The Late Jonas Savimbi

I'd always thought that the analogy between Savimbi and Radovan Karadzic -- 
and of the Angolan Ovimbundu with the Bosnian Serbs -- that this article 
makes was a very apt one. But while Milosevic got shipped off to the Hague 
on the insistence of the Western powers, the Angolans had to deal with 
Savimbi on their own -- and indeed, he was foisted upon them by the US and 
South Africa.

John Lacny

**********
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n06/hard2406.htm

London Review of Books, March 21, 2002

The Late Jonas Savimbi
Jeremy Harding

The sight of a man in fatigues stalking around a poor country is guaranteed 
to arouse the interest of ideologues in richer ones, whatever their 
persuasion. Yet the recent 'martyrdom' of Jonas Savimbi, the leader of the 
Unita rebel movement in Angola, has had nothing like the same effect as the 
death of Che Guevara 35 years ago in Bolivia, mourned by millions of 
vicarious guerrilleros around the world. The bodies of both men were put on 
display to satisfy the scepticism of the international press and demoralise 
the local following. Both were transmitted to most parts of the world: Che 
in Deposition with the Third Day pending, as it still is for some; Savimbi 
rotting in his socks, caught like a chicken-thief who thought to creep into 
the coop.

Jonas Savimbi stole just about everything and he should not be pitied. His 
greatest wish was to take possession of Angola, not as a common felon but 
as a feudal grandee, a Naipaulian Big Man, who would stride out of the 
bush, fully empowered by elections or force majeure - it didn't much matter 
- and preside over the capital Luanda, the decadent enemy heartland of 
half-castes, Marxists, philanderers and oil-profiteers. This was not 
possible. In the attempt, which lasted roughly thirty years, he robbed 
Angolan peasants of just about everything and several well-known 
politicians of their plausibility. Jeane Kirkpatrick, the Reagan 
Administration's henchperson at the UN, described him as 'one of the 
authentic heroes of our time', and Reagan himself is reported to have 
likened him to Abraham Lincoln. Even as he ceased to serve the purposes of 
Washington and Pretoria at the end of the Cold War, he continued to 
persuade Western right-wing lobbyists and anti-Communist crusaders to part 
with their money: 'hearts, minds and purses' was the Savimbi strategy on 
this front and it paid off handsomely. He also pilfered and cannibalised 
greater reputations to advance or tweak his own: he proclaimed himself a 
Maoist before Maoism became an anathema and a devotee of Che when fashion 
features in the Face were still decking out pretty boys from Epping or 
Harrogate to look like jungle revolutionaries. Ingenuity, coupled with 
immense reserves of courage, cruelty and amour propre, was the ingredient 
that allowed him to continue his 'armed struggle' in Angola for so long, 
and to turn the country into one of the unhappiest on earth. At the same 
time, he was a consequence of Angola's place in the Cold War jigsaw, and 
the speed at which the Angolan anti-colonial struggle became an 
internationalised civil war fought by large numbers of non-nationals.

The Portuguese were very unhappy about leaving Angola. Like the Pieds 
Noirs, they were a settler community, much of it of peasant stock, which 
had done well. Angola was resource-rich. There were, and still are, 
diamonds and oil. In the central highlands, you could raise cattle and 
crops; where the land sloped down towards sea level, coffee grew in 
abundance. This was not a place to leave with good grace. It's said that in 
the bay of Luanda, as Independence approached in 1975, the ships bound for 
Europe were loaded with as much as they could hold and what they couldn't, 
including brand new cars, generators, office switchboards, anything that 
could have been useful in the new Angola, was tipped into the sea. Savimbi 
was by this time fighting flat out against the MPLA, the movement that was 
about to assume power in Luanda. His comrades in the field were the South 
African Defence Force.

