South Africa a-Team Foray

Embarrassment piled on embarrassment for the South African government last week after the ambush of a nine-man commando unit by Angolan troops. Reason: South Africa was supposed to have withdrawn the last of its soldiers from Angola in April under a U.S.-mediated accord. General Constand Viljoen, head of South Africa's Defense Forces, admitted that the country still had military units in Angola on "reconnaissance and information-gathering" missions against rebel groups like the African National Congress (ANC), which is known to have bases there. But the captured leader of the commando squad, Captain Wynand Petrus du Toit, during a press conference in Luanda gave a very different version of the foray, in which two commandos were killed (the others escaped).

The bearded Du Toit, 27, still wearing hospital pajamas and with his arm in a sling, said his unit had been sent into Angola to blow up the Malongo oil * refinery, jointly owned by Gulf Oil Corp. and the state-owned oil concern, Sonangol. The mission: to cause a "considerable economic setback" for the Luanda government. The plant is the largest oil refinery in Angola, processing more than half of the country's crude-oil production. The South African government denied that the commandos were sent to sabotage the facility.

Du Toit's statement was quickly seized on last week by Cuban Leader Fidel Castro, who has 30,000 of his troops stationed in Angola. He lambasted U.S.-sponsored peace efforts in southern Africa and charged that the U.S. had known all along that South Africa was lying when it claimed to have withdrawn its forces from Angola. The Angolans had been considering a phased withdrawal of Cuban forces in return for the South African pullout, but last week, according to South African sources, the Luanda government intended to break off negotiations with Pretoria.

At week's end it seemed that the commando incident had produced its first political casualty. Pretoria announced that the hawkish General Viljoen, 51, had decided to retire. Nevertheless, government spokesmen continued to claim that the outlawed ANC is increasing its actions against civilian targets in South Africa. Lending support to this claim, a bomb went off last week in a building used by the Defense Forces in Johannesburg, injuring 17 people. Two days later, a second blast in the city damaged the offices of an organization that sends money, books and food parcels to South African troops. The ANC claimed responsibility for both explosions.