Angola

==

see bak for better format

see broidy trump

see savimbi

roger stone?

manafort

broidy trump

wreck crew book/txt https://harpers.org/archive/2008/08/the-wrecking-crew/

norquist, abramoff, IFF

manafort?

===

mma

Right-wing media resume misleading attacks on hurricane recovery efforts after Biden announces humanitarian assistance for Africa

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Ilana Berger

Published 12/13/24 9

Right-wing media ramped up attacks on the Biden administration’s hurricane recovery efforts in southern Appalachia after President Joe Biden announced $1 billion in humanitarian aid for Africa.

On December 3, Biden became the first president to visit the African country of Angola, where he announced new aid “to address food insecurity and other urgent needs of refugees, internally displaced persons, and affected communities in 31 African countries,” according to the United States Agency of International Development.

According to Oxfam, a federation of international nongovernmental organizations addressing global poverty, “more than 24 million people in southern Africa face hunger, malnutrition and water scarcity due to drought and floods.” Oxfam also described southern Africa as a “climate disaster hotspot.”

Earlier this year, FEMA was the subject of right-wing attacks falsely accusing the agency of squandering disaster relief money on immigrants, preventing victims of Hurricane Helene from accessing aid, and even seizing the land of people whose homes had been destroyed. Conspiracy theories about government weather manipulation also circulated online.

Right-wing media falsely accused the Biden administration of favoring Africa over hurricane-stricken communities in the U.S., reviving harmful FEMA misinformation

Hurricane relief funding requires congressional approval and is separate from foreign aid and immigration spending, but Fox News has continually suggested otherwise.Top-rated hosts like Jesse Watters and Sean Hannity led the charge in repeating false claims that money allocated for disaster relief went to helping immigrants, but the Federal Emergency Management Agency maintains separate funds for those two purposes. In October, senior congressional correspondent Chad Pergram posted on X (formerly Twitter) that Fox News had obtained a GOP memo saying there is “no funding connection between” the migrant shelter program and the Disaster Relief Fund. Similarly, none of the humanitarian aid for Africa is coming from FEMA. Foreign disaster aid — like that being directed to Africa — typically comes from USAID and the State Department. Media Matters, [10/11/24, 10/10/24, 10/9/24, 10/9/24; Council on Foreign Relations, 10/23/24; usaid.gov, 12/3/24]

Right-wing media misinformation about FEMA’s actions in southern Appalachia was followed by violent threats against FEMA personnel on the ground.Misinformation about the responses to hurricanes Helene and Milton — ranging from accusations that FEMA is actively keeping aid and donations from hurricane victims to conspiracy theories that the government used weather manipulation to target certain populations — surged across social media platforms in the weeks after the hurricanes. In October, FEMA workers in both Rutherford County, North Carolina, and Carter County, Tennessee, faced threats of violence from armed civilians. Media Matters, [10/18/24, 10/9/24, 10/10/24]

While there is still work to be done helping victims in southern Appalachia, the federal response has been more robust than right-wing media claim. According to NC.gov, “over $244 million in FEMA Individual Assistance funds have been paid so far” in western North Carolina. According to FEMA, “The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), administered by FEMA, has paid policyholders over $1.4 billion for flood losses stemming from Hurricane Helene recovery” across affected states. NC.gov, [11/20/24, fema.gov, 11/27/24]

In reporting on Biden's trip to Africa, right-wing media ignored Biden’s recent request from Congress for billions more in recovery funding for impacted states. In November, Biden asked Congress for roughly $100 billion in emergency disaster aid to help North Carolina and other impacted states, including $40 billion for FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund. CNN, [11/18/24]

One America News Network host Dan Ball called the assistance “wasteful” and “frivolous,” saying, “There are Americans still right now, as I sit here, who are in need. And it's our money. It's their money. They'd like some more to rebuild from flooding. Like the residents of North Carolina who are still dealing with the devastating aftermath of hurricane Helene.” He later added: “FEMA is nowhere to be found. It’s like they don’t even want the people to rebuild.” OANN, *Real America with Dan Ball*, [12/6/24]

