Savimbi unita

<h1 id="firstHeading" class="firstHeading"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></h1><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">see red scorpian</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Stone was a lobbyist for Angola’s brutal Jonah Savimbi</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In addition to working with dictators like Marcos and Seko, the firm Black, Manafort & Stone represented Jonah Savimbi — whose National Union for the Total Independence of Angola <b>(<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">UNITA</span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> in Portuguese) tried to overthrow Angola’s Marxist government in the 1980s. </span>According to Human Rights Watch, UNITA was ruthless and “used terror as a policy to obtain supplies and coerce and intimidate civilians. Indiscriminate killings, mutilation of limbs or ears and beatings were used by rebels to punish suspected government sympathizers or as a warning against betraying UNITA.”</font></p></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://uca.edu/cahss/files/2020/07/Angel-CLA-2018.pdf">https://uca.edu/cahss/files/2020/07/Angel-CLA-2018.pdf</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Cabinda and The Company: Chevron-Gulf,</font></font></font></font></div><div>the CIA, and the Angolan Civil War</div><div>Austin Angel</div><div>History</div><div>Faculty Advisor: Dr. Michael Kithinji</div><div>
</div><div>The history of Gulf Oil and later Chevron-Gulf1 operations in</div><div>Angola is a complex story of split alliances, nation-controlling wealth,</div><div>and the follies of organizational nearsightedness in times of conflict. The</div><div>involvement of Chevron-Gulf in Angola and the machinations of the</div><div>CIA would pull the two organizations inexorably into a miniature Cold</div><div>War against each other, with the political future of Angola caught in the</div><div>crossfire. </div><div>
</div><div>An examination of this conflict offers a glimpse into the</div><div>Gordian knot of mineral extraction ethics in developing countries and</div><div>the impossibility of remaining neutral as a large business in a nation at</div><div>war. It also displays the consequences of rigidly applying global</div><div>strategic objectives across every conflict without stopping to examine</div><div>the real situation on the ground.</div><div>Chevron-Gulf’s history in Angola...</div><div>
</div><div>. The commandos planned to frame UNITA in an attempt to mask South African action against an American oil company and to make UNITA appear more militarily capable in northern Angola. South African involvement was revealed after the interrogation of SADF Captain Wynand Du Toit at the hands of MPLA soldiers and Cuban “doctors.”19 This attack against an American civilian installation20 occurred despite the fact that at the time the CIA had a working relationship with South Africa. Stockwell revealed this in a 1987 lecture: “We were working closely with the South African army, giving them our arms, coordinating battles with them...We had in fact formed four mercenary armies [in northern] Angola.”21</div><div>
</div><div>Although no US government official save Stockwell would ever formally admit to such a relationship, a 1986 US Congressional sanction preventing military support for South Africa specifically excluded intelligence and covert action support from the ban, heavily implying that such support existed or could exist.22 In declassified documents related to the Angolan Civil War,<b> the CIA concluded that the MPLA was funding the Cuban soldiers present in the country directly using hard currency payments from Chevron-Gulf to the MPLA</b>.23 The CIA would make that conclusion on April 22, 1985--</div><div>...</div><div> the timing is extremely questionable given the CIA’s clandestine relationship with South Africa and UNITA at the time. In addition, the CIA had attempted in 1975 to halt Gulf Oil’s payments to the Bank of Angola through legal action in the United States, but feared what legal precedent such a case would set regarding future oil concessions in Cabinda.25 A military sabotage, however, would set no such precedent. It is worth noting as well that in 1987 the CIA concluded that UNITA would be reticent to attack Chevron-Gulf directly for fear of American casualties after Operation Argon had failed.26 Throughout the entire conflict, Chevron-Gulf and the state-owned Sonangol worked very closely together. Mitro stated “Gulf was one of the few--if not the only--company that stayed active throughout the entire civil war, and that was viewed as a sign that they were interested in Angola for the long term. Some of Sonangol and the government’s officials had worked for some time in Gulf or Chevron...they knew [each other], their policies, their people.” After the passage of the Grassley Amendment<b>, the MPLA government asked Chevron to sell a portion of their oil holdings to an Italian oil company in order to diversify Angolan income sources in the event that the American company was ordered to leave Angola entirely</b>. Chevron...</div><div>
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</div><div>"...they begun to realize that their presence represents...a political presence as well. They wish they could avoid that, but they can’t [sic]...they are only beginning to learn this. Officially they always wanted to be neutral. But in most cases it is almost impossible to be neutral by the nature of [their] presence. [If you are operating in the West] you are one of thousands of competing companies. But when you are an oil company in a developing country, you are the [entire] economy. Your very presence [means] taking on the role of a government.” </div><div>
</div><div><b>In attempting merely to do business in Angola, Chevron-Gulf became embroiled in a proxy war that involved at least five nations and<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);"> found themselves funding an enemy of their own country’s government</span>.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> </span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Their involvement was not a sideshow, or a minor concern; rather, it was the central reason that the MPLA was able to maintain its war effort despite opposition from South Africa, UNITA, and the United States. The company emerged from the war, along with the MPLA, as one of the most embedded institutions in the country. Meanwhile the <b>CIA’s alliance with UNITA,</b> based solely on circumstance, led to massive US involvement in the conflict and turned </span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">a minor civil war into a proxy war with US players backing both sides of the war<b>. </b></span><b>The MPLA currently rules Angola</b>. The assassination of Jonas Savimbi in 2002 ended UNITA’s guerilla war. <b>Chevron-Gulf is still the largest private corporation operating Angolan oil fields and still provides the majority of Angolan wealth.28  </b></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">nolnx</font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div>
</div><div>‘Dirty trickster’ revealed: Here are 5 of the sleaziest things Roger Stone did before joining the Trump Campaign</div><div>Image via Fox News.</div><div>Written by Alex Henderson February 20, 2020</div><div>long before he became known for some of the shadiest machinations in the ongoing Trump-Russia scandal, the 66-year-old Stone, who returned to the GOP in 2015 after being registered as a Libertarian for three years, had a dark history in right-wing politics dating back to the Nixon era.</div><div>
</div><div>Stone is a self-described “dirty trickster,” and he takes great pride in it. Here are five of Stone’s sleaziest pre-Trump campaign activities.</div><div>
</div><div>Stone was fired by Sen. Bob Dole in the ‘70s for being a Nixonian ‘dirty trickster’</div><div>Stone, born in 1952, was in his late teens when he became an aide for President Richard Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign. Although Stone has insisted that he never did anything illegal during the Watergate scandal, he has described his work during that period as “trafficking in the black arts.” After Nixon stepped down as president in August 1974 because of Watergate, Stone went to work for Sen. Bob Dole. However, he wasn’t in Dole’s employ very long; the Kansas senator fired him after he was identified by syndicated columnist Jack Anderson as being a “dirty trickster” for Nixon. One of Stone’s tricks was hiring a Republican operative to infiltrate the 1972 presidential campaign of Democrat George McGovern, who suffered a landslide defeat when Nixon was reelected.</div><div>
</div><div>Stone is a self-described ‘Nixonite’</div><div>During Watergate, many prominent Republicans — including Sen. Barry Goldwater — distanced themselves from President Nixon. But Stone is one GOP operative who is openly proud of his work with Nixon and has bragged about being a “Nixonite.” In 2008, the New Yorker quoted Stone as saying, “The reason I’m a Nixonite is because of his indestructibility and resilience. He never quit. His whole career was all built around his personal resentment of elitism. It was the poor-me syndrome.”</div><div>
</div><div>Stone and Paul Manafort represented Ferdinand Marcos and other corrupt dictators</div><div>Stone and Paul Manafort — Trump’s former 2016 campaign chairman and another major target of Mueller’s Russia investigation — go way back: when a 24-year-old Stone became president of the Young Republicans in 1977, Manafort was the one managing his campaign. And they went on to work together on Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign. In 1980, Stone and Manafort, along with their associate Charlie Black, formed the right-wing Washington, DC lobbying group Black, Manafort & Stone, which not only represented Republicans in the U.S. but also corrupt dictators ranging from Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines to Mobuto Sese Seko in the Congo. As bad as the Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs Manafort worked with in the 2000s and 2010s were, some of the dictators, tyrants and thugs that Stone and Manafort represented in the 1980s were even worse.</div><div>
</div><div><b>Stone was a lobbyist for Angola’s brutal Jonah Savimbi</b></div><div>In addition to working with dictators like Marcos and Seko, the firm Black, Manafort & Stone represented Jonah Savimbi — whose National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA in Portuguese) tried to overthrow Angola’s Marxist government in the 1980s. According to Human Rights Watch, UNITA was ruthless and “used terror as a policy to obtain supplies and coerce and intimidate civilians. Indiscriminate killings, mutilation of limbs or ears and beatings were used by rebels to punish suspected government sympathizers or as a warning against betraying UNITA.”</div><div>
</div><div>Stone advised Al Sharpton in 2004 — hoping to divide Democrats</div><div>In his 2004 Democratic presidential primary campaign, the Rev. Al Sharpton had an unlikely advisor: Roger Stone, who helped the civil rights activist craft a message against Howard Dean (another Democrat who ran in that primary). When Sharpton stressed that Dean, as governor of Vermont, hadn’t had any blacks or Latinos in his cabinet, that messaging came from Stone — who, in a 2004 interview with the New York Times, said of Sharpton, “There has not been a candidate with this much charisma since Ronald Reagan.”</div><div>
