'Absolute Hell Over There'

ANGOLA 'Absolute Hell Over There'

A year after the big flap over the battle for Angola and whether or not the U.S. should intervene to limit Soviet influence, how is the country doing? Answer: poorly.

During the long struggle for Angolan independence, Agostinho Neto and his Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (M.P.L.A.) fought a classic campaign of guerrilla warfare against the territory's Portuguese rulers. Neto is now President of Angola, but guerrilla war still goes on--this time directed against his own Marxist government in Luanda. Angola has been admitted into the United Nations as its 146th member--an act of faith in the Neto government that may be slightly premature. The M.P.L.A. forces and the Cuban troops that helped them to win the civil war after the Portuguese pulled out in 1975 have uncontested control over only about half of the 481,000-sq.-mi. country.

The armed struggle is being carried on by survivors of liberation movements that fought Neto's M.P.L.A. in the bloody, mammoth civil war: Holden Roberto's National Front for the Liberation of Angola (F.N.L.A.), Jonas Savimbi's National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) and FLEC, a Zaire-supported front that seeks independence from Angola for the oil-rich northern enclave of Cabinda. Despite the continuing presence in Angola of at least 13,000 elite Cuban troops, which supplement his own Soviet-supplied army of 20,000, Neto concedes that "the defense of the country's sovereignty and security remains one of the most important preoccupations of the government."

That is an understatement. The 500 or so FLEC guerrillas in Cabinda have not yet interfered with the oil production that supplies 80% of Angola's foreign exchange, but their hit-and-run raids have tied down at least 5,000 Cuban and M.P.L.A. troops. Elsewhere in northern Angola, Roberto's F.N.L.A. soldiers are carrying on a low-level insurgency campaign of sabotage, road mining and occasional ambushes. They have made the coffee plantations of the area so unsafe that laborers from the south refuse to work there.

Neto faces his biggest threat in the south, where Savimbi commands an effective force of 5,000 men. Still a hero to the area's dominant Ovimbundu people, the bearded, beret-wearing UNITA leader completed a 500-mile trek through the south--on foot--urging his tribal brothers to resist the Luanda government. Rallying to his cause, the Ovimbundu have set up underground cells throughout southern Angola.

Savimbi insists that he is not fighting to overthrow Neto's government. He says, "The real enemy is Cuban colonialism. The Cubans have taken over the country, but sooner or later they will suffer their own Viet Nam in Angola. We are perfectly willing to have a dialogue with the M.P.L.A. and form a national unity government of Angolans. But the Cubans must leave first. Then we will build true African socialism."

All-Out Assault. Although M.P.L.A. forces and the Cubans control every city and town in the south, their garrisons in the bush are isolated, and roads linking them are constantly harassed by UNITA forces. The Luanda government has launched an all-out assault in southern Angola in an effort to finish off the resistance. So far its main achievement has been to terrorize innocent civilians. MiG fighter-bombers have napalmed entire villages near Angola's border with Namibia (South West Africa); herds of cattle have been slaughtered, not only to feed the attacking forces but to punish the pro-UNlTA tribesmen.

As a result, more than 5,000 Angolans have fled to refugee camps in Namibia, joining 5,000 others who left their homeland during an earlier government offensive against UNITA. At the same time, there are some 16,000 Angolan refugees in neighboring Zambia, which banned UNITA from operating in that country. The Zambians, who had been one of UNITA'S principal backers, evidently decided that their support could not continue now that Angola had been given a seat at the U.N.

"From what the refugees tell us," says a South African military official in Namibia, "it must be absolute hell over there." The Cubans and M.P.L.A. forces are reported to be using flame throwers and bulldozers to raze the villages in a 1.6-mile-wide cordon sanitaire being carved out along the 800-mile border between Angola and Namibia. Nowadays the Angolan refugees who manage to get across this "Castro Corridor," as the South Africans call it, are all women and small children; they say that in the border region all males over ten, considered potential military age in Angola, are being summarily shot, lest they become UNITA recruits. The atrocities may be strengthening support for UNITA. Says one refugee cattle herder: "After what Neto and the northerners have done to us, we will fight forever for Savimbi. When the call comes to help him drive the devil Cubans out of our country, we will return."

Facing Famine. Some of the Cuban soldiers in Angola have been replaced by civilian technicians, but they have not succeeded in bringing the country out of economic paralysis. In Luanda, meat, eggs, milk and bread are often unobtainable. A U.N. official visiting the city has warned that Angola faces not only widespread famine but the danger of tuberculosis and epidemics of dysentery. Largely because of the mass exodus of Portuguese whites, the country has only one doctor for every 12,000 people. The few foreign visitors allowed into the country are appalled by the chaos. Transportation and other public service facilities, when existing at all, are in disrepair. Says a Yugoslav engineer, "Everything is falling apart."

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