So much for peace in Angola-a 17month anomaly following a 16-year civil war that took the lives of at least 350,000 people. The battle in Luanda capped days of assaults throughout the country by UNITA, which was supported during the civil war by the United States and South Africa. By the end of last week, a tense cease-fire seemed to be holding in the capital. The corpses that littered the streets around the Turismo had been hauled away. Blue-uniformed policemen, armed with AK-47s, roamed Luanda’s deserted streets, while hundreds of white expatriates packed into Portuguese Air Force C-130 transport planes headed for Europe and America. But UNITA troops, now in control of about one third of the nation, refused to lay down their arms. In the provincial capital of Huambo, some of Savimbi’s soldiers looted UNICEF warehouses containing medical supplies. “The peace that was brokered between the warring factions is no longer holding,” says a U.N. official in Luanda. “Angola is for all practical purposes in a state of war.”
Savimbi is largely to blame. Having failed at the polls six weeks ago, when the country voted under United Nations supervision in separate presidential and parliamentary elections, he seems determined to take Angola by storm. In the parliamentary race, the country’s 4 million voters delivered a convincing victory to the left-wing governing party, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). But with minor candidates clogging the presidential field, dos Santos received only a plurality of the vote, 49.6 percent-just shy of the simple majority needed to avert a runoff. Savimbi finished second and cried fraud. Never mind that 800 international observers pronounced the election free and fair; UNITA’s leader beat a sulky retreat to his base in Huambo and began plotting mischief. As the nation awaited a timetable for a presidential runoff election, Savimbi took advantage of the political stalemate to extend his military control from the populous Benguela province on the Atlantic coast to the Bie province in central Angola. Last week dos Santos accused his rival of conducting “a vast operation to take over the national territory.”
Savimbi also threatens to undo Angola’s fragile transition to democracy. A peace accord–brokered by the United States, Russia and Portugal in May 1991–was to have culminated in September’s balloting, the first open, multiparty elections in the history of the former Portuguese colony. The agreement also mandated the formation of a unified army, composed of the UNITA and MPLA factions that had been fighting each other since 1975, when Angola won its independence. But neither side demobilized. On the eve of the vote, Savimbi still commanded as many as 35,000 seasoned guerrilla fighters, while the MPLA government had created a heavily armed paramilitary police force numbering in the thousands. The final days of the campaign were punctuated by skirmishes and kidnappings. The United Nations went ahead with the elections, but had no power to enforce the outcome.
Whipped, but by no means conciliatory, Savimbi last week called on his former cold-war backers, the Americans, to intervene in the crisis. (Washington has urged Savimbi and his enemies to negotiate a peaceful settlement of their dispute.) The arrival in Luanda of U.N. peacekeeping chief Marrack Goulding did little to snuff out new outbreaks of violence. In the absence of a negotiated settlement between the MPLA and UNITA, a new presidential vote looked less and less likely. Now, with the coming of the rainy season, the two-man runoff could well be postponed until next spring. By then, Angola may be mired in full-scale civil war again-and its delicate experiment with democracy left a shambles.