On Infowars, host Harrison Smith ranted that the government should have built four high tech “schools per state” with the $1 billion aid pledged to Africa or “rebuilt hurricane-ravaged Appalachia,” but instead “people pay taxes to their government and the government just skedaddles with it to some third world nation and hands it over to a dictator.” He later added: “I wonder where all that money went because it certainly didn't go into fixing the infrastructure in the places that were damaged,” referring to FEMA aid that has already been allocated to impacted states. Infowars, *The American Journal*, [12/4/24]

On Fox Business, host Elizabeth MacDonald and right-wing radio host Jason Rantz attacked FEMA and the Biden administration, saying that aid for Africa is “the ultimate slap in the face” for Americans recovering from Hurricane Helene.MacDonald said that Biden “wants to spend more than 1 billion bucks of your money in Africa and on Ukraine but not on the victims of Hurricane Helene in North Carolina. They are literally freezing to death living in tents and RVs, no heat, no electricity, little food.” MacDonald also misleadingly said that the government “burned through a billion bucks in FEMA money on illegal aliens.” Fox Business, *The Evening Edit*, [12/4/24; Media Matters, 10/11/24]

On Fox Business, host Maria Bartiromo complained that Biden is “shelling out” money in Africa and called it “incredible” that he is “giving all that money to Ukraine, another billion to Africa. Meanwhile, what about these people that are still trying to recover from these hurricanes?” Guest and former Bloomberg host Adam Johnson added, “FEMA got criticized during the campaign, as you recall, from the politicization of some of the surveys that they were doing, but also saying, how much money are we spending on the migrant crisis but we’re not spending in terms of FEMA response? And then he goes to Africa and gives this money away. What is the strategy as he exits the door here?” Fox Business, *Mornings with Maria*, [12/4/24]

OnFox & Friends First, co-host Todd Piro called the aid “a double-edged sword” because “we want to be in Africa to counteract China” but “there are people in North Carolina that just got destroyed by a hurricane and they’re getting measly $750 checks.”

Fox News, *Fox & Friends First*, [12/4/24]

On Newsmax,Wake Up Americaco-host Alex Kraemer called the aid and humanitarian assistance part of Biden's “Americans last policy” while co-host Sharla McBride attacked FEMA. Kraemer called it “mean” for Biden to give a “blank check to other countries” and said he has a “sitting back, let them eat cake” attitude toward North Carolina. McBride said: “Still people are out of their homes. A lot of people dealing with the effects of the flooding they went through, and many of them still struggling to get money from FEMA, from the money they deserve as being an American citizen.” Newsmax, *Wake Up America*, [12/4/24]

Fox News headline: “Biden pledges $1B in aid to Africa as North Carolina residents continue to struggle after Helene.” The article’s subheadline read: “Social media users fumed over Biden's decision to help foreign countries before his own.”Fox News, [12/3/24]

On Infowars’War Room, host Owen Shoyer said that “Joe Biden just gave you another middle finger,” calling the aid “obviously absurd” because “Americans can't even get assistance with FEMA or other emergencies.” He continued: “We're paying for refugees if they come here. We're paying for refugees if they stay there.” He also said that people in North Carolina are “basically living in huts” because “they won’t sell their land. They won’t give up everything to the government in this land grab.” Infowars, *War Room*, [12/3/24]

Daily Wire reporter Ryan Saavedra: “Biden announces $1 billion in disaster relief for Africa while there are people still living in tents in North Carolina after their homes were destroyed by Hurricane Helene.”He added: “It's now winter in North Carolina and people there are facing freezing temperatures.” Twitter/X, [12/3/24]

Fox News host Laura Ingraham said that Biden’s Tuesday speech announcing aid for Angola “sounded more like ‘Angola First.’ Countries with their hands out love having a weak American president like Biden in office.”Fox News, *The Ingraham Angle*, [12/3/24]

Fox host Sean Hannity said, “That billion dollars in federal aid? No, that’s not going to rebuild homes in North Carolina. Instead, Joe is sending your hard-earned tax dollars to Africa.” He also called the move “a fitting end to a historically bad presidency marked by weakness, incompetence, utter dishonesty, corruption, and putting the interests of foreign nationals well before the needs of his fellow Americans.” Fox News,*Hannity*, [12/3/24]

Shroyer: “Biden just announced $1 Billion for Africa. People in North Carolina are still homeless after Hurricane Helene as winter hits and Christmas is approaching. We were told there's no money for Hurricane victims, yet another country gets billions from Biden on his way out.”Twitter/X, [12/3/24]

