Word: savimbi
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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...
Since then, Savimbi has foregone any conceivable peaceful resolution of the conflict by accepting aid, arms and even occasional direct military support from South African forces. Angola, which used to boast a vibrant tourist industry and a comparatively energetic economy, has been devastated by the war of attrition that pits the MPLA and 30,000 Cuban troops against UNITA and the South African army...
...impossible to believe that Crocker, the rest of the State Department, the CIA and the more hawkish members of Congress have been so utterly deceived by Savimbi. However, there is a real reason for the ostensibly plausible yet strategically reckless rationalization for propping up the new interventionist cause celebre: defense of South African hegemony over mineralrich Namibia...
...years, South Africa has violated international law by refusing to withdraw its claim to sovereignty over Namibia--called South-West Africa by the Pretoria government. South Africa vehemently maintains that the aid it funnels to Savimbi, supplemented by occasional invasions of Angola by the South African army, is the only way to ensure that the Cubans and Marxists in Angola don't provide sanctuary and support for the rebels trying to kick the South African army out of Namibia...
...this context, the Administration's belligerent policy widens the immoral marriage of convenience between Botha and Savimbi into a bizarre menage a trois. If Savimbi can get what he wants, southern Africa will be faced with a radical state far more reminiscent of the Khmer Rouge than any form of democracy, and history will forever associate Crocker and Reagan with not one, but two, of the biggest foreign-policy debacles since the Sudetenland...