judgment of a young French weaponry expert, an ex-para, whom I met at the start of my visit, one of the many birds of prey that have homed in to Angola. He had a point. The ratio between the white and black populations in Angola was about one to six, compared with one to four in South Africa and one to twenty-seven in Rhodesia. Arguably, Angola's whites could have hung on to their farms and businesses, whatever the Marxists in Lisbon wanted.

But Portugal's real guilt lies elsewhere. It is not just that 365,000 whites lost their livelihoods; it is that five million blacks (deliberatelY maintained in ignorance for centuries) were abandoned to economic ruin and civil war. 'Please tell the outside world to send us doctors: but for God's sake, don't send us Portuguese,

Central Hospital pleaded with me. Of the thirteen Portuguese doctors at the hospital, all but three tied when the local garrison pulled out, leaving dangerously ill patients waiting for operations. The Portuguese administrative staff pulled out simultaneously. The same Performance was repeated in factories, schools, research institutions, vital services. The mass Panic is understandable in human terms — although doctors, like priests, are expected to discharge a duty transcending their personal safety — but nothing had been done to prepare black Africans to take the place of the professional and managerial class that had suddenly been removed.

,., Portugal's guilt reaches further still. The Communists and woollier-headed Marxists in the Armed Forces Movement in Lisbon, having rejected old-style colonialism, tried to put a more up-to-date kind of neo-colonialism in its Place. They tried to engineer the transfer of Angola to the pro-Soviet guerrillas of the PoPular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) which, left to its own devices, Might have been expected to supply the Russians with naval bases on the Atlantic coast and to have provided a springboard for attacks on South-West Africa. The full extent of Portuguese backing for the MPLA will be a fruitful subject for historical investigation. One unreported example will have to suffice here.

was puzzled to find General Bernba's army 131 8,000 Katangese mercenaries, formerly members of Tshombe's gendarmerie (and therefore not exactly Communist) fighting in the front lines of the MPLA. (Unita is holding a number of Katangese prisoners at Balombo and Silva Porto.) I asked Miguel Nzau Puna, Unita's secretary-general, for an explanation. He claimed that one of the last actions of Portugal's notorious 'Red Admiral,' Rosa Coutinho, during his time as high commishoner in Angola, had been to visit Bemba's de eadquarters in the eastern town of Henrique

Carvalho, and to persuade him that he should transfer his support to the MPLA, which Was bound to be the winning side.

p If the story is true, the calculations of Ztugal's Marxists have gone wildly astray. The MPLA did look like the winning side until a Month or so ago, thanks to a massive infusion of Soviet bloc arms and the support of a Veritable international brigade of Communist troops — including (according to Unita and Western intelligence reports) some 1,700 Lubans, 500 Frelimo troops from Mozambique, Algerians, Vietnamese, PAIGC advisers from G, unea-Bissau, and a scattering of volunteers "m farther afield, including Brazilian Corn Lutists. There are also numerous reports that '3cultet and East German advisers are serving With the MPLA. Their rear base has been the the Port republic of Congo-Brazzaville, where Port of Pointe Noire has been a key .,transshipment point for East European arms ueliveries, and where a squadron of Migs is said 1.9 be held in readiness for the day when the Russians may decide to risk the diplomatic cansequences of giving direct air support to the MPLA.

But despite this tremendous Soviet bloc investment, and a series of military and ,4ProPaganda gains earlier this year, by independence day on Tuesday the MPLA was being stead-4 ground between the upper and nether millstones — between the forces of Holden Liberation FNLA (National Front for the of Angola) striking southward towards Luanda, and the forces of Unita, "king northward and westward along the 'Ile of the Benguela railway. The MPLA's

propaganda claim to be the dominant force in Angola and, therefore, the sole legitimate government, was left hanging in tatters.

The extraordinary way that this war is being reported still means that much of the news about it emanates from the MPLA or people sympathetic to it in Luanda. This is not wholly the fault of gullible journalists or bored editors; there is the overwhelming problem of geography. In my recent tour of Unita-held territory, I found myself in a situation where there was no radio, telephone or telex link to the outside world, no rail or safe road links, no diplomats or resident foreign press, and the only way for the casual visitor to come and go was via Dr Savimbi's own executive jet, This — as well as the sheer difficulty of verifying claims and counter-claims in a situation where none of the guerrilla movements had allowed journalists to visit the front lines — is no doubt why the news of the most stunning military reversal in the course of Angola's civil war took so long to seep out last week. I was waiting at Nova Lisboa's airfield, plastered with Unita posters and littered with packing-cases abandoned by Portuguese refugees, on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 4, when Dr Savimbi's car came screeching to a halt outside. He had come out to show me the text of an intercepted radio message, transmitted by the MPLA command at Novo Redondo at noon that day to the MPLA general headquarters in Luanda. The text read as follows: Forced to retreat from Benguela and Lobito. Great enemy superiority. We lost seven companies in combat. Many Cubans killed, disappeared ... Did not abandon material. Exploding material which impossible to destroy.

