Dear Editor
Dear Editor Problems Cokie Roberts' "Poppies of the Field" (NL, January 5) was a fascinating glimpse into the intricacies of making foreign policy. What appears so right from a local or national...
...Indeed, his appeal becomes even stronger if one reads The New Leader article alongside the Le Monde interview with Agostinho Neto of the Marxist-dominated People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), reprinted on the New York Times op-ed page of January 9. Whereas Neto announces "there can be no agreement with the representatives of imperialism in our country" (meaning Savimbi's National Union for the Total Independence of Angola and Holden Roberto's National Front for the Liberation of Angola), Savimbi tells us that "only elections —free elections—under OAU auspices can provide a genuine conclusion...
...Nonetheless, Savimbi came across as a decent, civilized and humane man, whatever failings he might have as a politician or, perhaps more accurately, a bureaucrat...
...New York City Stephen R. Randall Savimbi I was extremely impressed with Jonas Savimbi on the basis of Robin Wright's interview with him ("Talking with Angola's Jonas Savimbi," NL, February 2)—though it would appear from the finality of the House and Senate votes on aid to Angola and the direction recent events have taken in that country that any such feelings are now wholly beside the point...
...Let me add that Ms...
...Wilmington Roberta G. Slovender Free Press Bonnie Potter, in her "Striking the Washington Post" (NL, January 19), quotes a labor lawyer as saying: "It's a classic labor-management confrontation...
...I am thinking in particular of Portugal's Republica—where Communist printers took over a Socialist newspaper in the name of worker control and turned it into a propaganda sheet, before the government finally restored it to its rightful owners...
...Who would ever think that trying to stop the heroin trade by cutting supplies off at the source would not only disrupt the lives of peasants and merchants in Ischehisar, Turkey, but result in babies lying awake at night crying...
...In his January 6 column, Wicker wrote that the members of the anti-MPLA coalition were "callous and contemptuous of the rights and property of the civilians for whose support they are supposedly contending...
...What appears so right from a local or national perspective can turn out to be totally wrong when viewed from another direction...
...Wright could be lying, her trip might have been paid for by the Central Intelligence Agency, yet for myself, I am prepared to say that her account rang true and Wicker's remarks did not...
...You pick sides according to who you are and where you've been in the last 30 years...
...Of course, Ms...
...Sometimes it really does seem that everything is intertwined with everything else, and that attempting to cope with the world's problems is simply too much for the feeble mind of man...
...That example compels me to assert that, contrary to Miss Potter's treatment of the story, issues of free speech and the right to publish, as well as economics, are involved in the Post matter...
...Boston Gilbert MacDowell...
...Wright's description of Savimbi's movement would seem to give the lie to the arguments of those like Tom Wicker of the Times, who profess to see truth and justice lodged in the MPLA...
...Wright observed at Silva Porto chanting "Sa-viM-bi, Sa-viM-bi" or with her comment that Savimbi "is clearly the most popular among his people...
...Yet the questions in this case, it seems to me, are classic in a quite different sense...
...In the end the ballot must decide, not bullets...
...This comports not at all with the 100,000 people Ms...
Vol. 59 • February 1976 • No. 4
