Word: swapo
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...nationwide constitutional convention called the Democratic Turnhalle Alliance came up with a constitution and a president, only to lose both to the violence of dissenting SWAPO terrorists. In 1981, the Reagan Administration seized on Namibian independence as its only chance to do something constructive. In that initiative the Western allied nations, generally known as "the five," went so far as to set an August 15 deadline for accords, but missed the deadline by making Namibian independence contingent on the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola, a bow to South African tears. The same issue of Cuban troops has marked talks...
Western observers have tended to see, in these cycles of near accords and last-minute stipulations, parallels to almost any global situation they choose. South African strikes into Angola to forestall SWAPO have been likened to Israeli incursions into Beirut. Some see South Africa's approach in Namibia as a hint of future internal strategy...
...room. He told stories of his 13 children and drank only orange juice. When he visited us in the States for the first time, he was en route to New York and Washington to try to persuade diplomats that, as moderates, the conventioneers represented Namibian opinion more accurately than SWAPO could. On that trip, Carter Administration officials refused to receive his party because SWAPO had been excluded from the constitutional conference. The American press excoriated him for allying with the conference, for working within the system rather than sticking to SWAPO...
...outside the capital city of Windhoek, and questions of national representation becme moot as crowds of his tribesmen and others marched and lamented and staged a massive ritual funeral. Rioting broke out at the funeral and seven Ovambo tribesmen were killed, the climax of weeks of Herero-Ovambo strife. SWAPO leaders denied any involvement, just as they had three years before when Ovambo chief Philemon Elifas was shot to death in a similar incident...
...retrospect, the death seemed just as inevitably cyclical as the flux of international negotiations. Both times, South African officials had immediately suggested SWAPO as culprits; they noted the guerrilla group's opposition to any Turnhalle-type talks, in which Elifas had also agreed to participate shortly before his assassination. Even then, some Ovambo migrant workers opposed to the conference had been quoted in the New York Times as predicting "jubilantly" that "Clemens Kapuuo will be next...