No solution to Angolan imbroglio in sight

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): On Saturday, for the second time in a week, they shot down a United Nations (UN) plane soon after take-off from the besieged Angolan city of Huambo.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan was "outraged", and Issa Diallo, head of the UN Observer Mission in Angola, said he thought UN flights were being specifically targeted. Six other flights out of Huambo that day were not fired on, but "the UN plane asked for and got authorization, takes off, and gets shot down."

Yet nobody said the obvious: "Savimbi did it." Both planes were shot down over territory controlled by UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola), Jonas Savimbi's rebel army, and Savimbi has always treated the UN with contempt. But the UN never calls a spade a spade in Angola -- with results that have been disastrous for the country.

Savimbi is a monster from a distant past, when Angola was still a Portuguese colony and the major liberation movement there was the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola), which was both Marxist and non-racial. Lisbon saw the MPLA as especially dangerous because it drew support from all the tribes of Angola, from the large mixed-race population, and even from some whites.

So in the late 1960s the ambitious and well-educated young Jonas Savimbi (he has a medical degree from Lisbon and a PhD from Lausanne) was recruited by the Portuguese secret police to start up a rival movement based on his own Ovimbundu tribe: UNITA. The goal was to weaken the MPLA by splitting off the Ovimbundu, who account for about a third of Angola's people. It has worked all too well.

A revolution at home forced Portugal to pull out of Angola in 1975, but the MPLA and UNITA could not agree to form a government together. More precisely, the Cold War strategists who saw Africa as a battleground enticed them into war by promising them enough arms to crush the other side and form a government alone.

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and the apartheid regime in South Africa gave Savimbi arms and money, and a joint South African-UNITA offensive got most of the way to the capital, Luanda, in 1976. But the Soviets sent 50,000 Cuban troops to drive them back, and the struggle subsided into a 15-year-long guerrilla war.

It was a debilitating conflict that killed several hundred thousand Angolans, but UNITA, kept afloat by U.S. and South African subsidies, had no chance of winning. The MPLA was the legal government, and controlled most of Angola's rich resources -- it is Africa's second-largest oil producer and third-largest diamond exporter -- as well as most of the territory.

Despite the war, the MPLA even managed to build one of Africa's best medical, educational and welfare systems in most of the country (though there was no nonsense about democracy). UNITA used Maoist methods -- Savimbi was a Communist at university, though he later changed ideology to suit his backers -- to create an Orwellian tyranny in the region he controlled, but there was almost no development in his zone.

Then the end of the Cold War in 1989, followed by the end of white minority rule in South Africa, pulled the carpet out from under both Angolan combatants. Dealing over their heads, the Americans, Russians, and South Africans cut a deal that sent the MPLA's Cuban troops home, gave independence to South African- ruled Namibia -- and forced Angola to hold a UN-supervised election.

It was a shambles. The government's army melted away after the cease-fire, but Savimbi filled the UN's demobilization camps with old men and boys while keeping his real army intact. The UN tolerated his foot-dragging, arguing that it could all be sorted out after the election -- but then, to Savimbi's vast surprise and utter fury, he lost the September, 1992 election. Practically nobody outside the Ovimbundu-dominated Central Highlands voted for UNITA (and even many of them were coerced into it).

Savimbi claimed that the results were rigged (the UN said otherwise), and UNITA's secret army overran two-thirds of the country before the MPLA could rebuild its forces. Most cities in the interior were wrecked, all the infrastructure built up over 15 years was lost, the death toll rose to half a million (in a population of only 12 million), and Savimbi captured the diamond- producing provinces that largely finance his operations today.

The UN stood idly by until an MPLA counter-offensive began to win back much of the lost territory in 1994, and then brokered a new cease-fire that gave UNITA a big share in a coalition government (with no nonsense about elections this time). Savimbi agreed, and over 8,000 UN troops were sent to supervise the disarmament process -- but once again, Savimbi kept his best troops back.

The Luanda government knew what Savimbi was up to when the cease-fire violations and local land-grabs started mounting early this year, but it's no longer the poor-but-honest Marxist regime of the 1970s and 1980s. The Marxism is gone, but so is the honesty and dedication: the MPLA regime is now one of the most corrupt and least competent in Africa. So its desperate recent efforts to rebuild its army have not produced a professional fighting force -- as it discovered when large-scale fighting began again last month.

The UN knew that Savimbi had preserved the core of his army, but last year it withdrew its peacekeeping troops anyway, leaving only a thousand observers behind. The Security Council issued a strong statement blaming the vast majority of cease-fire violations on Savimbi, but did nothing except to impose a (very leaky) embargo on his vastly lucrative diamond-smuggling operations.

Now the cease-fire is over in all but name, and Savimbi turns out to have bought far more heavy weapons than anyone suspected.

UNITA again threatens to overrun most of central Angola -- and it's the only side with a motive for killing UN military observers who could confirm its violations. But the UN still obsessively pursues its policy of 'even-handedness', refusing to acknowledge what is plain to everyone on the ground -- and Angola goes back to hell.