Angola’s legacy of unrest

“The first man to be killed in Portuguese Africa nearly fell into my beer today . . .” Thus wrote foreign correspondent Donald Wise from Luanda in the early 1970s. The event — a dissident thrown out a window and on to the street — marked the beginning of brutal repression of the Angolan independence movement, and of the chain of violence that continues today.

The recent death of Jonas Savimbi, who for 35 years led the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), is being hailed by the diplomatic community as a breakthrough for peace in the country, which has known virtually nothing but civil war since Portugal granted it independence in 1975.

It is nothing of the sort. Although Savimbi, to a much greater extent than other leaders of the Angolan independence factions, was UNITA, a guerrilla movement that can claim 30-35% of the electorate’s support at the polls is not going to dissolve solely because the government has finally chased down its leader and killed him.

A little background on the Angolan civil war may be in order. When Portuguese dictator Antonio Salazar was deposed by a military coup in 1974 (the coup that founded the modern Portuguese democracy), the new government instantly announced that Portugal’s overseas colonies would receive independence. In Angola, three independence movements contended for power: the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), backed by the Soviet Union; the National Front for the Liberation of Angola, backed by Communist China; and UNITA, with lukewarm support from the West. The Communist-backed movements were powerful in the cities; UNITA, in the interior. What ensued was the second phase of Angola’s civil war, the archetypal proxy war of the 1970s.

By 1976, the MPLA were the victors. The Front collapsed and the Chinese, still determined to punch above their weight in southern Africa, cast in their lot with UNITA. The MPLA looked to the Soviet Union for help, and got it, in the form of 37,000 Cuban “advisors” in Soviet pay. (There was some irony in all this, which not everyone appreciated: at the height of the Portuguese colonial period, Portugal had about 50,000 troops in Angola. The Russo-Cuban colonial period didn’t take quite as many bodies to enforce, but then it was better financed.)

Heavily armed advisors they were, and the war against UNITA was largely prosecuted by Cuban troops between 1976 and 1989. Angola’s support for the South West African People’s Organization, the Namibian independence movement, brought South African money and troops into southern Angola in support of UNITA. Through the 1980s, despite Cuban help, the MPLA was on the ropes. Then proxy wars suddenly became unfashionable; the Soviet Union pulled the plug, and the Cubans, their Soviet paymasters gone, pulled out their occupation troops between 1989 and 1991.

But UNITA had its own problems. South Africa’s internal political brew boiled over as well, and the regional power backed out of Namibia, leaving UNITA to its own devices.

In 1991 the MPLA, finally able to confirm that Gorbachev had torn down the wall and its former colonial protectors were out of the empire business, agreed to a cease-fire with UNITA. UNITA stipulated presidential and legislative elections, which the MPLA won in 1992.

Savimbi, charging that the elections were not free and fair, repudiated the cease-fire and headed back into the bush, beginning the third phase of the civil war, the phase fuelled by diamond and oil money. UNITA, no longer having the South Africans in its corner, moved for control of the oil-producing regions of the northwest and the diamond operations in the interior.

UNITA was largely successful, taking over Soyo, the country’s main oil-refining city on the Congo River, and making the interior diamond country unsafe to operate in without armed protection.

There was a hiatus from late 1994, when UNITA and the government entered another cease-fire under United Nations supervision, but power-sharing is no one’s long suit in Angola, and by 1998, UNITA was back doing what it did best.

The MPLA government has trumpeted Savimbi’s death as a decisive victory over UNITA. Kofi Annan, secretary-general of the United Nations, a body that can always be counted on for a few platitudes in defence of the legitimacy of one-party African states, said, through a spokesman, that “It is important for all in Angola to take advantage of the situation and move the peace process forward.”

Even Pik Botha, once South Africa’s foreign minister and an architect of Pretoria’s support for UNITA, suggested it was “the hour for coming to a settlement.”

Fat chance. If UNITA dissolves into splinter groups, the MPLA will be faced with another Sierra Leone, a set of regional strongmen running lawless terror gangs that will, more than ever, be dependent on the black markets in oil and diamonds. If UNITA survives, the dynamic of guerrilla movements dictates that the most ruthless will rise to the top. It will be UNITA’s hard-liners, not its moderates, whom the MPLA will face.

The United Nations and international do-gooders may clamor for peace and those chimeral “just and lasting settlements,” but it dodges two realities. The first is that the MPLA, though the victor in a multi-party election, is still constitutionally the Angolan state; the Marxist constitution of 1992 is unchanged. UNITA won’t accept that. The second is that violently opposed factions like the MPLA and UNITA cannot be relied on to create a tolerant democracy where the rule of law is respected.

But the West can do one thing: it can choke off the cash. In this respect, “clean” diamonds from Namibia, Botswana, Australia and Canada are one of the best tools the mining industry can offer the world. Making the diamond market an unfriendly place for black-market Angolan diamonds — and a friendly one for legitimately produced ones — could force some progress in an intractable situation. But if the cash keeps flowing to the parties in the civil war, Angola will remain a desperate, dangerous and disheartening place, diamonds or no diamonds, Savimbi or no Savimbi.