This was an extraordinary alliance for an avowed anti-colonialist, but the 
situation in Angola was tangled and Savimbi's methods were unorthodox. For 
a start, neither of the two rival liberation movements in Angola, the MPLA 
and the FNLA, which were active from the early 1960s, could get the edge 
over the other until the very eve of Independence, by which time the MPLA 
had a decisive advantage in the form of Cuban military support on the 
ground. Savimbi was another matter. He had parted company with the FNLA in 
1964 and put his own arrangements together. By 1966, Unita was a 
functioning organisation. On the face of it, the movement should never have 
amounted to much, but as the marginal player in what had become a 
triangular struggle for power it enjoyed two slow-burn benefits which 
assured its survival. The first was tribalism. Savimbi belonged to the 
Ovimbundu people of the highlands, geographically remote from the stamping 
grounds of the two main movements. These, too, had tribal bases (the MPLA 
were mostly Mbundu and the FNLA Bakongo) but their tribalism was diluted by 
a modicum of urbanity and, too, by Marxism-Leninism, with its fraternal 
this and that. Once the Cubans had done for the FNLA and helped to install 
the MPLA in Luanda, Unita slowly but surely took on the characteristics 
(and frightening strengths) of an ethnic movement, like Inkatha in South 
Africa or Karadzic's Serbian Democratic Party in Bosnia. (Both Savimbi and 
Karadzic preferred to be addressed as 'Doctor'. Perhaps it will be 'Dr 
Karadzic' if and when he stands trial at the Hague. Savimbi got his 
doctorate in Switzerland and used to sign his letters 'Jonas Malheiro 
Savimbi, licensed in legal and political sciences, University of Lausanne'.)

Even though Unita had begun by carrying out armed actions against the 
Portuguese, the authorities were far too preoccupied with the other two 
movements to give it a great deal of thought. This was its second 
advantage. Gradually a sort of entente seemed to grow between Savimbi and 
the colonial enemy. It became more businesslike with the arrival of 
Francisco da Costa Gomes, who took command of the military effort in Angola 
in 1970. (He later served as Portugal's first post-Fascist President.) The 
result was a shaky non-aggression pact, observed on some days but not 
others, and it involved Savimbi in gathering information about the MPLA for 
the Portuguese, while undermining it as best he could. None of his 
right-hand men, some of whom would become Unita's most able commanders and 
diplomats in the 1980s, seems to have known what was going on.

Unita's prospects were somewhat improved by the coup in Lisbon, in April 
1974. With Iberian Fascism entering its final stage, decolonisation became 
inevitable in Portugal's possessions and, with Franco's death, in Spain's. 
The results in both cases - they included the occupation of the Spanish 
Sahara by Morocco and of East Timor by Indonesia - were disastrous. The 
superpowers' interest in Angola had by early 1975 become nearly 
obsessional. Unita was suddenly a useful point of counter-pressure against 
the MPLA, which was heavily backed by Moscow and supported by the Cubans. 
According to the head of the CIA's Angola Task Force at the time, 
Washington divided about $30 million (mid-1970s values) between the FNLA 
and Unita in the five months prior to Independence - the start date of this 
high-alert funding period coincided with the fall of Saigon. America's 
generosity was a boon to Unita. It couldn't give the movement a seat at the 
table, but it was respectable seed capital for the long business of murder, 
starvation, intimidation and mayhem that became Unita's purpose in Angola 
from then on.

Savimbi's good fortune was to have become an anti-Communist in Southern 
Africa when the tide was turning against the values of the 'free world', 
which in those days meant white minority rule. The MPLA was strictly a 
Marxist-Leninist movement with a non-starter economic policy and, as time 
went on, a penchant for self-enrichment. Like Islam and Christianity in 
many parts of Africa, Marxism-Leninism was a malleable doctrine, 
susceptible to many local heresies, but the MPLA was rigorous in its 
discourse, and the persecution of its enemies, if nothing else. As the 
party of power, it was also forced to become a war machine, for the killing 
only intensified after Independence. In this, Savimbi was crucial. He could 
rail and cajole and smarm and pontificate to enthusiastic foreign audiences 
about the evils of Communism in Angola and then pass the hat. He had a 
regional domino theory which cited the three main Muscovite movements - the 
ANC, Swapo of Namibia and Joshua Nkomo's Zimbabwe African People's Union - 
as well as Mugabe's Zanu and, in Mozambique, Frelimo going hell for leather 
with another Marxism-Leninism cargo-cult.