Conspiracy theorist Lara Logan linked to an article about the aid Biden pledged to Africa, writing, “Is anyone else still in shock & disbelief over the treatment of people in North Carolina?" She continued: “How is this happening? They’ve been abandoned & where is most of the media?”Twitter/X, [12/4/24]

Right-wing influencer Gunther Eagleman: “Joe Biden just announced a $1B aid package for AFRICAN nations that are rebuilding from natural disasters. What about North Carolina? This is DISGUSTING.”[Twitter/X, 12/3/24]

Former Fox host and current Newsmax host Todd Starnes claimed Biden “abandoned” people in Western North Carolina because it’s “Trump Country” and is instead sending disaster relief to Africa.“It is snowing in the Western North Carolina mountains,” he said. “Many people are living in tents. Others have no home. FEMA has abandoned the people there. So has Biden. Instead, the president is sending $1 billion in disaster relief aid to Africa. That's because Western North Carolina is Trump Country. And the Marxists within the administration want the citizens there to suffer. It's really that simple and it's really that appalling.” Twitter/X, [12/3/24]

### Right-wing media lies about the federal response to Hurricane Helene

:{10/04/24

### How a lie about immigrants and FEMA disaster aid spread across Fox News

:{10/11/24

### As social media posts calling for violence against FEMA gained traction, fear about armed groups forced the agency to proceed with caution

10/18/24

---

ggl 12 24

[DW

Can Angolan diplomacy help silence guns in eastern Congo?

Presidents Felix Tshisekedi of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Paul Kagame of Rwanda are set to meet in Luanda on December 15.

2 days ago](https://www.dw.com/en/can-angolan-diplomacy-help-silence-guns-in-eastern-congo/video-71028400)

[

The New York Times

Why Black Americans Searching for Their Roots Should Look to Angola

When President Biden visits the country this week, he is expected to highlight a largely overlooked bond between Angola and the United...

2 weeks ago](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/01/world/africa/angola-biden-slavery.html)

[

Al Jazeera

Angola’s path to prosperity lies in its sun and soil, not its oil

Investing in solar electricity and agriculture can help the country diversify its economy and uplift its rural areas.

1 week ago](https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/12/7/angolas-path-to-prosperity-lies-in-its-sun-and-soil-not-its-oil)

[

Reuters

Biden meets African leaders in Angola to advance Lobito railway project

U.S. President Joe Biden met African leaders in the Angolan port of Lobito on Wednesday to advance a plan to extend a railway that could...

1 week ago](https://www.reuters.com/world/biden-visits-angolan-port-city-lobito-tout-railway-plans-2024-12-04/)

[

The Guardian

Joe Biden addresses America’s ‘original sin’ of slavery on Angola visit

US president remembers 'stolen men and women and children brought to our shores' and lauds American investment in country.

1 week ago](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/03/us-history-of-enslavement-in-spotlight-joe-biden-angola)

[

BBC

Biden in Angola: US president 'proud' to be there for unprecedented visit

US President Joe Biden has said he is “very proud to be the first American president visiting Angola” at the start of talks with his...

1 week ago](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3rqlwlxxpeo)

[

Fox News

Biden appears to rest his eyes at African summit in Angola

President Biden appeared to rest his eyes during a summit with African leaders in Lobito, Angola, during his travel overseas to visit...

1 week ago](https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-appears-rest-his-eyes-african-summit-angola)

Page Navigation

Stone was a lobbyist for Angola’s brutal Jonah Savimbi

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.”

https://uca.edu/cahss/files/2020/07/Angel-CLA-2018.pdf

Cabinda and The Company:Chevron-Gulf,

the CIA, and the Angolan Civil War

Austin Angel

History

Faculty Advisor: Dr. Michael Kithinji

The history of Gulf Oil and later Chevron-Gulf1 operations in

Angola is a complex story of split alliances, nation-controlling wealth,

and the follies of organizational nearsightedness in times of conflict. The

involvement of Chevron-Gulf in Angola and the machinations of the

CIA would pull the two organizations inexorably into a miniature Cold

War against each other, with the political future of Angola caught in the

crossfire.

