Savimbi's Shadowy Struggle

Cubans will remain in Angola as long as they wish." So said Angolan President Agostinho Neto, expressing gratitude to Premier Fidel Castro for sending an estimated 20,000 troops and 4,000 civilian technicians to his country. Neto had good reason to be thankful. Without Havana's help -- not to mention about $2 million a day in Soviet aid -- the Marxist regime in Luanda would probably not be in power today.

Three years ago, Neto's Moscow-backed Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (M.P.L.A.) appeared to have won control of the former Portuguese territory in a bloody civil war against two Western-supported independence groups: Holden Roberto's National Front for the Liberation of Angola (F.N.L.A.) and Jonas Savimbi's National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). In fact, the civil war never really ended, and Neto's Popular Movement government, even with Cuban assistance, has not been able to establish jurisdiction over a country that is larger than Britain, France, Portugal and West Germany combined.

In the far northern district of Cabinda, which is separated from the rest of Angola by a 20-mile strip of Zaire, guerrillas of the small Front for the Liberation of the Cabinda Enclave (F.L.E.C.) are fighting for independence. Unfortunately for the F.L.E.C.'s chances, the squabbling Cabindans are split into three factions; moreover, according to Western intelligence estimates, several battalions of Cubans have been deployed in Cabinda to protect the offshore oil wells that currently provide most of Angola's revenues. Farther south, surviving units of the F.N.L.A. also harass government forces in occasional skirmishes, even though Holden Roberto, 55, now stays mainly in Zaire. President Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire provided much of the F.N.L.A.'s support during the civil war. The Luanda regime may have encouraged the Katangese invasion of Shaba region partly out of vengeance.

Neto's most dangerous opposition is in the south, where UNITA not only fights on but even seems to be gaining a little under the bearded Savimbi, 43, a onetime philosophy student at Switzerland's University of Lausanne. He commands a ragtag army of 5,000 regulars and 12,000 auxiliary bushfighters that includes women and boys barely in their teens. Supported by the Ovimbundu tribe, which makes up about 40% of Angola's population of 6.2 million, Savimbi's forces now control a third of the country. They have gained an advantage by staging successful hit-and-run raids, involving small commando groups of 25 men, to keep government forces off guard.

The UNITA commandos periodically cut the Benguela railroad that formerly carried Zairian and Zambian ore to the seaport at Lobito. The sabotage has deprived Angola's government of $100 million a year in rail revenues. UNITA'S guerrilla attacks have also disrupted diamond mining, as well as farming in the Huambo district, which is Angola's main granary. The country's only sizable revenue (about $700 million last year) comes from oil rigs in Cabinda that are operated under Cuban protection by the Gulf Oil Corp.

Savimbi is well armed and reasonably well financed. Help comes directly from South Africa, which considers UNITA a potential ally in its struggle against the South West African People's Organization (SWAPO), the Angola-based rebel group that seeks to take over Namibia. Ovimbundu refugees, as a result, are allowed into Namibia to escape the fighting, as are some UNITA guerrillas. One wounded fighter recently showed up at a South African border camp, where he accepted a field bandage for his leg and a meal of corn mash and gravy. Leaving for the combat zone, he cockily echoed a line that the charismatic Savimbi impresses on his followers: "Without the Cubans and the Russians, the M.P.L.A. is lost. They know it and we know it."

UNITA receives other weapons, ammunition, medicine and spare parts from abroad through Zaire. According to In Search of Enemies, a newly published expose by former CIA Agent John Stockwell (TIME, May 22), the agency flew $25 million worth of arms to the F.N.L.A. and UNITA through Zaire. After Congress cut off such assistance in 1975, Savimbi was temporarily in trouble. Lately, however, UNITA has been getting funds from other sources, including $18 million reportedly provided by a coalition of wealthy Angolan Portuguese living in Brazilian exile, along with French, Iranian and Arab sources interested in bringing down Neto's Marxist government.

Savimbi's increasing success in the bush has forced Neto to launch a major offensive against him, using both M.P.L.A. and Cuban troops. Despite the government's superior firepower the offensive has been going poorly. There is dissension between the two attacking groups: the Angolans sneeringly call the Cubans "town dwellers" who are afraid to go into the bush, particularly at night. Angolan prisoners captured by UNITA tell of M.P.L.A. mutinies and heavy casualties among the Cubans.

Within the M.P.L.A. leadership there appears to be a split along racial lines. Neto is an assimilado, meaning a Portuguese-speaking Angolan who in colonial times had the same privileges as a European. His wife Maria Eugenia da Silva is white--a fact that prompted the appearance of mysterious posters in Luanda demanding "Morte a rainha branca " (Death to the white queen). An unsuccessful coup last year led by former Interior Minister Nito Alves, an Angolan black, may have been triggered by the ethnic split.

The Roman Catholic Church, which represents half the population of Angola, has accused the government of violating constitutionally guaranteed religious freedoms. The church complains that children are being sent to other Marxist states for education. About 60 young Angolans are in Cuba to study citrus-farming techniques, and 150 more attend schools there to learn both Spanish and Marxism-Leninism. The protests have provoked government jitters. Angola's principal newspaper, Jornal do Luanda, recently called for a "struggle against rumors and rumormongering" that might prove "destabilizing." And the death penalty, which was abolished by the Portuguese a century ago, has been reinstated in cases of "counterrevolutionary activity." qed

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.