Portugal: Revolt in a Non-Colony

Perhaps because Portugal has been a colonial power for so long,* most modern Portuguese profess to see no distinction between the homeland and the Overseas Provinces, which are no longer referred to as colonies. Vivid in the memories of adult Portuguese are grade school wall maps on which Portugal (roughly the size of Indiana) was always accompanied by its mammoth possessions. Superimposed on the map of Europe, they extended clear across Spain and France. The message of the maps: “Portugal is not a small country.” Last week events on two continents hastened the day when Portugal will in fact be a small country.

In the troubled Portuguese African colony of Angola, 150 settlers have been slaughtered in the past fortnight in a rash of terrorist raids led by Angola blacks who live near the Congolese border. Already Portuguese Dictator Antonio Salazar’s forces have evacuated 3,500 terrified whites from northern Angola. Thirty thousand Portuguese soldiers crash about in pelting rainstorms, hunting the sizable terrorist bands thought to be still at large.

Most of the terrorists are members of a mildly left-wing exile group known as the Union of the Populations of Angola, which maintains its headquarters in the Congo capital of Leopoldville. U.P.A.’s founder and president, a 36-year-old Angolan named Holden Roberto, returned last week to Leopoldville from lobbying around U.N. headquarters in Manhattan to take command of the rebel campaign. Deploring the slayings in Angola, he insisted that his men had been ordered only to begin a campaign of sabotage and general disobedience, but had gotten out of hand when the Portuguese ordered a series of brutal repressions.

In Angola’s capital city of Luanda, it was the whites who got out of hand. Infuriated by the U.S. vote fortnight ago in favor of a disapproving Security Council resolution aimed at Portuguese rule in Angola, 400 Portuguese settlers rioted for two hours outside the U.S. consulate in Luanda. Shouting “Down with Communism and the partners of the Soviets!” the mob overturned Consul William Gibson’s car and, while cops made themselves scarce, dumped it into Luanda harbor.

Portuguese Angolans faced still more trouble in the U.N. Forty Asian and African nations last week sponsored a proposal to put the Angola troubles on the General Assembly agenda. Just before the vote, Portuguese U.N. Delegate Vasco Vieira Garin stalked out of the Assembly hall “in the name of justice and right.” Then, by a vote of 79-2, the Assembly voted to put Angola on the docket. France and Britain were among the eight who abstained. The U.S. reaffirmed its earlier stand, voted with the majority. Portugal’s two lonesome defenders: Franco Spain and South Africa.

*Portugal’s first colony, won from the Moors in 1415, was the North African port of Ceuta, now held by Spain.