Word: dos
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Angola remains mired in a seemingly endless war between the Marxist-Leninist government, led since 1979 by Jose Eduardo dos Santos, and the rebel National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (unita), headed by Jonas Savimbi and supported by South Africa and the U.S. After a decade the fighting drags on, with no prospect of victory on either side. TIME's Nairobi bureau chief, James Wilde, recently spent 15 days crisscrossing Angola. His journey took him from the U.S.-operated oil installations in the northern enclave of Cabinda to the capital, Luanda, where he was admitted to the presidential...
...some 20,000 civilians have lost limbs to rebel mines planted among crops, under footpaths and along dusty village roads. Thousands more have been killed by the rebels or by government troops on the prowl for guerrilla collaborators. Economically, the nation has also been left maimed. President Dos Santos concedes that the war has already cost his government more than $12 billion; 1 million of the country's 8.5 million people are on the brink of starvation...
...With the Dos Santos government committing an estimated 80% of its budget to military needs, the economy has been thrown into chaos. These days a dollar will buy more than 1,500 kwanza on the black market, or 50 times as much as at the official exchange rate. At bank rates, a sack of potatoes costs $100. Some 750,000 squatters jam the garbage-filled streets of Luanda, where many scrounge through trash cans for food and live in shacks. Even a confidential Soviet report on the capital acknowledged its "sense of hopelessness...
...part, Dos Santos, a Soviet-trained petroleum engineer, has shown an increasing inclination to distance his regime from Moscow. The Luanda government, for example, has accepted $100 million in development aid from the European Community. Still, with UNITA extending its influence, the war- weary Angolan army has gradually come under the control of Soviet military technicians. "Dos Santos must move very carefully in dealing with the Soviets," says one foreign diplomat in Luanda. "He does not yet enjoy enough of a power base to keep the Soviets in line -- or to do without them." At the same time, the President...
...fact, any rapprochement with Washington seems a long way off. The House of Representatives last week defeated a measure that would have barred covert U.S. aid to UNITA unless it was approved by Congress. Such signals are unlikely to deter Dos Santos. Not long ago a diplomat applying for a site to build an embassy in a choice Luanda location was surprised to find that it was reserved...