Word: swapo
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
Another sore point for the South Africans is Namibia. Carter referred to South Africa's intransigence in his Lagos speech, but failed to mention that the Marxist SWAPO (South West African People's Organization) has also rejected a settlement plan put forward by five Western powers. Carter only regretted, and did not condemn, the cold-blooded murder of Herero Chief Clemens Kapuuo, who almost certainly was the victim of a SWAPO assassination campaign directed against moderate black Namibians. One famous South African, Heart Surgeon Christiaan Barnard, charges that Washington refuses to accept admittedly imperfect internal settlements in Namibia...
...sides sought to reap political advantage from the assassination. South African officials charged that SWAPO had killed the black leader as part of an assassination campaign, and alluded to a "captured document" that purportedly included plans to kill opposition black leaders in Namibia. In Zambia last week, SWAPO Leader Sam Nujoma, who at one time studied English under Kapuuo, denied that his organization had had anything to do with the killing. The murder, he suggested, might well have been the work of South African provocateurs...