Lobito is Angola's largest seaport, and Benguela is the western terminus of the vital Benguela railway, which leads to the central African copperbelt; in times of peace, Zambia used to export 44 per cent of its copper by this route.

Dr Savimbi's piece of paper was the first evidence of the rout that the MPLA had suffered on the 'Lobito front,' under pressure from Unita (and allied) forces driving towards the two towns in a three-pronged assault from the south-west, the south-east and the north. It also suggested the scale of the fighting: an MPLA company contains 150-200 men, so it would seem that the Communists lost between 1,050 and 1,400 troops in a single battle last week. The message also pointed to the extent of Cuban intervention on the MPLA side. Unita commanders say that the drivers and machine-gunners of the MPLA's Soviet-made tanks and armoured cars are mostly Cubans and claim to have taken Cubans prisoner.

Before I left Unita territory, on November 5, Dr Savimbi told me that Unita forces had entered Lobito, picking their way through the mines and sabotaged bridges that the MPLA had left behind. Unita supporters inside the town reported that hundreds of cars had been abandoned, at the wharfside as MPLA cadres, military commanders and foreign advisers beat a hasty retreat by sea.

At the time of writing, no reporter had been able to visit the Lobito front, but MPLA denials of defeat sounded increasingly half-hearted, and its propagandists were shifting tack in an attempt to blame their reverses on the intervention of the South Africans and Portuguese 'mercenaries.' The loss of Benguela and Lobito — if permanent — not only explodes the MPLA's claims to be the foremost 'freedom movement' in Angola, but could provide the logistic and economic base for an independent state of southern Angola.

We now enter a supremely sensitive area. At the end of the day, will there be one Angola, or several? In the oil-rich Cabinda enclave, sandwiched between Congo-Brazzaville and Zaire and physically separated from Angola proper, Zairean troops are reported to be ready to wage battle with the MPLA and its foreign helpers. President Mobuto of Zaire is known to be hopeful of absorbing Cabinda into his own territory, and there has been speculation that he may have insisted on the fulfilment of this ambition as the price for giving large-scale support to the FNLA (which receives most of its arms, including long-range artillery via Kinshasa).

Unita leaders flatly deny any secessionist ambitions for the territory they control, and their denials are made more convincing by the fact that the Unita leadership is drawn from all over the country; Secretary-General Puna, for example, comes from Cabinda. But its popular base is among the Umbundu tribal group, which accounts for some 40 per cent of Angola's total population, concentrated in the area south of the Benguela railway. The barely tapped natural wealth of central and southern Angola — diamonds, gold, iron ore, timber, cattle — will be made accessible to exploitation if Unita and its allies succeed in driving away the MPLA from the eastern extremities of the railway, in the stretch beyond Luso. In the continuing civil war, Unita will figure as the de facto government of ‘Umbunduland; In the event that its present tactical alliance with the FNLA breaks down — and there is persistent tension, notably with the FNLA faction led by Daniel Chipenda — outright secession cannot be ruled out. But this will no doubt be contingent on the attitudes of outside powers.

What remains possible in the meantime is a further, and dramatic, escalation of foreign involvement in Angola's civil war. It is possible that the Russians, having recognised the MPLA as the country's legitimate government, will use allegations of South African and Western backing for the 'rebel' movements as a pretext to lend direct air support to the Communist forces. This, in turn, might goad the Chinese — who have twice attacked Soviet intervention in Angola into dropping their current low profile, maybe to the extent of introducing troops or military advisers. It would tempt the Americans and the French to supply planes and anti-aircraft equipment to the MPLA's rivals.

In the midst of these possible chain explosions, Western public opinion may at last become fully alive to the true dimensions of the most crucial struggle for power that has so far been waged in black Africa. We will all come to take the measure also of men whose names are still only half-familiar, first among them Dr Jonas Malheiro Savimbi. He is one of the most sophisticated political leaders that! have met in a long while, and has presided over the transformation of a bush army into a mass movement informed by a remarkable will to win. 'We will fight on until our deaths' runs one of the songs popular at Unita rallies, 'until long after our sunset.' I found that Savimbi and other leading Unita figures had sloughed off much of their youthful Marxism ('this is a phase we all go through,' he told me), and that the movement's grass-roots popularity is one of the most effective blocks to Soviet ambitions in Angola. It is encouraging to be able to conclude that in Angola, as in Portugal, the Soviet horse is flagging badly. But there is a long stretch of the course still to run.