Insofar as there was any urgency in Savimbi's lucrative anti-Communist 
gospel, it lay four-square in Angola, the main target of Pretoria's 
external business after 1975. South Africa - a 'free world' stalwart at the 
time - had a counter-domino theory of its own, later known as the 'total 
strategy', which would have been hard to implement without some warlord 
leverage in Angola, and that is what Savimbi provided. Mozambique and other 
Frontline states also harboured ANC fighters, but Angola was a far tougher 
target, and a more important one. Under the MPLA it became a base area for 
armed South African and Namibian anti-apartheid forces, supported on the 
spot by detachments from Havana and advisers from Moscow, complete with 
armour and, eventually, very effective air power. Angola's was a gloomy 
internationalism, for sure. The country was full of dour apparatchiks, 
broken idealists, condescending Russians and Soviet-satellite expatriates, 
Stasi trainees and homesick, exasperated Cubans, but it was nearly 
unassailable, for it had oil revenues and a more than halfway decent Army, 
whose best brigades were adequately equipped and reasonably led. (A handful 
of officers were Portuguese, well versed in counter-insurgency, but 
politically inclined to stay the course as Angolans alongside a movement 
with which they were in sympathy.) By 1980, then, the contest stood as 
follows: the MPLA, Swapo and the ANC on one side, backed by the Eastern 
Bloc and Havana; Unita and apartheid special forces on the other.

Matters were hard for Savimbi after Carter cut him off in 1976. His 
reliance on Pretoria was so thorough that he was regarded as little more 
than an apartheid stooge. But the South Africans set him up with Jamba, his 
well-appointed base in the remote south-east of the country, and serviced 
his needs in accordance with their own. They became, in effect, a standing 
presence in that part of Angola - referred to by Pretoria as 'the force in 
being' - and a tremendous source of anxiety for the MPLA, whose military 
sweeps against Savimbi were deepening Ovimbundu resentment and slowly 
creating the density of ethnic support that would carry him for a few years 
to come.

Savimbi, meanwhile, could argue that the MPLA was the brutal agent of 
Communist domination he had always said it was, not only over his own 
people, who were being bombed and displaced by the campaigning, and often 
horribly abused, but over the region as a whole. His tirades against the 
corruption of the MPLA were becoming truer as time went on; that it was 
repressive and arrogant was also correct. But his dislike of its 
mixed-race, paleface composition became more pronounced - and his black 
nationalist ideology became blacker by degrees. This, as critics were apt 
to point out, did not square with the sale of the Ovimbundu soul to the 
devil in Pretoria, but Savimbi had no problem with a powerful, obliging 
white man, while white people of the kind he cultivated liked nothing more 
than a 'real black man' (this was the secret of Buthelezi's fortunes, 
before they declined).

The tap that Kissinger had turned on, and Carter had turned off, was opened 
again in 1981, when Ronald Reagan approved a covert aid package for Unita. 
South African Special Forces were good at what they did. Unita's 
performance was already much improved by comparison with its half-hearted 
exertions against the Portuguese. Even so, Washington's financial and 
diplomatic backing was an immense boost. The country, which was now a Cold 
War cockpit, remained undefeatable, but it could be comprehensively ruined, 
and this is what happened. The figures for war-related deaths, and child 
deaths in particular, leapt dramatically in the 1980s. Towns and villages 
were deserted or shelled to extinction. The countryside was a living death. 
There were landmines and limbless people everywhere (there still are). 
Young men were press-ganged into the burgeoning rabble of the Angolan Army, 
where the discipline of the elite units could not hope to reach. Unita 
kidnapped and abducted its fighters or picked up the homeless, traumatised 
survivors of Government offensives. Some of them were so-called 'child 
soldiers' - 'premature adults' is a better description. Provincial capitals 
became slum havens for hundreds of thousands of displaced people. Savimbi's 
struggle, subsumed though it was in a large-scale offensive driven by South 
Africa and paid for in the United States, had come home to Angola. But of 
course the Government had enough in the way of oil revenues to sustain a 
major war effort, while the Angolan commanders, some of them, were just as 
good as Unita's, often better, and they had the benefit of a Cuban 
contingent whose numbers were steadily growing, partly in response to 
Washington's aggressive posture. With battle-hardening came a grim 
hardening of party political practice - a kind of Stalinism, as Basil 
Davidson later came to think of it - mirrored in the bases of the Namibians 
and South Africans. Swapo 'traitors' were tortured by their commissars, 
while ANC dissenters were shoved in pits or executed.

