Terror in Angola
From Our Correspondent
DR. PALMA CARLOS, the defence lawyer for the eight Angolan leaders whose trial began on July 25 in the military court of Luanda, was stopped at Lisbon Airport by the PIDE (Portu- guese Gestapo) from flying to Luanda, These eight leaders constituted the first group of the fifty Angolans who are detained in the military gaol of Luanda and are awaiting trial. They were all arrested between March and August, 1959.
A further wave of arrests has been sweeping across Angola. During June fifty-two people were arrested in central Angola alone, mostly civil servants and railway employees. Dr. Agostinho Neto, a well-known Angolan poet— who had already been in gaol in Portugal for two years, while a medical student, for his political activities—was arrested on June 8' and flogged in front of his family by the Chief of PID8 and his assistant. Usually this kind of brutality is reserved for ordinary folk; not for people of some social standing: that PIDE now' shows no such restraint reflects the present situation in Angola. Police armed with machine guns have been carrying out indiscriminate raids on African houses, smashing all radio sets over the heads of their owners.
Father Joaquim Pinto de Andrade, the African Chancellor of the Archbishopric of Luanda, was deported to Portugal at the end of June under police escort; the familiar tactful method of securing the help of the Church to remove un- desirable priests is no longer possible in Angola; force has to be used.
Are Angolans to suffer the same fate as the Goans, between 1954 and 1957 when murder, tor- ture and long gaol sentences were a common- place? Hardly : Portugal does not have the re- sources. But Salazar, like Hitler, is determined to fight till the end even if it brings chaos both in Po tugal and her colonies. He has already sent f urthe r military reinforcements to Angola, and more troops from Portugal are expected there soon, to train and lead the African troops that have' nen recruited. These will not be reliable; but S ilazar does not rely solely on his military forces to defend his empire The high command of th t Legiao Portuguesa, a counterpart of Hitler 's SS, has been reorganised with the specific purpo se of intensifying its colonial activities. The legion arios are specially trained fanatics; Salazar has b pasted that all his followers may betray him, :ut not the legionarios.' Three leaders of Moviinento Popular de Libertacao de Angola, Viriato Cruz, Mario de Andrade and Lucio Lara, who are safely in Conakry, have issued a statement calling the attention of the world to Portugal's 'feverish preparations for a colonial war' and demanding that Portugal should 'immediately accept the right of self-determination of the people of Angola' to avert bloodsned. The first response has come from a group of Portuguese liberals in exile in Canada; and it looks that similar response is forthcoming from Portuguese liberals in Brazil and other countries.
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