</div><div>But Stone had an ulterior motive: he wanted to divide Democrats. Sharpton eventually dropped out of the race and endorsed Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, who won the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination but lost to incumbent Republican President George W. Bush in the general election.</div><div>
</div></div><div><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman"><font size="4">=</font></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-july-16-2019/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-july-16-2019/</a></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">harry bridges strike</p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">connects many dots eg bin ladin</p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">manafort</p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">angola--> // war on terror? afl-cio mtg portugal, more radical than cia, irving brown</p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">china supported unita savimbi pro-apartheid?! helped build RR for copper to port in tanzania</p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">china also helped anc?</p><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/04/paul_manafort_isn_t_a_gop_retread_he_s_made_a_career_of_reinventing_tyrants.single.html">http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/04/paul_manafort_isn_t_a_gop_retread_he_s_made_a_career_of_reinventing_tyrants.single.html</a></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div>
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</div><div>Despite his Yankee stock,<b> Manafort</b> ran Reagan’s Southern operation, the racially tinged appeal that infamously began in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the hamlet where civil rights activists were murdered in 1964. The success of the 1980 campaign gave Stone and Manafort cachet. More important, they helped run Reagan’s transition to power. They stocked the administration, distributing jobs across the agencies and accumulating owed favors that would provide the basis for their new lobbying business. They opened their doors in 1981.</div><div>
</div><div><b>Manafort and Stone pioneered a new style of firm, what K Street would come to call a double-breasted operation.</b> One wing of the shop managed campaigns, electing a generation of Republicans, from Phil Gramm to Arlen Spector. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The other wing lobbied the officials they helped to victory on behalf of its corporate clients. Over the course of their early years, they amassed a raft of blue-chip benefactors, including <b>Salomon Brothers and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.</b></span></div><div>
</div><div><b>Another early client was Donald J. Trump.</b> What Trump wanted was help fending off potential rivals to his <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Atlantic City casino business. He especially feared the rise of Indian gaming. </span>As the 2016 campaign has graphically illustrated, Trump doesn’t treat rivals gently. Testifying before a congressional committee in 1993, he began with his rote protestations of friendship. “Nobody likes Indians as much as Donald Trump.” He then proceeded to worry that the tribes would prove unable to fend off gangsters. “There is no way Indians are going to protect themselves from the mob ... It will be the biggest scandal ever, the biggest since Al Capone … An Indian chief is going to tell Joey Killer to please get off his reservation? It’s unbelievable to me.”</div><div><b>
</b></div><div><b>Trump poured money into a shell group called the New York Institute for Law and Society. </b>The group existed solely to publish ads smearing his potential Indian competition. Under dark photos of needles and other junkie paraphernalia, the group asserted, “The St. Regis Mohawk Indian record of criminal activity is well documented.” (It wasn’t.) “Are these the new neighbors we want?” We know that Trump and Stone were behind the New York Institute because Gov. George Pataki investigated its doings. He slapped Trump and Stone with a $250,000 fine and required them to publicly apologize for running the ads.</div><div>
</div><div>Manafort didn’t own the Trump account at the firm. But one of his former partners told me that he would dispense advice and pitch in, winning Trump’s trust. When Manafort took an apartment in Trump Towers in 2006, he would kibitz with his old client when they’d run into one another on the elevator. “Trump knew this guy was top drawer,” says one Republican operative.</div><div>
</div><div>* * *</div><div><b>
</b></div><div><b>Manafort and Stone built a glamour firm. The Black in its name belonged to Charles Black</b>, who as a 25-year-old launched the Senate career of Jesse Helms. Later, they lured Lee Atwater, the evil genius who would devise the Willie Horton gambit for George H.W. Bush. The firm had swagger. In the early ’80s, the partners spoke openly to the Washington Post of their annual $450,000 salaries. According to the consultant Ed Rollins, Black would later boast that the firm had schemed to gain cartel-like control of the 1988 Republican presidential primary. They managed all of the major campaigns. Atwater took Bush; Black ran Dole; Stone handled Jack Kemp. A congressional staffer joked to a reporter from Time, “Why have primaries for the nomination? Why not have the candidates go over to Black, Manafort and Stone and argue it out?”</div><div>
</div><div>Manafort actively avoided the spotlight, though he had a knack for garnering unwanted attention. He took on clients and causes that even most of his colleagues on K Street considered outside the usual bounds. Black, Manafort, and Stone hired alumni of the Department of <b>Housing and Urban Development </b>then used those connections to win $43 million in “moderate rehabilitation funds” for a renovation project in Upper Deerfield, New Jersey. Local officials had no interest in the grants, as they considered the shamble of cinder blocks long past the point of repair. The money flowed from HUD regardless, and developers paid Manafort’s firm a $326,000 fee for its handiwork. He later bought a 20 percent share in the project. Two years later, rents doubled without any sign of improvement. Conditions remained, in Mary McGrory’s words, “strictly Third World.” It was such an outrageous scam that congressmen flocked to make a spectacle of it. Manafort calmly took his flaying. “You might call it influence-peddling. I call it lobbying,” he explained in one hearing. “That’s a definitional debate.”</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Strangely, the HUD scandal proved a marketing boon for the firm. An aide to <b>Mobutu Sese Seko </b>told the journalist Art Levine, “That only shows how important they are!” Indeed, Manafort enticed the African dictator to hire the firm. </span>Many of the world’s dictators eventually became his clients. “Name a dictator and Black, Manafort will name the account,” Levine wrote. (Levine’s piece, published in Spy, featured a sidebar ranking the ethical behavior of Washington lobbyists: It found Black, Manafort the worst of the bunch.) The client list included Philippine strongman Ferdinand Marcos (with a $900,000 yearly contract) and the despots of the Dominican Republic, Nigeria, Kenya, Equatorial Guinea, and Somalia. When the Center for Public Integrity detailed the firm’s work, it titled the report “The Torturers’ Lobby.”</div><div>
</div><div>Indeed, the firm was an all-purpose image-buffing operation. As the Washington Post has reported, Manafort could book his clients on 60 Minutes or Nightline—and coach them to make their best pitch. He lobbied Congress for foreign aid that flowed to his clients’ coffers. He might even provide a few choice pieces of advice about tamping down domestic critics. Manafort understood the mindset of the dictator wasn’t so different from his corporate clients. According to one proposal unearthed by congressional investigators, the firm boasted of “personal relationships” with administration officials and promised “to upgrade backchannels” to the U.S. government.</div><div>
</div><div>This wasn’t empty rhetoric. On a Friday in 1985, Christopher Lehman left his job at the National Security Council. The following Monday, he was flying with Manafort, his new boss, to the bush of Angola to pitch the Chinese-trained guerilla Jonas Savimbi, who wanted covert assistance from the U.S. to bolster his rebellion against Angola’s Marxist government. Savimbi briefly left a battle against Cuban assault forces and signed a $600,000 contract.</div><div>
</div><div><b>The money bought Savimbi a revised reputation.</b> Despite his client’s Maoist background, Manafort reinvented him as a freedom fighter. He knew all the tricks for manipulating right-wing opinion. Savimbi was sent to a seminar at the American Enterprise Institute, hosted by the anticommunist stalwart Jeanne Kirkpatrick, a reception thrown by the Heritage Foundation, and another confab at <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Freedom House. (Kirkpatrick introduced Savimbi, who conscripted soldiers, burned enemies, and indiscriminately laid land mines, as a “linguist, philosopher, poet, politician, warrior ... one of the few authentic heroes of our time.”)</span></div><div>
</div><div>Manafort’s campaign worked wonders. His lobbying helped convince Congress to send Savimbi hundreds of millions in covert aid. Indeed, every time Angola stood on the precipice of peace talks, Manafort, Black worked to generate a fresh round of arms—shipments that many experts believe extended the conflict. Sen. Bill Bradley was blunt in assigning blame. “When Gorbachev pulled the plug on Soviet aid to the Angolan government, we had absolutely no reason to persist in aiding Savimbi. But by then he had hired an effective Washington lobbying firm, which successfully obtained further funding.” Or as Art Levine concluded, “So the war lasted another two more years and claimed a few thousand more lives! So what? What counts to a Washington lobbyist is the ability to deliver a tangible victory and spruce up his client’s image.”</div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">IFF 86-93  <b>S afr made crime to be commie  US declared ANC terrorists</b> Rusel Chrystal //JA  Jamba woodstock for intil FF; savimbi no use after cold war, so same SA intel pvt army hunted him down <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Exec Outcomes</span></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">IFF trip: b1 bob dornan, <b><span style="color: rgb(237, 28, 36);">inhofe</span></b>,<b> j helms</b>, phil crane, buz likens, lichenstein <b>D'Souza wrote for mag</b> (later sil vly guru)</font></p><p><b><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">craig williamson SA spy infiltrated and became leader, got ppl jailed and killed</font></b></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">hayek award to vaclav klaus  wreck crew</font></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">==</font></div>