The balanced view is that Moscow and Havana must take their share of 
responsibility for what happened to Angola in the 1980s. No doubt. But the 
country had become the site of a bitter clash between anti-colonialism and 
anti-apartheid, on the one hand - with support from the regimes whose 
'socialist' ideology informed them - and, on the other, a pair of monsters, 
the United States and apartheid South Africa, who were prepared to defend 
their version of the free world to the death - almost always someone 
else's, which is where Savimbi came in. (Once at least, South African 
armour, retreating in haste, mowed down Unita infantry.) In Angola, that 
defence would have meant, very simply, running the country from Pretoria 
with the help of a subaltern in Luanda. The man in question would have done 
the job rather well. Without the Cuban presence, quite likely this is what 
would have happened. It's possible that Angolans might have suffered less, 
or differently, under such a dispensation, just as black South Africans 
might have suffered less, or differently, had they settled for apartheid. 
For most people in Angola at the time, these choices couldn't even be 
formulated, let alone expressed in any real way.

There appears, all the same, to have been a margin of distinction in 
people's minds between MPLA supremacism, with its bullying ways and its 
contempt for the idiot majority - the 'idiocy of rural life', that is; 
especially Ovimbundu rural life - and a powerful, military-industrial 
racial supremacism, with its contempt for everything except its own 
survival. Angola was apartheid's bloodiest battlefield, but the distinction 
- in more or less stark forms - was the same elsewhere in the region. The 
polls in Southern Africa, from Rhodesia in 1980 to South Africa in 1994, 
tell us what millions of people thought of as the lesser evil.

In 1988, with the battle for Angola turning in the Government's favour, 
Savimbi's private foreign supporters did all they could to further his 
cause. The UK branch of the Western Goals Foundation, an influential 
rightist 'mover-and-shaker' organisation, brought him to Britain to speak. 
In the US in the same year, the right- of-right Conservative Caucus - 
created in the Ford years under the auspices of Jesse Helms and Richard 
Viguerie - put up $221,054 for its 'victory over Communism in Southern 
Africa'. Savimbi was on the organisation's list of priority concerns. In 
military terms, the Cubans were doing well in Angola, at a price, and the 
South Africans rather worse than they had in the past. The Cold War, 
crucially, was drawing to a close, and a regional settlement opened up. By 
the end of the year, the deal was all but done. There was a timetable for 
Cuban withdrawal. A large detachment of South African troops stuck in the 
south of the country was allowed to retreat without being mangled. South 
Africa, it was agreed, would also leave Namibia and the UN would supervise 
a Namibian election. Similar moves were afoot in Mozambique. Mandela, 
clearly, was going to be freed. There would be elections - majority rule - 
in South Africa, too. Elections everywhere, in fact - even in Angola.

Washington's great anti-Communists - the Somozas, Bothas, Marcoses, 
Pinochets, Mobutus and the like - were never great democrats. Neither was 
Savimbi. It was clear before the elections in Angola that the democratic 
spirit was not something his foreign admirers expected to find in him. The 
adulation nonetheless continued as the election drew closer. Savimbi's 
praises were sung at length by the British branch of the International 
Freedom Federation - patronised by Jimmy Goldsmith and John Aspinall, and 
run by a yoofish wild bunch who had come up through the Federation of 
Conservative Students in the second Thatcher term. When Savimbi rejected 
the results of the elections in 1992 (which proved the country's preference 
for the lesser evil of an oil-rich clique in Luanda, as opposed to an old 
apartheid stooge with murder on his mind), his foreign friends cleared 
their throats and turned to more pressing business: untrammelled market 
freedom in Eastern Europe and, nearer home, the horrors of Maastricht. 
Savimbi took Angola back to war.