An examination of this conflict offers a glimpse into the

Gordian knot of mineral extraction ethics in developing countries and

the impossibility of remaining neutral as a large business in a nation at

war. It also displays the consequences of rigidly applying global

strategic objectives across every conflict without stopping to examine

the real situation on the ground.

Chevron-Gulf’s history in Angola...

. 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

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, theCIA concluded that the MPLA was funding the Cuban soldiers present in the country directly using hard currency payments from Chevron-Gulf to the MPLA.23 The CIA would make that conclusion on April 22, 1985--

...

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 stateowned 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, 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. Chevron...

"...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.”

In attempting merely to do business in Angola, Chevron-Gulf became embroiled in a proxy war that involved at least five nations and found themselves funding an enemy of their own country’s government. 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 CIA’s alliance with UNITA, based solely on circumstance, led to massive US involvement in the conflict and turned

a minor civil war into a proxy war with US players backing both sides of the war. The MPLA currently rules Angola. The assassination of Jonas Savimbi in 2002 ended UNITA’s guerilla war. Chevron-Gulf is still the largest private corporation operating Angolan oil fields and still provides the majority of Angolan wealth.28

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPLA

The People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola, for some years called the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola – Labour Party (Portuguese: Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola – Partido do Trabalho, MPLA), is a left-wing political party from Angola. The MPLA fought against the Portuguese army in the Angolan War of Independence from 1961 to 1974, and defeated the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) and the National Liberation Front of Angola (FNLA) in the Angolan Civil War. The party has ruled Angola since the country's independence from Portugal in 1975, being the de facto government throughout the civil war and the ruling since its end.

Formation[

On December 10, 1956, in Estado Novo-ruled Portuguese Angola, the underground Angolan Communist Party (PCA) merged with the Party of the United Struggle for Africans in Angola (PLUA) to form the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola, with Viriato da Cruz, the President of the PCA, as Secretary General.^[2][3] Other groups later merged into MPLA, such as Movement for the National Independence of Angola (MINA) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Angola (FDLA).^[4]

...

The MPLA emerged victorious in Angola's 1992 general election, but eight opposition parties rejected the election as rigged. UNITA sent negotiators to the Luanda, where they were killed. As a consequence, hostilities erupted in the city, and immediately spread to other parts of the country. Tens of thousands of UNITA and FNLA sympathizers were subsequently killed nationwide by MPLA forces, in what is known as the Halloween Massacre, and the civil war resumed.^{[11][12][13][14]} The war continued until 2002, when UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi was killed. The two parties promptly agreed to a ceasefire, and a plan was laid out for UNITA to demobilize and become a political party. Over 500,000 civilians were killed during the civil war.^[15] Human rights observers funded by the Kingdom of Saudi-Arabia have accused the MPLA of "genocidal atrocities," "systematic extermination," "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity during the civil war."^[16] Political scientist Rudolph Rummel estimated that the MPLA were responsible for between 100,000 and 200,000 deaths in democide from 1975 to 1987.^[17]

Human rights record[

The MPLA government of Angola has been accused of human rights violations such as arbitrary arrest and detention and torture^[18] by international organisations, including Amnesty International^[19] and Human Rights Watch.^[20] In response, the MPLA government hired Samuels International Associates Inc in 2008 to help improve Angola's global image.^[21]

Party organizations[

At present, major mass organizations of the MPLA-PT include the Angolan Women's Organization (Organização da Mulher Angolana), National Union of Angolan Workers (União Nacional dos Trabalhadores Angolanos), Agostinho Neto Pioneer Organization (Organização de Pioneiros de Agostinho Neto), and the Youth of MPLA (Juventude do MPLA).

Foreign support[

During both the Portuguese Colonial War and the Angolan Civil War, the MPLA received military and humanitarian support primarily from the governments of Algeria, the Bulgarian People's Republic, East Germany,^[22] Cape Verde Islands, Czechoslovak Socialist Republic,^[23] the Congo, Cuba, Guinea-Bissau, Morocco, the Mozambican People's Republic, Nigeria, North Korea, the Polish People's Republic, China, the Romanian Socialist Republic, São Tomé and Príncipe, Somalia,^[24] the Soviet Union, Sudan,^[23] Tanzania,^[25] Libya^[26] and SFR Yugoslavia. While China did briefly support the MPLA,^[27] it also actively supported the MPLA's enemies, the FNLA and later UNITA, during the war for independence and the civil war. The switch was the result of tensions between China and the Soviet Union for dominance of the communist bloc, which almost led to war.^[28][29]

