Word: unita
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...Movement conducted and published monthly polls on the relative popularity of the three liberation movements. While the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and the (FNLA) each received less than 25 per cent of the electorate's support, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) consistently pulled over 50 per cent support. UNITA was at a clear political advantage, being a rurally-based party in a 90 per cent peasant country, But without superpower hookups, it could not neutralize the fighting which broke out between the Soviet-backed MPLA and the western-backed FNLA, both...
Outside observers, nurtured on Soviet propaganda that UNITA did not exist and that its head, Jonas Savimbi, was actually selling fish in a Zambian market, were stunned at the levels of relative popularity for the three movements--at such great variance to the propaganda campaign of the more substantially foreign-backed parties. Inside Angola however, that reality could be more readily comprehended. Both MPLA and FNLA had launched their guerrilla struggle in the early 1960's against the Portuguese from military bases in neighboring countries, MPLA in Zambia, FNLA in Zaire. The tactic of occasional forays across the border into...
...When UNITA was formed in 1966 it was vilified as a divisive splinter group. But it did propose a new strategy to the armed struggle. Rather than concentrate the efforts of the movement in building an elaborate propaganda network on the outside, it would concentrate the limited resources of the movement in building liberated areas in the center of Angola. Its headquarters and leadership were permanently established inside Angola. By maintaining complete contact with the peasantry and studying at close quarters the factors specific to the Angola struggle, UNITA succeeded in implanting within Angola's interior a solid infrastructure...
...movement's capacity to attract large segments of the rural population was barely audible to the outside world, except for a trickle of journalists and representatives from Afro-American organizations, willing to make the eight week journey on foot to UNITA bases within central Angola. Impressive reports about the movement filtered out by word-of-mouth accounts from the Namibian Liberation Movement--SWAPO--guerrillas. While SWAPO was forced to maintain a diplomatic alliance with MPLA because of its Soviet backing, SWAPO operated against the South African army (and continues to do so today) from UNITA bases in Southern Angola...
When the veil of secrecy was finally lifted from Angola after the April 1974 coup d'etat in Portugal, only one of the three liberation movements actually controlled liberated areas within Angola and only one had opted to direct its operations from inside the country--UNITA. It was only after the April coup that MPLA rebuilt its base in Luanda. Having been an urban, primarily intellectual movement ever since its inception in 1956, MPLA had been forced underground by the early '60s, and was only recently able to re-activate its urban cells...