Word: neto
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...part because the rebels' history is so murky. Escaping from Katanga in the mid-1960s following the collapse of a separatist movement led by the late Moïse Tshombe, they initially supported Portugal in its fight against the black Angolan liberation groups. After one of the guerrilla groups, Agostinho Neto's Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, came to power in Luanda, the Katangese switched their allegiance to it. Although the Katangese have helped Neto's government in its continuing struggle with rival liberation groups (see following story), relations between Luanda and the Shaba rebels remain somewhat uneasy. After...
Cubans will remain in Angola as long as they wish." So said Angolan President Agostinho Neto, expressing gratitude to Premier Fidel Castro for sending an estimated 20,000 troops and 4,000 civilian technicians to his country. Neto had good reason to be thankful. Without Havana's help ? not to mention about $2 million a day in Soviet aid ? the Marxist regime in Luanda would probably not be in power today...
Three years ago, Neto's Moscow-backed Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (M.P.L.A.) appeared to have won control of the former Portuguese territory in a bloody civil war against two Western-supported independence groups: Holden Roberto's National Front for the Liberation of Angola (F.N.L.A.) and Jonas Savimbi's National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). In fact, the civil war never really ended, and Neto's Popular Movement government, even with Cuban assistance, has not been able to establish jurisdiction over a country that is larger than Britain, France, Portugal and West Germany combined...
...Neto's most dangerous opposition is in the south, where UNITA not only fights on but even seems to be gaining a little under the bearded Savimbi, 43, a onetime philosophy student at Switzerland's University of Lausanne. He commands a ragtag army of 5,000 regulars and 12,000 auxiliary bushfighters that includes women and boys barely in their teens. Supported by the Ovimbundu tribe, which makes up about 40% of Angola's population of 6.2 million, Savimbi's forces now control a third of the country. They have gained an advantage by staging successful hit-and-run raids...
...Congress cut off such assistance in 1975, Savimbi was temporarily in trouble. Lately, however, UNITA has been getting funds from other sources, including $18 million reportedly provided by a coalition of wealthy Angolan Portuguese living in Brazilian exile, along with French, Iranian and Arab sources interested in bringing down Neto's Marxist government...