Electoral history[

In the 1992 election, MPLA-PT won 53.74% of the votes and 129 out of 227 seats in parliament; however, eight opposition parties rejected the 1992 elections as rigged.^[30] In the next election, delayed until 2008 due to the civil war, the MPLA won 81.64% of the vote and 191 out of 220 parliamentary seats.^[31] In the 2012 legislative election, the party won 71.84% of the vote and 175 of 220 parliamentary seats.^[32]

https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-july-16-2019/

harry bridges strike

connects many dots eg bin ladin

manafort

angola--> // war on terror? afl-cio mtg portugal, more radical than cia, irving brown

china supported unita savimbi pro-apartheid?! helped build RR for copper to port in tanzania

china also helped anc?

WHAT DO THEY WANT 2019? 2016

https://www.motherjones.com/politics**/2018/12**/disgraced-trump-fundraiser-elliott-broidy-tried-to-use-gop-contacts-to-score-billions-in-africa/

david corn

In late 2016, as Donald Trump was readying to move into the White House, Elliott Broidy, then one of the Republican Party’s top fundraisers, was working on a deal to gain control of what a business partner called “billions of dollars in oil & gas, and mining assets” in Angola. And while he was trying to pull together this gigantic venture—as well as mounting another project to provide intelligence services to the Angolan government—Broidy used his clout to hook up top Angolan government officials with members of the US Congress and the Trump administration. It was a swampy endeavor involving old-fashioned political influence, a Beverly Hills activist and realtor, and a Nigerian American businessman who had been a close friend of Michael Jackson.

Broidy is no longer a power player wielding sway in the Republican cosmos. Early this year, he faced a series of media stories that raised questions about his business dealings(which included ventures with the governments of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Romania, and the Republic of Congo)and alleged influence peddling. Those articles were based on emails hacked from his personal accounts. Broidy subsequently sued Qatar, claiming Qatari officials orchestrated the hacks and a smear campaign because Broidy, a vigorous supporter of the Israeli government, was a vocal opponent of Qatar. (In August, a federal judge dismissed the government of Qatar as a defendant in the case.)

And in April, news broke that Broidy had in 2017 used Michael Cohen, then Trump’s personal lawyer, to pay $1.6 million in hush money to a Playboy model with whom he had an extramarital affair. Broidy soon resigned as deputy finance chair of the Republican Party. In August, the Washington Post reported he was under federal investigation for possibly selling his influence within the Trump administration to foreign officials for tens of millions of dollars. And recently, federal prosecutors implicated Broidy in a scheme under which millions of dollars ended up in his wife’s law firm in return for Broidy helping a Malaysian financier, who was accused of embezzling billions, end a Justice Department investigation.

The hacked Broidy emails are an incomplete set of records. The hackers obviously disseminated material to cast the businessman/fundraiser in a negative light. But the emails do depict slices of Broidy’s world in which he attempted to grease deals with ties he forged as a top fundraiser for Trump and the Republican Party. And Broidy’s wheeling and dealing in Angola—a full account of which has not yet been reported—reveal how he mixed commerce and politics.

The story begins with an unlikely hook-up: a prominent Beverly Hills resident named Lisa Korbatov brokering a partnership between Broidy and Dolapo Asiru, a Nigerian American dealmaker. On his LinkedIn page, Asiru describes himself as a “highly regarded international investment banker and diplomat” who “has represented African governments at the United Nations and regularly advises other governments on all aspects of their financial planning, investments and international trade.” In 2001, Asiru was sued by Motown for being connected to a company that the record label complained was infringing on its trademark by using the Jackson5.com domain name. (Asiru says that his attorney “not only demonstrated that the action lacked merit, but achieved a confidential and very satisfactory financial settlement in my favor. On a personal note, that frivolous lawsuit never affected my relationship with Michael Jackson who was one of my close friends.”) In 2008, Asiru attended a state dinner at the George W. Bush White House for the president of Ghana. A columnist for Africa News in 2009 called him “one of Nigeria’s most influential men in America.” Asiru, an American citizen, has donated to Republican political candidates, most notably Mitt Romney.