<p id="firstHeading" class="firstHeading"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">stone hell:</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style=" color: #000000;">BMS&K were one of several shops profiled in the article, and perhaps because their hands were bloodiest, they were given the regal place of the piece’s final paragraphs. To give the firm fair judgement, I give the full excerpt devoted to them here, from</span><span class="Apple-converted-space"><span style=" color: #000000;"> </span></span><a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=qnVC8yS4N_AC&lpg=PP1&rview=1&pg=PA90#v=onepage&q&f=false" sl-processed="1" style=" text-decoration: underline;"><span style=" color: #000000;">page 90 of “Publicists of the Damned”</span></a>:</font></p>

<p style="font-weight: normal; background-color: rgb(238, 238, 238);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The well-compensated flacks at Black, Manafort stand at the pinnacle of organizational apologism. Name a corrupt despot, and Black, Manafort will name the account: Ferdinand Marcos, $900,000 a year; the now deposed Somalian dictatorship, $450,000; the drug-linked Bahamian government, $800,000. The firm’s involvement in the Bush and Reagan presidential campaigns allows it to promise – and sometimes deliver – special, executive-level rewards to its egregious clients. The partners, particularly Roger Stone, cultivate friendly relationships with reporters by generously supplying them with leaks and political gossip. And the schmoozing works. Once, when asked why he didn’t expose the corruptions of the governments Stone represents, a well-known political reporters said of<b> Stone</b>, “He’s too good a source.”</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Sometimes Black, Manafort’s willingness to bend U.S. foreign policy to suit its needs is so great that it doesn’t mind running roughshod over the people its client supposedly represents. For $600,000 a year since 1985, the firm has represented Angola’s thuggish<span style=" color: #ED1C24;"> Jonas Savimbi,</span> an alleged witch burner, and his guerilla group UNITA, helping promulgate his “freedom fighter” image and persuading Congress to approve more than $230 million in covert aid to Savimbi’s rebel forces. The cease-fire arranged in Angola last year threatens to reduce UNITA’s need for the heavy-duty lobbying that Black, Manafort has been providing. One former government official believes that the firm’s hawkish congressional lobbying for more military aid slowed down the process by which the cease-fire was achieved.<span style=" background-color: #FFF200;"> “Black, <b>Manafort played an important part in keeping the Angolan war going</b></span><b>,” he says. It did so by forging a coalition of ultraconservative Republicans, anti-Castro Cuban Americans and moderate Democrats who wanted to appear tough on Communism.</b> A conservative congressional aide sympathetic to UNITA charges, “Clearly, Savimbi wanted peace negotiations for a longer time than Black, Manafort wanted negotiations.” The lobbyists, he speculates made it clear to Savimbi that he would lose right-wing support in Congress if he made too many concessions to Angola’s Marxists.<b> Another Republican staff member says of Black, Manafort, “Their view is, ‘To hell with the facts, fuck the world.’”</b></font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style="font-weight: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">One of George Bush’s very first foreign-policy acts was to send a letter when he was president-elect to Savimbi in which he promised continued U.S. support for the rebels </span><span style="background-color: rgb(238, 238, 238);">– this at a time when hopes for brokering a peace settlement were especially high. The letter was drafted by a member of UNITA’s public-relations team, ex-Black, Manafort vice-president <b>Chris Lehman,</b> a former National Security Council staff member who used his White House contacts to help get the military commitment renewed. In Washington, Lehman and Black, Manafort’s triumph was more awe-inspiring than Savimbi’s. As a rival lobbyist said in the</span><span class="Apple-converted-space" style="font-weight: normal; background-color: rgb(238, 238, 238);"> </span><i style="font-weight: normal; background-color: rgb(238, 238, 238);">National Journal</i><span style="font-weight: normal; background-color: rgb(238, 238, 238);">, “How much value do you put on a letter like the one to Savimbi? Is it worth a million dollars? Of course it is!”</span></font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">So the war lasted another two years and claimed a few thousand more lives! So what? What counts to a Washington lobbyist is the ability to deliver a tangible victory and spruce up his client’s image.</font></p>

</blockquote>

<p style="color: rgb(85, 85, 85); font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 22.75px; orphans: auto; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style=" color: #000000;">The efforts of BMS&K in support of Savimbi are one of the few places where some light has been shed, again thanks to</span><span class="Apple-converted-space"><span style=" color: #000000;"> </span></span><i><span style=" color: #000000;">Spy</span></i><span class="Apple-converted-space"><span style=" color: #000000;"> </span></span><span style=" color: #000000;">magazine and a now forgotten article on a now forgotten incident,</span><span class="Apple-converted-space"><span style=" color: #000000;"> </span></span><a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=0OSXeiTCfLAC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA72#v=onepage&q&f=false" sl-processed="1" style=" text-decoration: underline;"><span style=" color: #000000;">“Fooled on the Hill: How some die-hard Cold Warriors and a Belgian con artist tried to change U.S. policy in Africa”</span></a><span style=" color: #000000;">, by David Aronson and David Kamp. I already wrote about this astonishing moment at great length in</span><span class="Apple-converted-space"><span style=" color: #000000;"> </span></span><a href="http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2013/02/07/angola-namibia-south-africa-and-a-tea-party-leader/" sl-processed="1" style=" text-decoration: underline;"><span style=" color: #000000;">“Angola, Namibia, South Africa, and a Tea Party Leader”</span></a><span style=" color: #000000;">, but I return to it briefly here.</span></font>

