Word: cabinda
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...northern district of Cabinda, which is separated from the rest of Angola by a 20-mile strip of Zaïre, guerrillas of the small Front for the Liberation of the Cabinda Enclave (F.L.E.C.) are fighting for independence. Unfortunately for the F.L.E.C.'s chances, the squabbling Cabindans are split into three factions; moreover, according to Western intelligence estimates, several battalions of Cubans have been deployed in Cabinda to protect the offshore oil wells that currently provide most of Angola's revenues. Farther south, surviving units of the F.N.L.A. also harass government forces in occasional skirmishes, even though Holden Roberto...
...government of $100 million a year in rail revenues. UNITA'S guerrilla attacks have also disrupted diamond mining, as well as farming in the Huambo district, which is Angola's main granary. The country's only sizable revenue (about $700 million last year) comes from oil rigs in Cabinda that are operated under Cuban protection by the Gulf Oil Corp...
Mobutu's relations with his neighbors are strained, to say the least. Angola in particular has had problems with his erratic and belligerent style. Mobutu's designs on Angola have never been secret: he wanted to acquire the oil-rich enclave of Cabinda--which is separated from Angola by the Congo River--along with whatever else he could grab. When the Portuguese agreed to leave Angola, Zairean and South African troops joined local groups to fight the Movimento Popular de Liberacion d'Angola (MPLA), which had established itself as the best-organized and most popular nationalist movement. In this "Second...
...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...