In the latter months of 2016, Lisa Korbatov, a realtor, member of the Beverly Hills school board, and pro-Israel activist, connected Broidy with Asiru, according to sources familiar with the deal. Actually, they already knew each other.

About a decade earlier, Asiru, who had links to the ruling family of Gabon, and Broidy had been involved in a venture in the coastal African country. But that deal—of which there are scant public details—never materialized. “It imploded,” says a former Broidy associate. (The Gabon venture might have ended in a legal fight. In one of the hacked emails, Asiru, writing to Broidy, refers to “litigation with Gabon.”) And around that time, Broidy’s overall dealmaking hit a major roadblock. In 2009, he pleaded guilty to charges he had handed out $1 million in illegal gifts to New York state officials so they would invest $250 million from the state’s pension fund in Broidy’s investment company. (Three years later, after Broidy had cooperated with prosecutors, a federal judge reduced his felony conviction to a misdemeanor.)

oidy’s involvement in that crime put a crimp in his relationship with Asiru, and by 2016, they were not on the best terms, according to sources familiar with the men. But Asiru had some business prospects he wanted to share with Broidy, and Korbatov, a social acquaintance of both, brought the pair together again. “Elliot wanted to pitch companies in Africa,” a former Broidy associate recalls. (Korbatov and her husband, Igor Korbatov, met Asiru in 2007, when a trust controlled by her parents bought a Beverly Hills mansion from the family of Omar Bongo, the longtime dictator of Gabon. Asiru was then the “managing member” of the limited liability company that officially owned the property for the Bongo family.)

Korbatov convinced the two men they should once again throw in with each other. On December 7, 2016, Broidy, Asiru, and Korbatov signed a memorandum of agreement related to a joint venture called BCH Development Group. A later amendment to this memorandum noted that Korbatov would get a finder’s fee of 3 percent for any security contract negotiated by the Republic of Angola and Circinus, a security firm Broidy owned. And Asiru would pocket 30 percent.

Asiru and Broidy at this point were working on at least two different ventures in Angola. As 2016 was ending, the hacked emails show, the pair finished up a deal under which Circinus would set up and operate an “Open Source Intelligence Center” for the Angolan government. Much of the paperwork for that project was handled by Circinus executives. The contract was worth $12 million.

Yet at the same time, Broidy and Asiru had their eyes on a bigger prize: They were developing a deal with Grupo Simples, anAngola-based oil services company that in late 2015 had been assigned oil concessions by Angola’s state-owned oil company for possible development. (The company, at that point, had no experience developing oil wells.) This venture involved, Asiru noted in an email to Broidy, the Angolans “signing over billions of dollars in oil & gas, and mining assets” to BCH Development, the company formed pursuant to the agreement between Broidy, Asiru, and Korbatov.

Asiru was Broidy’s go-between with Grupo Simples. In a December 29, 2016, email from Asiru to Broidy—under the subject head, “Framework Agreement Between BCH Development Group and Grupo Simples Oil”—Asiru included a note from Alberto Mendes, the head of the Angola company, requesting that Asiru “urgently send me the due diligence” on BCH Development, including “formation year, directors, basic information.” Asiru pointed out to Broidy that “the Angolans are concerned” about striking a deal with “a newly formed entity (BCH Development Group). We need to show some history to avoid raising any Red Flags.”

Asiru had some ideas how to assuage the concerns of their Angolan partners. He asked Broidy whether they should tell the Angolans that BCH Development Group was formed as an affiliate of the company he and Broidy had used for their earlier dealings in Gabon. This way, Asiru added, they could “show some history.” Asiru also noted they needed “to provide some credible names to add to the board of Advisory for BCH.”

Broidy replied in an email that same day and said Asiru should not “tie BCH Development Group, LLC to any BCH Group entity that relates to Gabon.” Instead, Broidy instructed Asiru to tell the Angolans that BCH Development Group was formed in 2016 and that its directors included Asiru, Broidy, and Korbatov, with only Broidy and Asiru having “signature authority.” Broidy noted it was his understanding that Asiru had already “formed” BCH Development Group in Delaware. Yet a corporation of that name was not created in Delaware until three days later, on January 1, 2017.

Though Korbatov was part of this company, she was unaware Broidy was pursuing this mammoth deal in Angola, according to sources familiar with this episode.

