Word: swapo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Ostensibly aimed at a South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO) camp near Cassinga, Angola, the raid was the Vorster regime's brutal retaliation for SWAPO's rejection last month of a South African-endorsed independence plan for South West Africa. SWAPO rejected the plan, sponsored by the United States, Great Britain, France, West Germany and Canada, because it allowed South Africa to keep up to 2,000 troops in South West Africa until new elections could be held, and because it left Walvis Bay, Namibia's strategically-important deep-water port, under South African domination until further negotiations...
...former schoolteacher, Kapuuo was shot to death in Windhoek late last month by two men who vanished without a trace. The Hereros believe that he was murdered by SWAPO (South West African People's Organization), the Marxist-oriented guerrilla movement whose political base is the 430,000-member Ovambo tribe, Namibia's largest ethnic group. (Second largest are the whites, with 100,000, followed by the Hereros with about 60,000.) Headed by bearded Militant Sam Nujoma, SWAPO has an estimated 4,000 guerrillas, most of them based in southern Angola, who have been carrying out an intermittent...
...problem is that SWAPO is too militant and too radical to suit the South Africans, who would like to preserve Namibia as a sort of buffer state to the north. On the other hand, the Turnhalle coalition is too closely aligned with South Africa to suit SWAPO and its backers, which include most nations of the Organization of African Unity as well as the Soviet Union...
...ceasefire in the guerrilla war, U.N. peace-keeping forces would replace all but 1,500 of the South African troops in Namibia: after that, U.N.-supervised elections would be held. Some critics-mostly in Johannesburg-have charged that the Western powers' plan would lead inevitably to a SWAPO takeover and turn Namibia into another Angola. For this reason, South Africa will probably oppose the plan. Most observers believe, however, that in a fair and free election the political power of SWAPO and that of the Turnhalle group would be almost evenly matched...
...alike that its electoral plan is the right way to peace and prosperity in a truly integrated socirty. A catchy anthem has been recorded promoting the theme "For us, for you, for a free land, for Namibia." The party has hired helicopters to carry Alliance organizers to areas where SWAPO influence is considered strong. There have been numerous mass rallies and free barbecues, offering both popular entertainment and crude propaganda warnings, frequently in poster form, about the consequences of a SWAPO victory...