After the Fall of Huambo

Long before the Angolan civil war was rendered newsworthy as a backdrop for CIA disclosures, foreign policy foibles and the restive ghost of Vietnam, there was a war raging in Angola. And it now appears that in the next few years there will be a still more intense guerrilla war raging in Angola. Few have understood the real issue at stake in this conflict--majority rule--buried as it were beneath the stifling mantle of superpower politics. But if Vietnam has taught little else, surely we have learned that the will of a people, regardless of the odds against them, shall determine the outcome of their struggle.

Civil war in Angola erupted against last fall after the breakdown of the coalition government's elections. The October, 1975 polling has little in common with the Chilean fiasco, where a socialist regime attempted to assume power through the ballot box, leaving intact the fascist network of its predecessors. Rather in Angola the population had already fought an arduous 14 year war against the Portuguese minority regime for the very sake of establishing a socialist state under majority rule. During the transitional period last year, the Portuguese Armed Forces Movement conducted and published monthly polls on the relative popularity of the three liberation movements. While the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and the (FNLA) each received less than 25 per cent of the electorate's support, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) consistently pulled over 50 per cent support. UNITA was at a clear political advantage, being a rurally-based party in a 90 per cent peasant country, But without superpower hookups, it could not neutralize the fighting which broke out between the Soviet-backed MPLA and the western-backed FNLA, both intent on stalling the possibility of humiliation through electoral defeat.

Outside observers, nurtured on Soviet propaganda that UNITA did not exist and that its head, Jonas Savimbi, was actually selling fish in a Zambian market, were stunned at the levels of relative popularity for the three movements--at such great variance to the propaganda campaign of the more substantially foreign-backed parties. Inside Angola however, that reality could be more readily comprehended. Both MPLA and FNLA had launched their guerrilla struggle in the early 1960's against the Portuguese from military bases in neighboring countries, MPLA in Zambia, FNLA in Zaire. The tactic of occasional forays across the border into Angola, followed by a quick retreat to a foreign base, began in both cases to seriously alienate the peasantry and created an obstacle to further development of the resistance movement. The peasant population resented the technique whereby roving guerrilla bands moved in and out of combat zones while the peasantry, who remained on the terrain, often suffered vicious Portuguese reprisals.

But there was another retarding force at play, the increasing dependency of the liberation movements on outside support. Such relatively high-level aid dissipated the initiatives for building strong internal peasant support for the movements. And worse still, the two parties found themselves relinquishing more and more control over the decision-making processes. The necessity for aid was not at issue, but the amounts relative to the stage of development of the movements were crucial. Because of the severe repression within Luanda at the outbreak of the armed struggle in 1961, MPLA was not able to build the same foothold within Angola as did simultaneous popular movements in Guinea and Mozambique. But the Soviet Union provided such an efficient propaganda machine that it allowed MPLA to glower under the successes of the other two movements. The Angolan party felt less and less compelled to strive inside Angola for what the outside world believed they were already accomplishing, namely the formation of liberated areas within the Angolan countryside.

When UNITA was formed in 1966 it was vilified as a divisive splinter group. But it did propose a new strategy to the armed struggle. Rather than concentrate the efforts of the movement in building an elaborate propaganda network on the outside, it would concentrate the limited resources of the movement in building liberated areas in the center of Angola. Its headquarters and leadership were permanently established inside Angola. By maintaining complete contact with the peasantry and studying at close quarters the factors specific to the Angola struggle, UNITA succeeded in implanting within Angola's interior a solid infrastructure for guerrilla warfare and national reconstruction. Within a relatively brief period of existence UNITA significantly bridged the gap between intellectual leadership and the Angola reality of a massive peasant majority.

The movement's capacity to attract large segments of the rural population was barely audible to the outside world, except for a trickle of journalists and representatives from Afro-American organizations, willing to make the eight week journey on foot to UNITA bases within central Angola. Impressive reports about the movement filtered out by word-of-mouth accounts from the Namibian Liberation Movement--SWAPO--guerrillas. While SWAPO was forced to maintain a diplomatic alliance with MPLA because of its Soviet backing, SWAPO operated against the South African army (and continues to do so today) from UNITA bases in Southern Angola.

When the veil of secrecy was finally lifted from Angola after the April 1974 coup d'etat in Portugal, only one of the three liberation movements actually controlled liberated areas within Angola and only one had opted to direct its operations from inside the country--UNITA. It was only after the April coup that MPLA rebuilt its base in Luanda. Having been an urban, primarily intellectual movement ever since its inception in 1956, MPLA had been forced underground by the early '60s, and was only recently able to re-activate its urban cells.

By August, 1975, an ill-armed UNITA had been provoked into engaging into hostilities with MPLA and FNLA after an MPLA attack on the plane carrying UNITA's president. UNITA allied with FNLA, which provided weaponry against the MPLA offensive, but, while it retained control of much of the countryside, UNITA was unable to hold the cities. FNLA, without any significant support among the peasantry of the north, was quickly routed by MPLA's expeditionary force of 12,500 Cuban infantrymen.

UNITA's administrative capital, Huambo, fell on February 8, 1976, but the war was far from over. Guerrilla bases which had been operation against the Portuguese have been re-activated, and the military has moved back into the bush areas, which are inaccessible to Soviet tanks, and which provide dense forest cover against MPLA bomber attacks. Because the support base of UNITA is essentially the hundreds of deep villages which dot the vast Angolan countryside, the fall of Huambo has had relatively little effect on the functioning of the movement inside the country.

