Word: unita
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...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...
...UNITA commandos periodically cut the Benguela railroad that formerly carried Zaïrian and Zambian ore to the seaport at Lobito. The sabotage has deprived Angola's government of $100 million a year in rail revenues. UNITA'S guerrilla attacks have also disrupted diamond mining, as well as farming in the Huambo district, which is Angola's main granary. The country's only sizable revenue (about $700 million last year) comes from oil rigs in Cabinda that are operated under Cuban protection by the Gulf Oil Corp...
Savimbi is well armed and reasonably well financed. Help comes directly from South Africa, which considers UNITA a potential ally in its struggle against the South West African People's Organization (SWAPO), the Angola-based rebel group that seeks to take over Namibia. Ovimbundu refugees, as a result, are allowed into Namibia to escape the fighting, as are some UNITA guerrillas. One wounded fighter recently showed up at a South African border camp, where he accepted a field bandage for his leg and a meal of corn mash and gravy. Leaving for the combat zone, he cockily echoed a line...
...campaign in black Africa. Three years ago, the Cubans helped the Marxist faction of President Agostinho Neto win a civil war in Angola against two other nationalist groups. The Cubans stayed on to shore up Neto's Popular Movement government and to carry on the fighting against the pesky UNITA guerrillas of Jonas Savimbi in the southern part of the country. Last year the Cubans moved into Ethiopia in a big way. Reinforced by huge supplies of Soviet equipment, they helped the unstable Marxist junta in Addis Ababa drive Somali insurgents out of Ethiopia's Ogaden desert region...