<span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In December 1988, Angola’s neighbor, Namibia, was to gain its independence after long being a vassal state of South Africa, with its policy of segregation imposed on Namibia as well. This was done in conjunction with a<b> peace agreement,</b> where Cuba and South Africa agreed to withdraw their own military forces from Angola, forces which had kept that country’s civil war going. There was a problem, however: Namibia’s dominant party, SWAPO, was allies with the Soviet government.<b> Jonas Savimbi,</b> the anti-communist Angolan guerilla fighter was against this. Savimbi was funded and supplied by the United States and South Africa; with Naimbia no longer annexed by South Africa and governed by a party unfriendly to his interests, Savimbi could see how this would constrain his activities and those of UNITA. It should be noted that though Savimbi presented himself as an anti-communist, he was more accurately considered an opportunist, a man who eventually funded his operations through blood diamonds and was wanted for war crimes, killed in his last battle before he could be brought to trial.</font></span>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-weight: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">A bill was moving through Congress, with passage assured, that would have helped fund UN supervision of the transition of Namibia to independence.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> In order to derail the independence of Namibia, the senator from North Carolina, <b>Jesse Helms</b>, put a stipulation into the bill where the funding for the UN supervision would be withheld if there were any evidence of the use of chemical weapons by Cubans in Angola. Thanks to the work of Jesse Helms and BMS&K, Bush would sign the bill with the rider</span><span style="font-weight: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. They were also helped out by Andries Holst, a German film-maker who claimed to have recorded the horrors of chemical weapon use in Angola, and Aubin Heynrickx, a toxicologist who would confirm use of such weapons in a published report. Both men were brought in to give their support of the bill’s qualifier by a network that included BSK&H, the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, and the conservative think tank the</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b> International Freedom Foundation (IFF). </b></span><span style="font-weight: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The IFF would later be revealed to be a foundation set up by a lobbyist who would end up in infinite disgrace, Jack Abramoff, funded almost entirely by the South African apartheid government to promote messages and policies in favor of the apartheid government. Holst would turn out to be an utter fraud. Heynrickx’s research would be described by other researchers as “a real joke”, and that any student who submitted equivalent work would be kicked out of school. One can see all this, without difficulty, as an ominous foreshadowing of the lead-up to the Iraq war. After the fall of Saddam, in the search for chemical weapons used in war crimes, Heynrickx would show up there as well. To hell with the facts, fuck the world</span></span><a id="bkfrftnote42" name="bkfrftnote42" style="font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style=" color: #000000;"> </span></a><a href="http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-three/#ftnote42" sl-processed="1" style="font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><sup><span style=" color: #000000;">42</span></sup></a><span style="font-weight: normal; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">.</span></font>

<b><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">stone bksh  spy mag PR of damned</font></b>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4"> spy mag</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">art devine</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">van klosberg rep mobuto, bksh tried to steal contract; stole 326K$ fron HUD; vzn klos outed but backfired (they must be connected)</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">denis Neill sic</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">david fenton(angola marxcists)  vs bksh</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">tommy boggs triying to get $ for guate gov (death squads) promised land reform plan that afternoon, fail</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">dan burton paid 1k$ by mobutu</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">van k mynmar, ignored 190 election su cky's party won (she in prison (destructionsits), thay are still counting votes 18 mos later</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">1989 asmericam nun raped and bured cigs 100x times; us ebassay said she was a lesvbian into SM, army repeated.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Tom Scanlon dominican sugar cncl</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">bksh: marcos 900K$/yr</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">somalia 450K</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">bahamas 800K</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">stone czzies up to reporters by feeding info; one did not expose wrongdoing to preseve info flow; </font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">600K/yr savimbi since 1985</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">joe blatchford el salvador flak</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font>

<a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=qnVC8yS4N_AC&lpg=PP1&rview=1&pg=PA90#v=onepage&q&f=false"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">http://books.google.ca/books?id=qnVC8yS4N_AC&lpg=PP1&rview=1&pg=PA90#v=onepage&q&f=false</font></a>

<h1 id="firstHeading" class="firstHeading"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Jonas Savimbi</font></h1>

<div>

<p style="margin: 0.4em 0px 0.5em; line-height: 19.2000007629395px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>Jonas Malheiro Savimbi</b> (1934 - 2002) was a rebel leader in Angola who founded the Unita movement in 1966, and ultimately proved a central figure in 20th century <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Cold_War" title="Cold War" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Cold War</a> politics.</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">With support from the United States and several African nations, Savimbi spent the majority of his life battling Angola's Marxist, Soviet-aligned government, which was supported by weapons and military advisors from the Soviet Union and Cuba. Savimbi remains an extremely important figure in Angolan history</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">, viewed by some as a "freedom fighter" and by others as a war-monger who perpetuated a lengthy Cold War conflict.</span></font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Jonas Savimbi was born and raised in the eastern province of Moxico, which later served as his power base during the civil war that broke out in 1975, following Angola's independence from Portuguese rule. The war was an extremely bloody and costly one, causing the deaths of many thousands.</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Savimbi's war against Angola's Marxist government became a sub-plot to the Cold War, with both Moscow and Washington viewing the conflict as important to the global balance of power. In 1986, for instance, Savimbi was invited by U.S. President </span><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Ronald_Reagan" title="Ronald Reagan" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Ronald Reagan</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> to the White House. </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Reagan spoke of Unita winning "a victory that electrifies the world...."</span></font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Equally important, Savimbi also was strongly supported by the extremely influential <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Heritage_Foundation" title="Heritage Foundation" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Heritage Foundation</a></span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. Heritage Foundation foreign policy analyst </span><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Michael_Johns" title="Michael Johns" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Michael Johns</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> and other conservatives visited regularly with Savimbi in his clandestine camps in southern Angola and provided the rebel leader with ongoing political and military guidance in his war against the Angolan government. Savimbi's U.S.-based supporters ultimately proved successful in convincing the </span><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Central_Intelligence_Agency" title="Central Intelligence Agency" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Central Intelligence Agency</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> to channel covert weapons to Savimbi's war against Angola's Marxist government, which greatly intensified the conflict.</span></font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">As U.S. support began to flow liberally and leading U.S. conservatives championed his cause, Savimbi won major strategic battles in the late 1980's and early 1990's, and Moscow and Havana began to reevaluate their engagement in Angola, as Soviet and Cuban fatalities mounted and Savimbi's ground control increased. At the height of his military success, Savimbi controlled nearly half the country and was beginning, in 1990, to launch attacks on government and military targets in and around the country's capital, Luanda. Observers felt that the strategic balance in Angola had shifted and that Savimbi was positioning Unita for a possible military victory.</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Signaling the concern that the former Soviet Union was placing on Savimbi's advance in Angola, former Soviet President Mikhail </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Gorbachev raised the Angolan war with Reagan during numerous U.S.-Soviet summi</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">ts.</span></font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Under military pressure from UNITA, the Angolan regime negotiated a cease-fire with Savimbi, and Savimbi ran for president in 1992. But he questioned the legitimacy of the election when he lost, and resumed fighting. In 1994, Unita signed a new peace accord, but Savimbi declined the vice-presidency that was offered to him and again renewed fighting in 1998.</font>