Reconstruction in the more than half of the country still under effective UNITA control is directed primarily by three UNITA-sponsored organizations, the National Association of Labor Unions (SINDACO), the League of Angolan Women (LIMA), and the Angolan Youth League. LIMA comprises more than 10,000 women who had initially been trained for combat during the war against the Portuguese minority regime. Still maintaining a military component, LIMA now has chapters throughout the Angolan countryside and concentrates on political mobilization of the populations in those areas, instructing women in effective techniques of village political organizing. Its Kwacha Institute in Sambo, near the small town of Vila Nova, provides care for the elderly and disabled, administering occupational therapy and literacy classes. LIMA also operates cooperative farms in which food is produced for public institutions such as the orphanages under their care. City women pledge two or three days a week, on which they walk the often more than 15 miles to the farms, to join their peasant sisters in working the land.

Given the total lack of schools in Angola's rural areas during the time of Portuguese control, education is today a priority. Young girls and boys attend classes for the first time in their lives, six days a week with two shifts a day. Medical care is free but minimal because of the lack of doctors and medicines.

SINDACO encompasses not just workers, but peasant farmers who are formed into cooperative brigades which determine local food production policy, while regulating crop growth to suit demand. There have been no severe food shortages in these areas in recent years, even during periods of intensified struggle. Food coops are structured so that the families of workers obtain weekly allotments of food, paying a fixed amount calculated on the basis of their wages and family size. The Youth League has taken the initiative in setting up elementary schools throughout the country and drawing the parents into the process with their political mobilization work.

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The complicity of the west in Portugal's colonial legacy and in assisting the white minority regimes in Southern Africa has been long, invidious and well-documented. Soviet aims for establishing its own sphere of influence in this region pose an unfamiliar menace, but one which is the principal issue to be reckoned with in the present Angolan conflict. As MPLA's ambitious benefactor, the Soviet Union saw forcing a military solution as a means of boosting the movement's dwindling influence, preventing a humiliating display at the polls and asserting Soviet control over this area of Africa. Many well-intentioned liberals and progressives point to the Soviet Union's longstanding support of liberation movements as justification of its escalation of the war and the intrusion of nearly 15,000 Cuban troops. Herein lies the deeper, little-understood tragedy of this Angolan war and the issue that lumps the Soviet Union and the U.S. in the very same boat--superpower intrusion. The aid which the Soviet Union gave MPLA during the 14 years of anti-colonial struggle was more than offset by sums dispatched to persuade or blackmail governments and organizations into not recognizing its principal rival, UNITA. Large sums were equally invested in an elaborate propaganda mechanism to discredit its Angolan rival, claiming it nonexistent or otherwise in the pay of one foreign power or another. Attempts at unification of the movements, not just in Angola but in Rhodesia, Namibia and South Africa as well, were undermined by Soviet fears of losing control over their favored sons.

It is the recognition of the superpower dimension to the Angolan conflict that has prompted many Afro-American groups to organize around the battle cry "Superpowers out of Angola--Government of National Unity" while the liberals and white left maintain "U.S. out of Angola--MPLA." The peculiar instance of black groups supporting the party which the media had tagged as collaborators with the racist South African regime bears special looking into. Black organizations like the now clearly marxist African Liberation Support Committee (ALSC) have begun to take a more prodding look at the facts beyond what is presented in the press. ALSC has sent representatives to Angola to bring back firsthand accounts to the black community of what is really going on. Their reports are at total variance with the sophisticated information networks of the American liberal and pro-Soviet support groups in America, who have not only glorified MPLA but also go to great lengths to discredit UNITA. ALSC, in unison with more strictly nationalist groups, claims that the black community has been deceived about the situation in Angola.

The judgement of a tottering old political giant is not just a tallying up of the Richard Nixons who slipped through the system. There is a more subtle but equally incisive measure of the disintegrating state of affairs, an assessment of those who call themselves the system's avant-garde and regard themselves as the righteous guardians of social justice. There is an invidious callousness which pervades every layer of American society, including its left-swinging tips. It is an insensitivity spawned no doubt of power tipsyness, for the U.S. is a nation strong enough to keep its own wars thousands of miles off American shores, and fight them essentially by proxy. Angola today is a superpower war, that won't melt away just because one side denies the reality of its own colossal footprint in the mire. Fifteen thousand Cubans remain in Angola because the U.S. will take no initiative in pressing the Soviet Union for them to leave. And even America's left has been essentially indifferent to the real issue of African liberation throughout the anti-colonial struggle. Bereft of constructive ideas, and unwilling to organize on behalf of pressing for the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Angolan soil, they rejoice in the whiplash of the other superpower's totalitarianism, reckoning that a Soviet stooge is by definition more progressive than an American stooge. Implied in their stance is the American arrogance that an African independence movement is incapable of self-identity and of pursuing its own development.

To believe that the Angolan people, after having fought 14 years against Portuguese minority rule, will willingly submit to Russian-backed minority rule is to mock the conception of liberation and genuine human progress. The Americans found in Vietnam what the Russians are quickly finding in Angola, a hostile, guerrilla-organized rural majority intent on victory.

Connie Hilliard Sangumba, the American wife of UNITA's foreign minister George Sangumba, is a fourth-year graduate student at GSAS.