Word: angolans
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Long before the Angolan civil war was rendered newsworthy as a backdrop for CIA disclosures, foreign policy foibles and the restive ghost of Vietnam, there was a war raging in Angola. And it now appears that in the next few years there will be a still more intense guerrilla war raging in Angola. Few have understood the real issue at stake in this conflict--majority rule--buried as it were beneath the stifling mantle of superpower politics. But if Vietnam has taught little else, surely we have learned that the will of a people, regardless of the odds against them...
...armed struggle in 1961, MPLA was not able to build the same foothold within Angola as did simultaneous popular movements in Guinea and Mozambique. But the Soviet Union provided such an efficient propaganda machine that it allowed MPLA to glower under the successes of the other two movements. The Angolan party felt less and less compelled to strive inside Angola for what the outside world believed they were already accomplishing, namely the formation of liberated areas within the Angolan countryside...
...Portuguese have been re-activated, and the military has moved back into the bush areas, which are inaccessible to Soviet tanks, and which provide dense forest cover against MPLA bomber attacks. Because the support base of UNITA is essentially the hundreds of deep villages which dot the vast Angolan countryside, the fall of Huambo has had relatively little effect on the functioning of the movement inside the country...
Reconstruction in the more than half of the country still under effective UNITA control is directed primarily by three UNITA-sponsored organizations, the National Association of Labor Unions (SINDACO), the League of Angolan Women (LIMA), and the Angolan Youth League. LIMA comprises more than 10,000 women who had initially been trained for combat during the war against the Portuguese minority regime. Still maintaining a military component, LIMA now has chapters throughout the Angolan countryside and concentrates on political mobilization of the populations in those areas, instructing women in effective techniques of village political organizing. Its Kwacha Institute in Sambo...
...even more serious obstacle to M.P.L.A. rule is the sad state of Angolan civil administration. In southern cities like Huambo and Bié (formerly Silva Poôrto), white Portuguese held virtually every civil job before independence, all the way down to postal clerks and telephone operators. With many trained people gone into exile or into the bush, the problem of staffing a new government may be insuperable...