Strange revolution
Michael Vestey
It's 30 years since the almost bloodless revolution in Portugal that overthrew the Caetano regime. You don't often hear anything about that period, but Radio Four marked it last week with the first in a series called Unfinished Business (Wednesday), concentrating mainly on the affect it had on three of Portugal's colonies, Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, and whether the chaos and violence that followed could have been avoided. I suspect not; even some of the contributors to this programme weren't sure who was to blame for it.
It was the inability or unwillingness of Salazar's successor, Marcelo Caetano, to carry out his promise to give the colonies their independence that led a group of younger officers known as the Armed Forces Movement (the MFA) to overthrow the regime in Lisbon. The conscript army was weary of fighting nationalist guerrillas in the colonies. Rather too hurriedly, Portugal withdrew from them and so did 800,000 Portuguese white settlers, known as the Retornados, who took as many of their possessions as possible with them, much of which formed the countries' infrastructures. Even taxis were shipped out in containers bound for Lisbon.
As it happens, I was in Lisbon at the time reporting on the revolution and I remember the Retornados sitting glumly around the lobby of my hotel. the Tivoli. They had to be housed temporarily in the city's hotels, whole families bewildered at having to start again in a country largely hostile to them. It was a strange revolution in many ways. Farming land, banks and even the country's main daily newspaper, Diario de Noticias, were seized, though there was little violence. It seemed that some of the army officers were communists and very nearly came to power, though eventually they were thwarted, elections held and calm restored. When news of the coup reached the colonies, many settlers welcomed it, hoping for peace. But in Angola, the independence movement fractured into three warring factions, Unita, the MPLA and the FNLA. The resulting civil war became international with South Africa. Cuba and the Soviet Union taking sides.
The settlers fled back to Portugal to escape the fighting. Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau were simply handed over to the guerrillas. Earlier, in Mozambique, the Marxist guerrilla leaders had threatened the settlers, frightening them out of the country, which more or less collapsed after they'd gone. The new leader, Samora Machel, regretted the loss of expertise and warned Robert Mugabe not to do the same. Mugabe didn't, though of course he's gone mad now and is destroying Zimbabwe. The presenter of Unfinished Business, James Maw, asked the former prime minister and president Mario Soares if the civil war in Angola could have been avoided. He'd become foreign minister after the revolution. He thought it might have been if the factions had talked to each other more, but Cold War rivalry made it more difficult.
A historian said that no political party in Portugal had the guts to say that they should stay on in the colonies to handle the transition. There was too much impatience to leave. Nor were the new generation of African political leaders open to negotiation; for them it was now or never, and they simply wanted to grab power. It seems that today few want to talk about that period. The Retornados are still regarded with suspicion, and the veterans of the indepen dence wars find it difficult to discuss the atrocities which the Portuguese committed. One woman told this programme that a friend had described how soldiers placed pregnant African women ahead of them when walking on mined roads. Nor have the former colonies themselves recovered from the experience.
Listening to this interesting programme, it occurred to me that there's a series of radio documentaries to be made about the fall of the fascist regimes of Europe: Franco's Spain, Mussolini's Italy and the
Portuguese experience. Unfinished Business was largely about the consequences for the colonies, but the actual preparation of the coup, though covered a little in the programme, is fascinating, as I remember at the time. I suppose the fall of Hitler would have to be excluded as it's been endlessly chronicled in one form or another, and Hitler's last days in the Berlin bunker are currently being reexamined.
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