Angola Where Blossoms And Bullets Grow

While diplomats tinker with timetables for troop withdrawal, Angola bleeds. Negotiators from Cuba, Angola and South Africa are inching toward a detailed accord to send Cuba’s 50,000 soldiers home and institute long-promised independence for Namibia. But an agreement on the terms, expected next week in the Congolese capital of Brazzaville, will bring no peace to Angola, whose people have known nothing but war for 27 years. The departing foreigners will leave behind a land glutted with weapons and a Marxist government still at war with the 60,000 homegrown rebels known as UNITA.

Nowhere is the misery of Angola’s civil war more palpable than in the provincial capital of Huambo. Lavender-blossomed jacaranda trees line the streets, but many buildings are pockmarked by shellfire and bullets. At a health center, one-legged children push themselves on wooden trolleys while waiting for fresh supplies of artificial limbs. Most became amputees the same way as Fernando Segunda, 16: his right leg was blown off when he stepped on a land mine.

Down south near the Namibian border is the other side of the war’s legacy: a ^ state-of-the-art government air base bristling with the latest Soviet-built MiGs, tanks, radar, antiaircraft missiles and camouflaged bunkers. Angola is the tenth largest importer of arms in the world.

The civil war erupted in 1975 as Angola achieved independence after an anticolonial struggle against Portugal that had begun in 1961. It has killed more than 100,000 Angolans, wounded tens of thousands and cost the country as much as $23 billion in war damage, lost crops and lost diamond-mining revenues. And the killing may just keep going on.

The regional peace accord for southern Africa, which was mediated by the U.S., is expected to require the Cubans to depart within 24 months, possibly starting with a partial pullback behind the 13th parallel. During that time, South Africa will gradually remove its troops from Namibia and permit implementation of the ten-year-old U.N. Resolution 435 calling for the territory’s independence. The accord is expected to be signed by the U.S., South Africa, Angola and Cuba at a ceremony in Brazzaville. Though a hopeful start, the accord leaves Angola’s underlying dispute unresolved: the tribal conflict that pits some 310,000 fighters loyal to Marxist President Jose Eduardo dos Santos against Jonas Savimbi’s tenacious UNITA guerrilla movement.

If anything, Angola’s civil war is getting hotter. With Cuban aid, Angolan forces last week pushed an offensive into the heartland of Savimbi’s Ovimbundu tribesmen. The troops captured three towns in central Angola, including Savimbi’s birthplace of Munhango.

But the drive has hardly daunted UNITA. Thanks to years of support from South African troops, bases in neighboring states and U.S. military aid, including potent Stinger antiaircraft missiles, Savimbi’s men seem as determined as ever. They roam freely in 16 of Angola’s 19 provinces and constantly launch deadly assaults on government soldiers. UNITA, Savimbi claims, has enough arms and money to go on fighting for two more years.

When and if the Cuban troops withdraw, things will probably get worse for Dos Santos. He is so dependent on the Cubans that he has them guarding his presidential palace as well as the important American-operated oil installations in the enclave of Cabinda. The Angolan army, one of the best equipped in black Africa, is not well trained in counterinsurgency tactics. Dos Santos lacks the solid base of a tribal chief, so his survival may ultimately depend on whether he can revive Angola’s sickly economy. Angola has impressive economic potential in its mineral reserves. But while oil production will bring in about $2 billion this year, Luanda will spend half of it on Soviet weapons. Since 1985 Dos Santos has sought to encourage private investment and recently asked the International Monetary Fund for help in rescheduling the nation’s $4 billion foreign debt. Still, his reform efforts have yielded no tangible gain.

Thus far, Dos Santos has steadfastly refused to negotiate with Savimbi, who demands the right to share power. But without some form of negotiated national reconciliation, the military stalemate in Angola could keep the door to prosperity shut tight and prolong the 13-year-old civil war for years more.