Post-cold war Angola

...Such a pact was successful in Colombia in 1958, after years of bloody conflict between the Liberal and Conservative parties...

...UNITA's resumption of the war, probably with South African support, caught the MPLA government in a weak position...

...The result was a violent backlash by MPLA supporters that drove UNITA from Luanda...

...It seemed that the developing countries might be facing an unprecedented opportunity for peaceful reconciliation, demilitarization, and national reconstruction...

...The MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) emerged from the relatively well-educated and Europeanized mestico and Mbundu community centered around the capital city of Luanda...

...The vast interior of the country—which furnished the Americas with four million slaves prior to the mid-1800s — cannot benefit from oil wealth as long as the war continues...

...Wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Afghanistan, Cambodia, and Mozambique began to wind down...

...Neither side has contemplated a separatist solution...

...The UN, for its part, seems to have decided not to invest more personnel and resources in Angola...

...Unfortunately, its success was due in large part to an SUMMER • 1993 293 institution Angola currently lacks—an army without partisan affiliations...

...The fighting in early 1993 was more intense than anything seen in the post-independence period...

...Few people in developing countries are included in this economy...

...The country is approaching the level of disintegration of Somalia...

...For Angola and other third world countries, the chief danger in the new international system is the opposite of what it was in the old: not militaristic intervention, but neglect by the West...

...When the results were tallied, the MPLA had won 54 percent of the national assembly seats, to UNITA's 34 percent...

...But federalism, frequently touted as a solution to conflicts in Africa, has limitations—Yugoslavia was, after all, a federal republic...

...among the dead was the entire family of Marcelino Moco, an Ovimbundu who was made prime minister of the National Assembly by the MPLA in a vain gesture toward national reconciliation...

...The war started again with full force...

...An accord between the major Angolan movements broke down, resulting in a new war that quickly became internationalized...

...In 1990, third world military spending, mirroring global military spending, dropped to $123 billion...

...The United States, which through its multimillion-dollar support of UNITA shares a large measure of responsibility for the recent fighting, has done next to nothing to keep the peace...

...Ninety percent of them registered for the election, and 92 percent of 292 • DISSENT those endured long lines and difficult conditions to vote...

...Portuguese colonialism offered few educational or economic opportunities to its African subjects relative to its more affluent French and British counterparts...

...Other parties and candidates received very few votes...

...Owing in part to U.S...

...Aid to UNITA was increased, and large conventional battles were fought...

...Antagonistic ethnic identities reflected differential access to these opportunities...

...As in many other processes of nation-building, national consolidation does not seem possible without bloody war...

...But the case of Angola shows that short-term prospects are less pleasant...

...Both sides seemed to accept that an outright military victory was impossible but were unable to trust one another sufficiently to create the government of national unity that is needed to end the war...

...The Case of Angola The conflict in Angola is the result of divisions rooted in the recent colonial past...

...Envisioned in the 1991 accords, no such army was created—the greatest failure of the 1992 peace process...

...History, as Salman Rushdie has written, does not erase itself...

...There is no incentive for its governments to invest in peacekeeping as long as the oil keeps flowing...

...Paradoxically, because on each side the concept of nationhood has endured, the nation as a functioning entity has virtually ceased to exist...

...However, the elections were conducted under conditions of dual sovereignty, because the two armies were never demobilized as planned...

...UNITA (Union for the Total Liberation of Angola) was largely a party of the Ovimbundu, a people clustered in the center-south of the country whose late resistance to colonialism and harsh experience as migrant laborers shaped the party's distinctive "ethno-populist" discourse...

...Only a few countries will be able to enlist the aid of the international community in ending war, as only a few have been able to use the global trade regime to join the select club of "newly-industrialized countries...

...The results seem to show a country divided between Savimbi's primarily rural and Ovimbundu supporters in the central highlands and the rest of the country, which was willing to accept the MPLA...

...By 1980, Angola became a test case of the "Reagan doctrine," in which the United States pledged to roll back communist governments around the world...

...See Aristide Zolberg, "The Specter of Anarchy" in Dissent, Summer 1992...

...Despite large-scale popular enthusiasm for a peaceful, electoral resolution of conflict, Angola returned to full-scale war and economic chaos in January...

...The soldier Raul, whom I met in Luanda, is probably still in the army, no closer to an engineering degree than before...

...Thousands of refugees fled from towns, and over a million people face the prospect of starvation...

...UNITA, supported by South African troops and the United States, held large parts of the south...

...The real chances for third world peace and nation-building in the new international system may be as slim as those for economic development...

...Portugal, supported by the United States and NATO, held off the nationalist challenge for ten years...

...When the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, the United States was no longer interested in arming governments and "freedom fighters" as a bulwark against a disappearing communist threat...

...UNITA, with more experienced and loyal troops, quickly gained control of three-fourths of the national territory...

...When a nationalist movement of resistance to Portuguese colonialism began the armed struggle in 1961, it was fragmented along ethnic lines...

...their countries serve instead simply as providers of natural resources and primary goods...

...it issued a toothless condemnation of UNITA in March and retired to the sidelines...

...lobbying, the UN's peacekeeping force in charge of demobilization was too small — 476 military and police observers in a country of about ten million—to do anything to prevent a return to war...

...In 1991, the two main Angolan forces agreed to a cease-fire after sixteen years of war, an estimated five hundred thousand dead, and incalculable economic losses...

