Tion dollar aid package for Zaire, one of the US's closest allies in Africa and a known arms supplier for the FNLA and UNITA.
Then, on 14 December, the New York Times revealed that the Forty Committee, the intelligence committee chaired by Kissinger, had decided last July to send 50 million dollars of secret aid to the FNLA and UNITA. 300,000 dollars had already been given to UNITA in April. A closed session of the US Senate was later told, on 17 December, that aid to the FNLA and UNITA totalled 60 million dollars.
American mercenaries are also operating in Angola. During a visit to UNITA-held areas of Angola in November, I was told that 15 US advisers were instructing new UNITA recruits in weapons use at the UNITA training camp at Capola near Silva Porto. I also met an exGreen Beret who told me he had offered UNITA his services as a pilot. ADVERTISEMENTS Advertisements have been placed in American newspapers by a certain David Bufkin who claims to have sent over 300 Americans to Angola in recent months. Though it is illegal under federal law to recruit American civilians to fight in foreign wars, not a single prosecution has been made.
In addition, the Ford administration has persuaded Gulf Oil, which produces over 90 per cent of Angola's oil, to halt all tax and royalty payments to the MPLA regime in Luanda. The company announced on 22 December that it would now pay the 100 million dollars due on 31 December into a blocked account. In the present war conditions, Gulf's royalty and tax payments amount to almost all the Luanda Government's revenue.
South Africa, too, has been deeply involved in Angola for months. On the one hand, it is taking advantage of the war situation in the country to embark on 'punitive missions" across the border from Namibia against freedom fighters of the South West African Peoples Organisation (SWAPO). The South African Defence Ministry boasted, for example. on 15 December that its troops had massacred 61 guerrillas in one such action in what it calls the border operational area'.
The Vorster regime also admits to having occupied installations of the Ruacana Falls hydro-electric scheme and the Calueque pumping station on the Cunene River just north of the Namibian border. These projects, in which South Africa has sunk £108 million, are crucial for the development of Namibia's still largely untapped agricultural and mineral wealth.
But the South African Government has done its best to hide the third and most serious aspect of its aggression involvement of its army on the side of UNITA and the FNLA in the Angolan war, up to 500 miles north of the Namibian border. A South African column, supplied from bases in northern Namibia, entered Angola in August and helped UNITA and the FNLA eject the MPLA from a series of cities in southern Angola: from Sa da Bandeira and Mocamedes in October, and from Benguela, Lobito and Novo Redondo in November, The column has since been stalled by the MPLA on the Queve river, north of Novo Redondo.
SOUTH AFRICANS According to Lopo do Nascimento, MPLA prime minister of the Peoples Republic of Angola - speaking at a press confFerence on 18 December at which two in Angola. in North West Angola. diamonds).
foreign mvestors -the full-scale de Almeida. revolution in Angola. captured South African soldiers were displayed - there are 1,000 South African troops Why have the imperialist powers intervened, trampling underfoot the Angolan people's struggle for self-determination?
The South African, US and other imperialists want to continue with their plunder of the country's vast mineral wealth. Angola is Africa's fourth largest oil producer, 90 per cent of the oil coming from Gulf's oil-fields aggression. in Cabinda. Texaco say that they have disc overed an oil-field even bigger than Gulf's -DIAMONDS Krupp's of West Germany own the huge iron mines at Cassinga in southern Angola. And British and South African capital have a predominant stake in Diamang, which mines 95 per cent of Angola's diamonds (Angola produces ten per cent of the world's gem But are these interests really threatened by the MPLA? "The MPLA', wrote Jane Bergerol in the Financial Times on 3 December, 'is anxious to prove that it can get along with The MPLA is not, as is often claimed, a Marxist movement. In an interview published by the Nigerian magazine Afriscope in August, MPLA president Agostinho Neto emphasised that 'the MPLA is not a Marxist-Leninist organisation. Also our leadership is not Marxist - Leninist'. In the previous Transitional Government, the MPLA joined its coalition partners from UNITA, the FNLA and the Portuguese Government in outlawing strikes, disarming civilians, and approving an economic plan drawn up by the Portuguese minister of economic affairs, Vasco Vieira RUPTURE Nor is it true that Soviet support for the MPLA indicates a rupture by the Kremlin bureaucracy with detente policies. The USSR knows that the MPLA leaders have no intention of carrying through a socialist Kissinger knows this full well. Addressing a NATO Council meeting in Brussels on 11 December, he said that detente was not threatened in the long run 'because the Russians have an economic interest in accommodation the editors wrote on 18 December, 'will stop as soon as a government is established in Angola that can be trusted to respect our interests on the border: in brief, one that will ensure that Ovamboland gets her water from the Cunene River, that the Ruacana project will continue peacefully, and that Angola ceases to be a base for terrorism and insurg ency against the peoples of South West But a broad section of the US ruling class has opposed the initiatives taken by Ford and Kissinger for tactical reasons. The US Senate has voted by 54 to 22 to cut off US aid to the anti-MPLA coalition.
HOSTILITY
Anti-war feeling in the United States some ruling class circles fear, is too deep to allow the US to engage in an operation that strongly resembles the early days of the Vietnam war. Public hostility to covert operations, in the wake of the CIA revelations, is another constraint acting on the US rulers freedom Socialists, whatever differences they may have with the MPLA, must stand alongside the MPLA in the struggle to defeat the imperialist The greatest aid that we in Britain can give the people of Angola is to demand that all the imperialist powers get out of Angola now. All British collaboration with the US and South African intervention must stop. Britain too may be assisting the FNLA and UNITA forces - certainly it is a British company, Racal, which is providing UNITA with its radio equipment. A movement must be built to demand: Hands off Angola!
Soldarty with hu
Red Weekly 1 January 1976 Women/Ireland
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HANDS OF ANGOLA