<b><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">After surviving more than a dozen assassination attempts, Savimbi was killed four years later, in February 2002, in a battle with Angolan government troops.</span><a rel="nofollow" class="external autonumber" href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/1839252.stm" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 13px; background-image: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs+9AAAAVElEQVR42n3PgQkAIAhEUXdqJ3dqJ3e6IoTPUSQcgj4EQ5IlUiLE0Jil3PECXhcHGBhZ8kg4hwxAu3MZeCGeyFnAXp4hqNQPnt7QL0nADpD6wHccLvnAKksq8iiaAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC); background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: 100% 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat;">[1]</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. A</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> ceasefire between UNITA and the MPLA was signed six weeks later.</span></font></b>

<i><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Adapted from the </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Wikipedia</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> article, </span><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Jonas Savimbi</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">, and licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.</span></font></i></p>

<h2 style="font-weight: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.6em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); line-height: 19.2000007629395px; background: none rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span class="mw-headline" id="SourceWatch_resources"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">SourceWatch resources</font></span></h2>

<li style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/International_Freedom_Foundation" title="International Freedom Foundation" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">International Freedom Foundation</font></a></li>

<li style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Michael_Johns" title="Michael Johns" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Michael Johns</font></a></li>

<li style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Tepper_Aviation,_Inc." title="Tepper Aviation, Inc." style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Tepper Aviation, Inc.</font></a></li>

</ul>

</div>

</font></div>

<p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>Jonas Malheiro Savimbi</b> (1934 - 2002) was a rebel leader in Angola who founded the Unita movement in 1966, and ultimately proved a central figure in 20th century <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Cold_War" title="Cold War">Cold War</a> politics.</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">With support from the United States and several African nations, Savimbi spent the majority of his life battling Angola's Marxist, Soviet-aligned government, which was supported by weapons and military advisors from the Soviet Union and Cuba. Savimbi remains an extremely important figure in Angolan history, viewed by some as a "freedom fighter" and by others as a war-monger who perpetuated a lengthy Cold War conflict.</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Jonas Savimbi was born and raised in the eastern province of Moxico, which later served as his power base during the <b>civil war that broke out in 1975, following Angola's independence from Portuguese rule. The war was an extremely bloody and costly one, causing the deaths of many thousands.</b></font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Savimbi's war against Angola's Marxist government became a sub-plot to the Cold War, with both Moscow and Washington viewing the conflict as important to the global balance of power. In 1986, for instance, <span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Savimbi was invited by U.S. President <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ronald_Reagan" title="Ronald Reagan">Ronald Reagan</a></span> to the White House. Reagan spoke of Unita winning "a victory that electrifies the world...."</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Equally important, Savimbi also was strongly supported by the extremely influential <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Heritage_Foundation" title="Heritage Foundation" style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Heritage Foundation</a>. Heritage Foundation foreign policy analyst <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Michael_Johns" title="Michael Johns">Michael Johns</a> and other conservatives visited regularly with Savimbi in his clandestine camps in southern Angola and provided the rebel leader with ongoing political and military guidance in his war against the Angolan government. Savimbi's U.S.-based supporters ultimately proved successful in convincing the<span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Central_Intelligence_Agency" title="Central Intelligence Agency">Central Intelligence Agency</a> to channel covert weapons to Savimbi's war </span>against Angola's Marxist government, which <span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">greatly intensified the conflict.</span></font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Signaling the concern that the former Soviet Union was placing on Savimbi's advance in Angola, former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev raised the Angolan war with Reagan during numerous U.S.-Soviet summits.</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Under military pressure from UNITA, the Angolan regime negotiated a cease-fire with Savimbi, and Savimbi ran for president in 1992. But he questioned the legitimacy of the election when he lost, and resumed fighting. In 1994, Unita signed a new peace accord, but Savimbi declined the vice-presidency that was offered to him and again renewed fighting in 1998.</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">After surviving more than a dozen assassination attempts, Savimbi was killed four years later, in February 2002, in a battle with Angolan government troops. <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/1839252.stm" class="external autonumber" title="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/1839252.stm" rel="nofollow">[1]</a>. A ceasefire between UNITA and the MPLA was signed six weeks later.</font>

<i><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Adapted from the Wikipedia article, <b>Jonas Savimbi</b>, and licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.</font></i>

<h2><span class="mw-headline"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">SourceWatch resources</font></span></h2>

<ul>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=International_Freedom_Foundation" title="International Freedom Foundation"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">International Freedom Foundation</font></a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Michael_Johns" title="Michael Johns"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Michael Johns</font></a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Tepper_Aviation,_Inc." title="Tepper Aviation, Inc."><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Tepper Aviation, Inc.</font></a></li>

</ul>

<div id="mw-normal-catlinks"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Special:Categories" title="Special:Categories">Category</a>: <span dir="ltr"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Category:Angola" title="Category:Angola">Angola</a></span></font></div>

</div>

----

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonas_Savimbi">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonas_Savimbi</a></font>

<table><tbody><tr><td nowrap="nowrap" valign="top" width="100"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><strong>7/2/06</strong></font></td><td valign="middle" width="543" align="left"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><strong>JACK ABRAMOFF’S WHITE MAN’S BURDEN: How the Sleazy Republican Lobbyist Served Apartheid By Danny Schechter</strong></font></td></tr><tr><td nowrap="nowrap" valign="top"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"> </font></td><td valign="top" align="left"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">  </font></td></tr><tr><td nowrap="nowrap" valign="top" width="100"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"> </font></td><td valign="top" width="543" align="left">