...They gave the Angolan people an unprecedented opportunity to participate in politics, an opportunity that most seized eagerly...

...The legacies of cold war conflicts die hard, and armed forces, once set in motion, cannot be stopped overnight...

...This pact, highly unsatisfactory in democratic terms because of its exclusionary nature, nevertheless kept the peace in Colombia and was later opened up to other parties...

...The implication of these facts is that the Angolan peace will have to be achieved mainly by Angolans, if it is to be achieved at all...

...They also agreed to participate in a multiparty election in September 1992...

...Mainstream opinion in the West (reflected in the editorial pages of such publications as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Economist) now favored the United States's diplomatic recognition of Angola's MPLA government, which occurred on May 20, 1993...

...The proposition that the post—cold war era presents third world states with an unprecedented opportunity for peace and national reconstruction seems valid in the long run...

...What Could Be Done...

...The somber conclusion to be drawn from this case is that opportunities are not guarantees...

...But in 1974, after a revolution sparked by anti-imperialist army officers, it offered its colonies independence...

...Thousands of young men were conscripted on both sides, and hundreds of thousands of rural dwellers fled to the shelter of cities, especially Luanda...

...Angola thus faces the limitations of a purely extractive economy...

...By 1984, military spending in the third world reached $155 billion per year—only 17 percent of the world total, but still significant relative to spending on health, education, and welfare in those countries...

...Now, seven years older and about to face an uncertain future as a civilian, the young soldier had nothing to show for his service but a weapon and a uniform...

...Belying the democratic image that had been built up for it in Washington, UNITA lobbed indiscriminate mortar attacks on residential areas of the city...

...In the country's fiercest battle, the MPLA's attempt to dislodge UNITA from Huambo was repulsed after fifty-six days of brutal fighting, when the surviving MPLA troops withdrew on March 8. An estimated twelve thousand people were killed and another fifteen thousand wounded in the battle...

...This is a case of too little, too late...

...SUMMER • 1993 • 291 Raul experienced the tragic diminution of life opportunities caused by the militarization of the third world...

...This should hardly be surprising—in Nicaragua, for example, the United States also generously funded war, but has been stingy with money for peaceful reconstruction...

...294 • DISSENT Abandonment of the Third World...

...He had planned to study engineering, he told me, but had been drafted at eighteen...

...Each side claims to be "patriotic" and to have the right to lead the nation, but each has a very different conception of "Angolanidade," or Angolanness...

...On the other hand, the resumption of the war in Angola reveals the durability of the idea of Angolan nationhood...

...A war this thoroughly internationalized—the term "civil war" is a misnomer—could be ended only through international negotiation...

...In much of Latin America, Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, chronic warfare means that merely staying alive is the best that millions can hope for...

...Peace talks between the MPLA and UNITA sputtered and stalled in Addis Ababa and then Abidjan in early 1993...

...In a deal struck in 1988, the South Africans agreed to withdraw from Namibia in return for a Cuban troop withdrawal...

...UNITA's preferred formula for peace seems to be some sort of federalism, which would allow it to administer its central highlands stronghold on its own terms...

...When the enclave is threatened, as it was in the recent fighting, the oil companies can simply shut down operations and concentrate on other fields...

...The MPLA government reintroduced national conscription in early March...

...At the end of October, two weeks after the release of the election results, UNITA launched an attack on the capital city of Luanda...

...In terms of consumer demand, the global economy that really matters now consists of about 750 million people who earn $10,000 a year or more...

...The National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA), a force that declined in importance after the mid-1970s, was identified with the northern Bakongo people...

...Despite years of war in Angola, the West has been getting what it wants out of Angola, principally oil, by means of an enclave sector...

...He was one of four brothers, the only one not killed in a war that has gone on since 1975...

...In a vicious cycle of one-upmanship, threatened third world governments acquired more and more sophisticated weapons to confront increasingly well-armed rebels...

...The cold-war system thus rested on a paradox: peace and stability in the developed countries were accompanied by scores of "hot" wars in the third world, fueled and at times created by the United States, the Soviet Union, and their allies...

...A more workable formula for Angolan peace is probably a pact that splits control of the central state between the two parties...

...The MPLA, supported by the Soviet Union and Cuban troops that eventually numbered fifty thousand, held Luanda and most of the north, including the vital oil enclaves...

...In the presidential race, the MPLA's candidate, Jose Eduardo dos Santos, won 49.6 percent of the vote compared to 40.1 percent for the UNITA candidate, Jonas Savimbi, requiring a second-round runoff election...

...This reality was produced by the cold-war state system of the post–World War II period, in which each superpower had a high incentive to arm client states and rebel armies in return for political loyalty...

...Its ideology was communist and cosmopolitan...

...Sporting green fatigues and an AK-47, he told me that he was on duty even though it was his birthday...

...The 1992 Election and its Aftermath The elections, although staged in a way that gave considerable advantages to the ruling MPLA, were described as properly conducted by all observer groups...

...During this period, the Angolan government was spending about 20 percent of its GNP on the war, making it one of the most militarized states in the world...

...two of Savimbi's top leaders, and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of his suspected supporters were killed...

...Such negotiation began in the late 1980s, as the cold war ground to an end...

...In this agreement, the presidency of the country alternated between the two parties, all non-civil service jobs within the state were equally divided between them, and most measures in Congress (in which only the Liberals and Conservatives could hold seats) required a two-thirds majority to pass...