Lawless Terror

Except for a few cooking fires, it was dark when the seven truckloads of Portuguese soldiers came. They took me and many of our village down to the river. I heard many shots, and four men near me fell into the river. Then a Portuguese soldier stuck me many times in the back with the knife on his rifle. He kicked me into the river. I grabbed a branch and it carried me downstream. I crawled out and lay all the next day in the bush. Some friends found me and carried me here, where they are making me well.

His black body starkly thin against the white sheets, the speaker was Jean Felix, 22, a refugee from the nine-week-old revolt in Portuguese Angola. Two bayonet thrusts had gone completely through his chest; one had cut a kidney in half. He was recovering in the Christian Medical Institute Hospital at Kimpese in the Congo, 20 miles north of the Angola border.

Walking, hobbling on crutches, or carrying their wounded in bloody blankets, frightened refugees have been streaming across the border at the rate of over 800 a day since the revolt began. All have their stories of indiscriminate Portuguese brutality. Pedro Neves, 30, took a bullet in the leg when two Portuguese army planes strafed his village of Tumbi. Twelve-year-old Andre Destino's village of Boa Nuta was first strafed, then raided by troops in trucks. They shot and killed his father and brother, left him for dead with his left buttock shot away. "I estimate we've killed 30,000 of these animals already," bragged one Portuguese army officer in Luanda. "There are perhaps 100,000 of them in revolt--and we intend to kill every one of them when the dry season starts late in May."

Both estimates are probably way too high. Congo observers, working with the scraps of information that leak out past the iron censorship that Dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar has clamped on Angola, think as many as 7,000 Africans have been killed--many without reason, since probably no more than 2,000 to 3,000 natives are actively in revolt.

The black rebels have given the Portuguese provocation enough for savagery. Working in bands of 20 to 30, the rebels paint their faces red to make themselves "invisible," smoke marijuana for "bullet proofing," wear their trousers inside out as a means of identification on hit-and-run raids. Intent on terrorizing whites indiscriminately, they are not content just to kill; they also mutilate, plucking out eyes, severing hands. Altogether, the rebels are estimated to have killed some 600 Angolan whites. Last week the Portuguese, who all along have claimed that the revolt was not spontaneous but instigated from the outside, reported that army troops had captured 71 well-armed Ghanaian guerrillas fighting alongside the rebels. Rebel leader Holden Roberto, who directs the rebellion from his Leopoldville headquarters, has insisted that his U.P.A. has not had help from Ghana, professes to scorn Nkrumah as too leftist. But Ghana and Guinea have fostered a rival Communist-dominated group called the Movement for the Liberation of Angola (M.P.L.A.), and Nkrumah's meddlesome African Affairs Bureau has openly boasted of its efforts to foment rebellion in Angola.

No Escape. The Portuguese now have in action an estimated 8,000 white troops backed by 10,000 loyal black troops drawn from the tribesmen of lower Angola, who cordially hate the northerners who are leading the rebellion. Next month an additional 25,000 troops are expected from Portugal. In the meantime, the frightened authorities have supplied guns to civilians, who sometimes take justice into their own hands. In Luanda, civilian vigilantes raided Sao Paolo suburb to hunt for "suspected arms," shot down 33 Africans at random. A government spokesman later reported the raid proudly. Fortnight ago in Luanda, a country coffee planter spotted two Africans he believed had been with a rebel band that burned his plantation. He led a pick-up mob of whites down Luanda's main street. The mob literally tore one man limb from limb, pitched the other screaming off a six-story roof to crash through the candy-striped umbrella of a sidewalk cafe. The police casually watched.

Many Portuguese Angolans are appalled by the lawless terror that is overwhelming the province, would gladly leave if they could. But Salazar recently forbade any white male between 18 and 45 to leave Angola, has sharply limited the export of funds out of Angola. At week's end, there were some signs of sanity in Portugal itself. In a public memorandum to Salazar, 61 leading Portuguese demanded drastic changes in the constitution to bring about a more democratic rule in the homeland--as the first step toward solving Portugal's smoldering colonial problems abroad.

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