<p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Mediachannel.org</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Picture the scene.</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">It was a quiet night in <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">June 1985</span> in the equatorial heat of Jamba, a small town in the heartland of Angola, the oil and diamond rich African nation that was divided by a bloody civil war for 30 years. Jamba at the time was a base for Jonas’<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Savimbi’s Unita movement, a tribal secessionist movement bizarrely funded, at the same time, by Communist China and the CIA.</span></font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">A top-secret meeting was then underway between Savimbi and his boosters led by a young American Republican activist, none other than Jack Abramoff. He was there representing an organization he founded, the International Freedom Foundation. Also present, a South African newspaper reports, <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“Leaders of the Afghan mujahedin, Nicaraguan contras, Laotian guerrillas and members of the Oliver North American right.” (</span>Could a Bin Laden operative have been there with the CIA- backed Afghan delegaton? There’s no evidence of that yet.) Abramoff, and others had disguised their identities. His code name was “Pacman.”</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>Unita’s strongman, the late Jonas Savimbi was a masterful guerilla fighter who became the darling of the American right wing as it rallied to the cause of Unita’s main ally, racist South Africa.</b> Conservatives dubbed him a freedom fighter, heralding him as their Che Guevara. In the end 600, 000 people, mostly civilians would die in this bloody conflict, many as a result of atrocities perpetuated by Unita. I visited Angola in l986 and can personally confirm how bad it was.</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Abramoff’s trip to Angola had been paid for by right-wing NY financier Lewis Lehrman as part of an effort to build a global anti-communist alliance. (Lehrman later fired Abramoff, who would go on to become the most notorious lobbyist in America, for inflating his expense reports, a portent of corrupt practices to come.)</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Abramoff, an ultra-orthodox Jew recalled an incident when he left the meeting to pray in the bush. “They thought, I was a “mystic,” he would later write. There was nothing mystical about the US policies Abramoff was covertly advancing.</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">According to the Wikipedia, “In 1986, Savimbi was invited by U.S. President Ronald Reagan to the White House. Reagan spoke of UNITA winning “a victory that electrifies the world… Equally important, Savimbi was strongly supported by the extremely influential Heritage Foundation. Heritage Foundation foreign policy analyst Michael Johns and other conservatives visited regularly with Savimbi in his clandestine camps in southern Angola and provided the rebel leader with ongoing political and military guidance in his war against the Angolan government.</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Savimbi’s U.S.-based supporters ultimately proved successful in convincing the Central Intelligence Agency to channel covert weapons to Savimbi’s war against Angola’s Marxist government, which greatly intensified the conflict.”</span></font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">This early period in Abramoff’s career has been largely ignored in most of the American media. It was the period in which he began building relations with tribal peoples that would later turn him into a very well-compensated lobbyist for American Indian tribes in the lucrative gambling industry.</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">His fascination with Africa would lead to a lobbying contract for the Congo’s Mobutu Seso Seko, a Savimbi supporter and then the richest and most corrupt dictator on the continent. Mobutu, critics, charged, ran a “kleptocracy” based on the violent suppression of human rights.</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Abramoff never just served others. He was almost more ambitious and avaricious then that. He saw a chance to make a name and big money for himself with the help of apartheid South Africa. Rocked by uprisings in the townships and challenged by the artists who backed a cultural boycott of South Africa’s “Sun City”, the top gambling resort and entertainment venue, Apartheid’s rulers decided to fight back against the likes of activists like singer Little Steven Van Zandt by channeling state funds into media projects they could later deny they were linked with,</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">J<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">ack Abramoff had actually first visited South Africa in 1983, as head of the College Republicans National Committee (CRNC). </span>South Africa’s Mail and Guardian reported on February 10, 2006: “The IFF was officially headquartered in Washington, where the South Africans were given entrée into the American political establishment by Abramoff and the Young Republicans. But, it was effectively run from Johannesburg…Newsday reported that the Johannesburg office was “the nerve centre of IFF operations worldwide”.</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Ambramoff then enlisted in South Africa’s cultural war and suddenly found himself as the head of Hollywood movie studio called Regency Enterprises. The idea was to make anti-communist films that could denigrate the anti-apartheid movement. Poof, Jack wrote a screenplay.</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The movie was “Red Scorpion” starring the very Aryan-looking Dolph Lundgren. It pictured African liberation fighters as surrogates for Soviet totalitarians.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> The plot: “A Russian KGB agent is sent to Africa to kill an anti-Communist black revolutionary.” The tagline: “He’s a human killing machine. Taught to stalk. Trained to kill. Programmed to destroy. He’s played by their rules… Until now.”</span> Jack Ambramoff’s alter ego and fantasy was now on the screen.</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>The movie was made in <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">South African-occupied Namibia.</span> It was denounced by Hollywood supporters of the cultural boycott like Martin Scorcese, Spike Lee and Robert DeNiro for supporting apartheid. Other critics called it “homoerotic” and overpatriotic.” He later executive produced a sequel, Red Scorpion 2.</b></font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Ambramoff has a pattern of first denying sleazy practices until forced to admit them. At first, he publicly denied South African financing. This past week the Mail & Guardian quotes one-time apartheid spy Craig Williamson as now admitting that the money came directly from the South African military:</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“Among Abramoff’s South African projects was the anti-communist film Red Scorpion, made in South African-occupied Namibia and, according to Williamson, funded by the South African military.”</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Why the military? The newspaper reveals: “The IFF was ostensibly founded as a conservative think-tank, but was in reality part of an elaborate <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">South African military intelligence operation, code-named Operation Babushka. Established to combat sanctions and undermine the African National Congress</span>, it also supported Jonas Savimbi and his rebel Angolan movement, Unita.”</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The movie was modeled romantically on Savimbi’s “War for Freedom” but also riddled with stereotypes and propaganda, Sample exchange: “<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Colonel Zayas: Are you out of your mind? Lt. Nikolai: No. Just out of bullets. [Burps].”</span></font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Abramoff turned to his connections and got a soviet-made<b> WWII-era T-34 tank with a 76mm canon for in the final battle sequence.</b></font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">An amateur reviewer posted an insightful comment on a film website which may have foreseen the off-screen drama that Ambramoff himself is now starring in. “Looking beyond the mindless action scenes (which, despite the countless guns and explosions), there is a good fable about the possibility of manipulating truth, and how appearance is not always truth.”</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Another citizen-reviewer noted” Yes, the same man who bribed over 60 congressmen and senators, robbed several native American tribes blind, tried to take out life insurance policies on tribal elders with himself as the beneficiary, and called the Choctaw tribal council “Monkeys” and “troglodytes,”had an interesting earlier career.</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">He was disqualified from the student government election in his Beverly Hills elementary school for exceeding spending limits. He took over the young Republican movement in college with his schoolmates including Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition, and longtime republican insider Grover Norquist.”</span></font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Last week, pictures of Abramoff and President Bush, photos whose existence was first denied by the White House, turned up on the internet. Yes, they knew each other and met several times.</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Still to come are images of Abramoff on his African “liberation” safari taking up the white man’s burden in the name of discrediting Nelson Mandela.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> The African National Congress leader’s freedom was demanded by millions at the time, with the exception of then Congressman Dick Cheney who voted against a Congressional resolution calling for his release from prison. (Cheney also opposed overturning Ronald Reagan’s ban on sanctions against South Africa, a ban Jack Ambramoff worked to support.)</span></font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Quietly backing racist South Africa was high on the Republican agenda then, a fact that the media mostly ignores.</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">There must be a photo somewhere of young Jack with South Africa’s apartheid-era President, P.W. “The Crocodile” Botha.” Putting those two presidential trophy shots side by side, Botha on one side, Bush on the other, will complete this connection between the ongoing fight for truth and racial justice and the Bush Administration’s commitment to benefit “just us.” “News Dissector” Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org. He was the Executive Producer of the anti-apartheid TV series “South Africa Now” and helped produce the Sun City album with 54 top musicians.</font></p>

