Savimbi death opens way for Angola to leave decades of bloodshed behind

Published on Monday 25 February 2002 00:00

THE BURIAL yesterday of the rebel leader Jonas Savimbi in a pauper’s graveyard offers the potentially rich African country of Angola its best opportunity for peace in 27 years of civil war - a conflict that has laid waste to both town and countryside and destroyed millions of lives.

Without Savimbi, the once charismatic and charming guerrilla who turned into a serial murderer of his own closest followers, his UNITA resistance movement is finished as an effective military force.

"We have to see this, probably, as the beginning of the end of Angola’s war," said Mussayi Jeichandi, the United Nations special representative in Angola.

When Savimbi was shot dead last week by troops of the MPLA government - which was once a hardline Marxist-Leninist organisation, but which turned capitalist almost overnight, even to the extent of investing in Coca-Cola plants - the dynamics of regional power struggles throughout southern Africa changed.

Other autocrats, such as the Zimbabwean president, Robert Mugabe, will be trembling as they consider Savimbi’s final, ignominious fate.

Savimbi ruled UNITA (the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) as an absolute dictator in the movement’s latter years. He either murdered his entire second-tier leadership - a group of outstanding intellectuals, diplomats and military men - or forced them to defect.

Tony Fernandes, the MPLA’s ambassador to Britain, for example, was the joint founder of UNITA with Savimbi back in 1965. They created the movement to fight the Portuguese who had ruled Angola for 500 years. Mr Fernandes defected ten years ago this month after Savimbi had imprisoned him for more than a month in an underground pit on the charge that he was a friend of Ronald Reagan - at a time, ironically, when the United States was supplying Savimbi clandestinely with many millions of dollars through the CIA.

The Americans maintained a permanent "embassy" of three CIA men at Savimbi’s bush headquarters in the vast wilderness of south-east Angola.

"In those circumstances, under Savimbi, you became less than a nobody, there’s no other way you can describe it," Mr Fernandes recalled. "I was beaten with fists and clubs. I felt in some ways it was worse than being killed because of the humiliation."

Savimbi had become UNITA, and UNITA was Savimbi. With the head chopped off and nobody of real stature left alive or present to take over, UNITA seems destined to break up into a fragmented series of desultory armed bands that can gradually be mopped up if the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) plays its cards wisely.

It is incumbent now upon the MPLA to act shrewdly and judiciously. Angola, with vast oil, diamond and other natural resources, is potentially one of the richest countries on earth. Yet its people are the poorest. The United Nations has declared it the worst country on earth for a child to be born in. Some one million of its 12 million people have died in the civil war. Hundreds of thousands of people have lost limbs to landmines that have been sown liberally right across a country three times the size of Britain. Four million people are internal refugees, trapped in the horrific cycle of reprisal attacks that take place between government troops and UNITA guerrillas.

Having killed its nemesis, and displayed his bloodied body, swarming with flies, to the world, the MPLA government can no longer blame Savimbi for its own many shortcomings and the miseries of the people, as it has done for decades.

There will be a massive push for change, for more accountable government and for economic transparency by the international community, who will have to foot much of the bill for Angola’s total reconstruction and to tackle a mammoth humanitarian crisis.

Fiercely contested cities and towns like Huambo, Cuito and Malange - once centres of exquisite Mediterranean architecture under the Portuguese colonial rule - have been reduced to rubble reminiscent of Dresden at the end of the Second World War.

Angola, which became the arena of a hot conflict in the Cold War between the West and the East, might have been expected to find peace in the post-communist era. Instead it found a new brutality.

Ambassador Fernandes recalled that he and Savimbi launched UNITA with great idealism. "We were very young, both studying at the University of Freiburg [in Switzerland] and demonstrating against American involvement in Vietnam. Savimbi was 100 per cent a Maoist.

Gamal Abdel Nasser [then president of Egypt] gave us money and persuaded Mao Zedong to train our first guerrillas at the Nanking Military Academy.

"I liked the way Savimbi spoke about the future of Angola and its people. I liked Savimbi’s idea of UNITA basing itself in rural Angola, relying, like Mao, on the peasants, not the small population of urban workers. I thought the theory was correct."

Like Mr Fernandes, Geraldo Nunda, a former UNITA general who once commanded Savimbi’s northern front, became disillusioned when Savimbi insisted on taking UNITA back to war when it narrowly lost Angola’s first multi-party elections in 1992.

"I concluded Savimbi was insane. Multi-party elections were what we had fought for," said Gen Nunda, with whom this correspondent once "yomped" hundreds of miles across the Angolan jungles to watch him lead a brilliant attack by 1,500 UNITA men on an MPLA garrison near to the spot where Savimbi was shot dead last week.

"He was afraid of being an ordinary citizen," the general continued. "He wanted to be a presidential dictator.

"Until 1989, I thought UNITA was a big project of all the people. After that, as the killings of dissidents and women who refused to sleep with Savimbi accelerated, I realised that Savimbi had turned the party into his own personal project. He knew how to manipulate people.

"Like a scientist, he was always experimenting to see how far he could go. I saw that he would advance until the very end, until the moment when everything would fall apart."

Gen Nunda was incorporated into the MPLA army as a special adviser on how to eliminate Savimbi. He was present during last week’s operation in which MPLA forces trapped Savimbi and his bodyguards - known as the Dragons of Death - against a river bank in the encounter that ended the life of the 67-year-old UNITA leader who had, in reality, already destroyed himself long beforehand.