He was widely ostracised for doing so, but he could still knock on a few 
doors. There were unmarked supply flights from South Africa - old friends 
in Special Forces - and in Zaire in 1995 you could see an illegal airlift 
operating almost daily. Another peace package had been signed in Lusaka the 
year before: Unita was using the lull to re-equip. Savimbi's great coup in 
these costly years was the control of the diamond trade, which enabled him 
to rebuild his army into a significant force, as it had been when Unita 
worked in tandem with the South Africans. There was nonetheless a 
conscientious international effort to choke off his arms supplies and 
freeze the movement's assets. In 2000, the UN's sanctions began to be more 
carefully monitored and enforced than they had been in the 1990s. It was 
also becoming hard for Savimbi to trade his diamond reserves.

Since the elections, he had lost friends, especially in Unita itself. A 
number of top men were now in government in Luanda. Some senior Unita 
figures remained behind only because they were too frightened by the 
prospect of what Savimbi would do to their families if they left. His 
former admirer Fred Bridgland, who published a lionising biography in the 
1980s, had long since turned against him. Savimbi didn't like that. Ten 
years ago Bridgland told me the death threats were so serious that De 
Klerk's people had given him security minders. He had begun to catalogue 
the murders Savimbi committed inside Unita. Many of his victims were 
members of his own entourage, and more specifically of the top echelon of 
Unita's leadership. Accusations of Witchcraft were prevalent and so, too, 
were public burnings. In one case, Savimbi 'discovered' a woman spying on 
him by flying over his house at night. There were also tough penalties, 
according to Bridgland, for those who tried to deny his sexual advances. 
Ten years after the defeat of Communism, Savimbi was the dark residue of 
post-war anti-Communism at its most ruinous and superstitious.

Between 1975 and the ceasefire that led to the elections of 1992, about 
300,000 people are thought to have died in Angola as a direct or indirect 
result of the war. The figure for Savimbi's second war (or second and third 
wars, if you count the Lusaka accords of 1994 as a hiatus) is probably 
between 100,000 and 300,000. I went to Angola before and after the 
elections. Three visits in all, yet I think I'm right in saying I never set 
eyes on a body, which is an eerie thing in view of the statistics. But the 
nearly dead, the dying and the horribly injured could be found wherever you 
went. Children in stinking, ill-equipped hospitals with festering 
bullet-wounds; inert infants dying from dysentery; the living, whimpering, 
unspeakable remains of a boy in Huambo who had just stepped on a landmine; 
a soldier at Cuito Cuanavale cut through the midriff by shrapnel when our 
trucks were shelled by the South Africans. Somewhere in all this, there is 
the no less vivid memory of a large, convivial man in a dark collarless 
suit, with gold on his hands and wrists, addressing a meeting in London a 
year or so before Angola's only elections. It was Jonas Savimbi proposing 
to put Angola out to tender after his victory at the polls. Markets and 
joint ventures: Angola as the land of opportunity it always was, for 
outsiders above all. It was odd to hear an erstwhile admirer of Che Guevara 
with so little to say, beyond a vague promise of 'rural development', about 
the country's majority of subsistence farmers. They were the people hardest 
hit by the war, although, as it turned out, he still hadn't finished with 
them. Since 1998, four million people have been displaced by the violence 
of both sides in Angola; that's nearly a third of the population. At the 
time of writing, the numbers are reported to be rising as the war continues 
- beyond Savimbi's control, at last, but still very much of his making, and 
that of the men who made him.


Jeremy Harding is a contributing editor at the LRB. Small Wars, Small 
Mercies: Journeys in Africa's Disputed Nations came out in 1993. The 
Uninvited: Refugees at the Rich Man's Gate was published in 2000.




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