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</div><div><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><tbody><tr><td valign="top" class="color2"><a name="top"><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1" /></a><h5><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><a name="top"><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1" /></font></a><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><a href="http://www.hrw.org/legacy/wr2k2/contents.html">Table of Contents</a> > <a href="http://www.hrw.org/legacy/wr2k2/africa.html">Africa</a> ></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></h5><h1><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1">Angola</font></h1><ul><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><img src="http://www.hrw.org/legacy/wr2k2/images/blank.gif" width="1" height="2" border="0" />
<img src="http://www.hrw.org/includes/blue/images/bullet.gif" width="5" height="5" border="0" vspace="2" /> <a href="http://www.hrw.org/legacy/wr2k2/africa1.html#developments">Human Rights Developments</a>
<img src="http://www.hrw.org/legacy/wr2k2/images/blank.gif" width="1" height="2" border="0" />
<img src="http://www.hrw.org/includes/blue/images/bullet.gif" width="5" height="5" border="0" vspace="2" /> <a href="http://www.hrw.org/legacy/wr2k2/africa1.html#defending">Defending Human Rights</a>
<img src="http://www.hrw.org/legacy/wr2k2/images/blank.gif" width="1" height="2" border="0" />
<img src="http://www.hrw.org/includes/blue/images/bullet.gif" width="5" height="5" border="0" vspace="2" /> <a href="http://www.hrw.org/legacy/wr2k2/africa1.html#international_community">The Role of the International Community</a>
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<font face="Arial,Helvetica">HUMAN RIGHTS DEVELOPMENTS</font></font></h4><p><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1">Civil war persisted in Angola, accompanied by a dramatic escalation of violations of the laws of war. The National Union for the Total Independence of Angol<b>a (UNITA), a rebel group led by Jonas Savimbi, killed, abducted, and terrorized civilians with impunity. Government forces abused civilians during forced relocations and beat or killed civilians displaced in the course of looting, extortion, and forced recruitment of boys and men.</b></font></p><p><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1">The situation worsened since the breakdown of the Lusaka Peace Protocol in <b>mid-1998 when UNITA resumed fighting. In 2001, the numbers of internally displaced persons grew to over four million, and some 435,000 Angolan refugees lived in camps in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Zambia, and Namibia</b>. Within Angola, security was limited to areas within a narrow perimeter around the government-controlled provincial capitals and the major municipalities, making safe land travel almost impossible. Humanitarian aid delivered by air only reached 10 to 15 percent of Angola. Ambushes of civilians and humanitarian workers increased, preventing travel by humanitarian ground convoys and impeding delivery of aid to thousands in desperate need.</font></p><p><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><b>UNITA stepped up hit-and-run tactics against civilians. Rebels used terror as a policy, to obtain supplies and coerce and intimidate civilians. Indiscriminate killings, mutilation of limbs or ears, and beatings were used by rebels to punish suspected government sympathizers or as a warning against betraying UNITA. UNITA continued to forcibly recruit men and teenage boys to fight. Girls were held in sexual slavery and used as a source of forced labor.</b></font></p><p><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In an apparent bid for international attention, UNITA struck against government targets several times while foreign officials visited Angola.</span> For instance, in early May the visiting United Nations (U.N.) secretary general's special adviser for Africa, Ibrahim Gambari, commented that "Progress is being made to find solutions for the conflict and to end war in Angola."<b> But on May 5 the rebels attacked Caxito, a provincial capital sixty kilometers north of the capital, Luanda, killing more than 150 people and kidnapping sixty children from a Danish-run orphanage</b>. After an international outcry, rebels handed over the children to a Catholic mission.</font></p><p><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><b>Similarly, during a visit by a U.S. delegation, the Consortium for Electoral and Political Processes Strengthening (CEPPS), there to evaluate conditions for national elections, UNITA blew up a train 130 kilometers from Luanda. Passengers fleeing the flames were ambushed, leaving 256 dead and more than 170 wounded. During the last week of August alone, rebels killed 268 civilians. On August 31, they ambushed a bus near Cacolo, thirty kilometers from Malanje, and set the bus on fire with passengers still alive inside, killing fifty-three passengers.</b>UNITA deliberately targeted humanitarian workers and aircraft. <b>On April 15, they looted a warehouse belonging to relief organizations in Benguela province. In June, rebels launched missiles towards two planes carrying relief supplies</b> near the cities of Kuito and Luena. That same month, they attacked the city of Uige, forcing evacuation of U.N. and other humanitarian workers. Civilian vehicles were also ambushed in Bie, Benguela, Huila, Cuanza Sul, Cuanza Norte and Malanje provinces. During a May 14 attack on a truck convoy in Benguela, two people were killed and fifty kidnapped.</font></p><p><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1">In late 2000, government forces mounted an attack on UNITA forces in central Angola. Fighting reached neighboring Namibia, with Namibian troops taking part. In November, a government assault in Malanje aimed at controlling towns near the DRC border drove many civilians to Malanje's provincial capital. UNITA regained control of the area in February and March, leading the government to undertake another campaign in April.<b> When no displaced civilians appeared, concerns arose over their safety. </b>Also in February, UNITA forces held the town of Quibaxe in Bengo province, killing and abducting many civilians and causing others to flee. An <b>estimated 8,000 people from Quibaxe were missing.</b></font></p><p><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1">Unprecedented numbers of internally displaced persons were registered in twelve of the eighteen provinces throughout the year, with an average of 30,000 new arrivals each month. The most affected areas were Golungo Alto, Caxito, Mussende, Camacupa Cuemba, and Matala. Humanitarian services were overburdened. In Matala, in January, for instance, some 28,000 displaced persons were living in desperate conditions and the average of seventy new arrivals registering daily found no food, shelter, or health care. In September, there were some 60,000 newly displaced with 24,000 in the provinces of Cuando Cubango, Moxico, Luanda Sul and Norte, and 10,000 in Bie province alone. As of early October, there were 160,000 in Kuito and 60,000 in Camacupa and Catabola. Eight people died daily in Cuemba from lack of food and medicine.</font></p><p><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><b>The internally displaced primarily suffered abuses at the hands of UNITA. Yet allegations of abuse by government forces continued, ranging from forced relocation to killing and looting. </b>Violations occurred mainly during military operations and while army and police implemented "limpeza" ("cleansing") operations near recently recaptured towns, to clear the area of the local residents, ostensibly for their safety, but thereby depriving UNITA of a potential source of food and labor. During cleansing operations, government troops forced families to move from the area carrying goods looted by the army; those who refused were beaten or killed. Allegations of soldiers raping women during these operations were confirmed in Moxico and Malanje provinces.</font></p><p><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1">Those driven from their home areas by government forces were in many cases first moved to the government-controlled municipalities. Conditions for the displaced in these areas were often terrible, with insufficient assistance, sanitation, health services, and security. In addition to extortion, the army also forced displaced persons to accompany government troops to search for food in mined or otherwise insecure areas. When the numbers in the municipalities became overwhelming, the government relocated the displaced women, elderly, and children to internally displaced camps on the outskirts of the provincial capitals under government control. Men and adolescent boys were often forced to remain in combat areas to fight.</font></p><p><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1">Gains were made in strengthening the legal framework to protect the internally displaced--a new law, the Norms for the Resettlement of the Internally Displaced, was passed in January 2001, and several other plans of action were drafted. However, practical mechanisms for their implementation were not put in place, particularly at the provincial and municipal levels. Many of the internally displaced camps were located at the outskirts of government-controlled towns, serving in effect as a human shield or buffer zone against UNITA attacks. The internally displaced were regularly subjected to assaults at the hands of the security forces in the camps and served as a source of exploitable labor by nearby landowners. Regular looting and extortion by the security forces of the displaced populations provided a source of goods, including food, to the security forces, which were often not paid for months.</font></p><p><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><b>A continuing flow of military arms and equipment sustained the conflict. On February 26, Spanish authorities intercepted a Georgian freighter in the Canary Islands en route to Angola, carrying an undeclared 636-ton cargo of Russian-made weapons. On September 30, a shipment of five hundred anti-tank rockets from Iran bound for Angola was seized at Bratislava airport</b>. Two days later, the Angolan army uncovered a large cache of weapons close to the Mavinga airport.</font></p><p><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1">In one positive development, government use of antipersonnel mines appeared to decline in 2001. Nevertheless, troops reportedly laid mines at night around defensive positions, removing them in the morning.<b> UNITA continued to lay mines to prevent residents from fleeing to government-held areas or to keep them from reaching their fields. Rebels also used anti-vehicle mines to interrupt transpor-tation and ambush humanitarian convoys and civilian vehicles. 70 percent of the casualties were civilians, and more than half were displaced people fleeing fighting.</b></font></p><p><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1">Freedom of expression in Angola remained a concern. Restrictions on journalists continued, despite assurances by the vice minister of social communications, who met with the Committee to Protect Journalists in October 2000 and May 2001. On July 7, Gilberto Neto, a reporter for the independent weekly <i>Folha 8</i>, and Philippe Lebillon, a researcher from the London-based Overseas Development Institute, were arrested at an airport in Malanje province and escorted back to Luanda. During interrogation at the National Directorate of Criminal Investigation, their documentation and equipment were confiscated.