12/17/2023 0 Comments Zenu proxie![]() ![]() However, Savimbi, with a group of his soldiers, continued the war until his death in February 2002 a final peace agreement was signed two months later. Dos Santos and others in the MPLA leadership wanted and imposed tolerant behaviour towards Unita former combatants – revenge and persecution could easily have emerged. Several peace accords were again signed by Dos Santos’s government with Unita, and in 1997 a government of national unity was created with Unita and another former group, the FNLA. In the 1990s, as the conflict dragged on, corruption scandals touched senior Angolans concerning arms deals with the ex-Soviet bloc, and the French politician Charles Pasqua was convicted, and then acquitted, of profiting from illegal arms sale to Angola, while at the same time there were curious transactions over repayment of a $5bn debt to Boris Yeltsin’s Russian government. But Unita again returned to war when they lost the election. Later that year in a tripartite agreement, which gave Namibia independence, Cuban troops also agreed to withdraw.ĭos Santos led the country into a new phase with UN-monitored elections, which the MPLA won. Massive destruction of the country’s infrastructure, and hundreds of thousands of destitute, wounded and displaced people was the reality.īut in late 1987 Cuba turned the tide by sending their best planes, best pilots, weapons and 30,000 troops to southern Angola to relieve the 12,000-strong cream of the Angolan army surrounded in Cuito Cuanavale by a South African army with air superiority.īy late March 1988 the battle of Cuito Cuanavale was won and the South African army forced to withdraw. Angola resisted numerous South African invasions and attacks with Cuban assistance. Under President Ronald Reagan from 1981 the US openly aided Unita. ![]() ![]() When Neto died suddenly in 1979, Dos Santos, aged only 37, was elected his successor from within the politburo in part because of his loyal behaviour during the coup attempt, but also as representing a younger generation.ĭos Santos inherited a crippled country and an active war. Meanwhile, the country was thrown into crisis by a violent coup attempt in May 1977 by pro-Soviet militants hoping their claimed sympathies for Moscow would provide them with external support. However, a new war was promptly unleashed on Angola by South Africa, using Unita as a proxy. As Portugal retreated in 1975, the South African army, with CIA support, invaded Angola to prevent the MPLA, with its support for the African National Congress and Namibia’s independence movement, Swapo, from taking power.Ĭuba brought a military force across the Atlantic to support the MPLA, stopping that plan, and Angola proclaimed independence, led by the MPLA, on 11 November 1975. They had their own candidate for leader of independent Angola, Jonas Savimbi of Unita (the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola). The independence war turned into the ugliest of decolonising confrontations as the US, under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, opted to protect South Africa’s white regime, and its occupation of Namibia, from the growing resistance in the region. After independence in 1975 he became minister of foreign affairs and later minister of planning under the first president, the poet, doctor and intellectual Agostinho Neto, a veteran of Portugal’s prisons. That September Dos Santos was elected to the central committee and politburo of the MPLA (People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola), while serving as a telecommunications officer. In April 1974 the fascist regime in Portugal, the colonial power, fell. ![]()
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