</font></p><p><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1">Neto was also blocked from leaving the country at Luanda International Airport on August 23. He was charged with endangering state security and defaming the police. (He had reported in 1999 on a police raid on the independent, church-affiliated Radio Ecclesia.) The charges were not pursued in court. In an earlier case in December 2000, immigration authorities at Luanda Airport prevented Raphael Marques, a free-lance journalist, from leaving Angola. They confiscated his passport and he was sent home without explanation, although he carried a provincial court order lifting any travel restriction against him. In July, several reporters, including British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) correspondents, faced obstacles in covering the violent forcible relocation of residents from the Boa Vista district of Luanda. On the positive side, Radio Ecclesia resumed broadcasting countrywide. That same month, the director of Radio Morena in Benguela was dismissed following a broadcast about a UNITA attack.</font></p><p><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1">While authorities allowed some open discussion of public affairs, especially through the privately owned media, it cracked down on opposition political parties by denying freedom of association and assembly, in some cases violently. In December 2000, the army seriously injured a Catholic deacon suspected of being a sympathizer of the separatist Front for the Liberation of the Cabinda Enclave (FLEC) and beat other members of the church. A month later, members of the army and police beat, arrested and detained eight members of the Party for Democracy and Progress in Angola (PADPA) for protesting against the government. In March, local authorities blocked the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) from activities in Bie. In three other cases, UNITA-Renovada representatives were threatened, arrested, and tortured. The provincial secretary of the Party for Social Renovation (PRS) was detained and four militants of the Democratic Party for the Progress of the Angolan National Alliance (PDP-ANA) were detained and interrogated about their political activities. In April, the Provincial Government of Luanda dismissed a petition by church groups to organize a march on peace and human rights, and in July it refused to allow a demonstration by Boa Vista residents, citing security concerns.</font></p><h4><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1">
<font face="Arial,Helvetica">DEFENDING HUMAN RIGHTS</font></font></h4><p><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1">Human rights activity increased, mainly in the capital, as the government allowed civic and church groups to discuss human rights violations and concerns about the war--for example in conferences held by two organizations, the Open Society and the Women's Movement for Peace and Development. However, the ability of human rights organizations to function outside the capital was greatly constrained by insecurity, and no human rights groups were able to obtain access to or function in UNITA-held territory. In October, D. Zacarias Camuenho, president of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of Angola and Sao Tome and a member of the Inter-Ecclesiastical Committee for Peace in Angola (COIEPA), was awarded the 2001 Sakharov Human Rights Prize by the European parliament, signaling the growing importance of the churches as a possible mediator between the two parties in the conflict. In July, COIEPA launched a sensitization campaign to end the war, while the Open Society and the Catholic Pro Peace Movement followed suit with an antiwar campaign in September.</font></p><p><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1">Medicines Sans Frontieres released a report in November 2000 titled "Angola: Behind the Façade of Normalization, Manipulation, Violence and Abandoned Populations" detailing the heavy price paid by civilians in the conflict. The report highlighted the increasing violence and policy of terror by both sides, but mainly blamed UNITA. Oxfam echoed those condemnations in a September 2001 report on the catastrophic humanitarian situation of Angolans.</font></p><h4><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1">
<font face="Arial,Helvetica">THE ROLE OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY</font></font></h4><p><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1">An economic reform program agreed on by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the government of Angola in April 2000 was designed to monitor oil revenues. Angola is the second largest oil exporter in sub-Saharan Africa and gains significant revenues from its oil exports. Dampening hopes for greater government transparency and accountability, the government failed to publish required auditing reports, despite two deadline extensions. (See <a href="http://www.hrw.org/legacy/wr2k2/business.html">Business and Human Rights</a>.)</font></p><p><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1">International donors continued to criticize the government's chronic under-funding of humanitarian services for its citizens, and in recent years donor support for humanitarian operations was reduced. Donors urged the Angolan government to use its substantial revenues from oil sales on humanitarian services rather than on military spending. Additionally, with the changing military situation, the move away from conventional warfare to counterinsurgency strategies was expected to reduce military spending by the government.</font></p><h4><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1">
<font face="Arial,Helvetica">United Nations</font></font></h4><p><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1">The U.N. continued to support the Angolan government's efforts to resolve the conflict. The U.N. reiterated its call to UNITA to fully implement its commitments under the 1994 Lusaka Protocol. A number of U.N. Security Council sanctions on UNITA remained in force, including an arms and petroleum embargo in force since 1993, prohibitions on diamond trading, prohibition on travel of senior UNITA officials outside Angola, and a freeze on UNITA's financial assets. The U.N.'s Monitoring Mechanism that verified compliance was extended again in October 2001.</font></p><p><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1">In April and October, the Sanctions Committee's Independent Panel of Experts issued reports concluding that UNITA retained vast quantities of weapons hidden throughout Angola. The panel identified at least sixteen diamond companies responsible for sanctions busting. The report made clear that efforts to reduce the illicit diamond trade fueling the war, including U.N. sanctions, met with little success. Angola's so-called "blood diamonds" represented 5 percent of the world's rough diamond trade, with a value of U.S.$420 million a year. Smuggled through Burkina Faso, Congo, Cyprus, South Africa, Tanzania, or Zambia, these diamonds ended up in cutting centers in Belgium, India, and Israel.</font></p><p><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1">Two high-level U.N. visits were made to Angola during the year. <b>When the secretary-general's senior adviser Ibrahim Gambari visited in May, he strongly condemned UNITA, stating that it was "solely responsible for the war in Angola," a</b>nd pledged U.N. assistance for reconstruction efforts. In April the special coordinator of the Network on Internal Displacement, Dennis MacNamara, visited Angola and noted the need for the U.N. to strengthen its overall capacity to address serious gaps in assistance and protection to the internally displaced.</font></p><p><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1">The U.N. Office in Angola (UNOA) continued to implement capacity-building projects such as improving access to the judicial system, increasing human rights awareness through legal counseling, and supporting media programs. The appointment of a new director in July to head UNOA's human rights division was followed by the office's internal reorganization and the preparation of a strategic plan of action.</font></p><h4><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1">
<font face="Arial,Helvetica">European Union</font></font></h4><p><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1">The European Union (E.U.) maintained a focus on trade and oil sales, rather than on human rights abuses. In its 2001 annual human rights report, the E.U. condemned UNITA's abuses and called on the Angolan government to assume greater responsibility for protecting displaced populations. It also recommended that the U.N. create a permanent group of independent experts to follow diamond trafficking in violation of the U.N. sanctions.</font></p><p><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1">Human rights issues were also not high on the agenda of the "troika" monitors of the 1994 Lusaka Peace Agreement--Portugal, Russia, and the U.S. Since 1998, Portugal has increased export of light weapons and ammunitions, including to Angola, in violation of the E.U. code of conduct that prevents arms sales to conflict countries where human rights are extensively violated.</font></p><h4><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1">
<font face="Arial,Helvetica">United States</font></font></h4><p><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><b>Good relations between Luanda and Washington concentrated largely on improving trade and investment. Angola rose in importance for the U.S. due to its vast oil resources. In ten years, the U.S. is projected to rely on Angola for 15 percent of its oil</b>. In May, the first trade mission to Angola since September 1997 examined possibilities of corporate partnerships in the areas of data processing, industry, water systems, environment and conservation, transportation, aviation, legal services, shipping, and banking.</font></p><p><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1">However, the U.S. did not always disregard human rights in relation to trade. According to the president's 2001 report on the implementation of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), prepared by the U.S. Trade Representative, Angola did not receive AGOA beneficiary country designation due to "concerns related to corruption, labor and human rights." The report cited extrajudicial executions by security forces and scorched-earth policies by certain army units, including burning villages and killing civilians in Cuando Cubango and Lunda Sul provinces, as well as government repression of independent media. Angola was one of only ten countries that sought to participate in AGOA but was denied.</font></p><p><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><b>The U.S. gave some aid for humanitarian assistance and civil society activities, although it did not play a strong role in efforts to end the war</b>. U.S. development and humanitarian assistance was over U.S. $39 million for FY 2001.</font></p><p><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1">
</font></p><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1" /></font><p><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><font face="GENEVA,ARIAL" size="-1"><a href="http://www.hrw.org/legacy/wr2k2/africa1.html#top">Back to Top</a></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></p><p><a href="http://www.hrw.org/legacy/wr2k2/contents.html">Table of Contents</a> > <a href="http://www.hrw.org/legacy/wr2k2/africa.html">Africa</a></p></td></tr></tbody></table></div><div>===

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