As Broidy and Asiru were working with Angolans on the oil deal and the intelligence center, Broidy used his Republican Party connections to obtain invitations to Trump’s inauguration for two Angolan officials: João Manuel Gonçalves Lourenço, the defense minister, and André de Oliveira João Sango, the director of external intelligence. In a January 3, 2017, letter to the two men—on BCH Development Group letterhead—Broidy invited Sango and Lourenço to the inauguration, and he also included a copy of the contract for the Circinus project in Angola and asked them to sign and return the paperwork within six days. The letter was drafted by Asiru.

Lourenço and Sango accepted the invitation, and while they were in Washington for the inauguration, Broidy, according to the hacked emails, arranged for them to meet Republican members of Congress, including Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.). The meetings were set up by Aryeh Lightstone, a leading Orthodox Jewish rabbi and businessman who owned a stake in a Broidy company called Threat Deterrence Capital LLC. (Lightstone, a well-connected player in GOP circles, is now a senior adviser to Trump’s ambassador to Israel, David Friedman.) In one email, a Broidy aide informed Lightstone that the meetings would include Broidy, Asiru, Lourenço, and Sango, as well as Alberto Mendes of Grupo Simples and Mario Gomes, another executive from the company. (The email did not explain why the two Angolan oil executives would be present.) Broidy appeared to be blending politics with his Angola business dealings: the intelligence center he was establishing for the government and the big oil endeavor he was pursuing. Reporting on Lightstone’s role in arranging these meetings, ProPublica recently noted, “Some legal experts argue that Lightstone and Broidy should have registered [as foreign agents] with the [US] government for the Angolan meetings, though representatives for both dispute that.” (Lightstone did not respond to an email request for comment.)

In mid-January 2016, Broidy received the first payment from Angola for the intelligence center project. It was for $6 million, but Broidy had been expecting $8 million, per his agreement with the Angolan government. He accepted the lower payment but requested Angola pay the rest of the $12 million fee within 180 days. According to the hacked emails, he would spend the coming months pushing the Angola government to pay up. (For her role, Korbatov pocketed $180,000. The emails do not show how much of a fee, if any, Asiru received.)

In February, Alan Blaine Stone, founder and CEO of Circinus, emailed Broidy that he needed a signed contract related to the firm’s Angola project: “I wanted to let you know that we need something from the Angolans signed even if it just says we’re ‘consulting and advising’ with the US Government; something to put in the records to show that we are on contract in order to justify the influx of funds.” Soon after that, Broidy asked Asiru to send him the signed contract for the company’s files, noting, “You mentioned that it was provided to you some time ago.” (Lawyers for Broidy say he provided the Angolans with no advice or consulting services related to the US government and that the Circinus contract only covered setting up and operating the open-source intelligence center in Angola.)

At this time, Broidy was chasing after yet another venture in Angola. In February 2017, Fran Moore, a former top CIA official who was a board member of the Broidy-owned Threat Deterrence Capital, sent an email to Broidy noting she wanted to “strengthen” a proposal related to Angola. This project aimed at diminishing the “high-level of corruption” in Angola in order to create a “better investment atmosphere,” according to Juan Zarate, a former deputy national security adviser in the Bush-Cheney White House and now chairman of the Financial Integrity Network, a consulting firm specializing in thwarting money laundering. Zarate tells Mother Jonesthat Broidy had heard Zarate’s firm wanted to develop business in Africa, reached out to him, and said he could “get a proposal from us in front of the Angolan government.” In an email Zarate sent Broidy, he referred to this endeavor as “an ambitious and important project for the Angolans (and us).”

Asiru, Zarate recalls, was going to make contacts for the Financial Integrity Network in Angola and would earn a finder’s fee, if a contract were signed. Asiru, Zarate says, “was very well-versed in African politics and business. Well-connected. He was a business mover-and-shaker.”

As Broidy was trying to do all this assorted business in Angola, he was using his political bonds to connect Lourenço, the Angolan defense minister, with the Trump White House. In a February 27, 2017, email to Asiru about the anti-corruption project, Broidy reported, “I will be at the White House meeting with VP Pence, CoS Priebus etc. tomorrow and can begin to set the wheels in motion for a meeting for the Defense Minister.”

And Broidy was willing to go all the way to the top. In this email, Broidy noted he would be visiting with “President Trump this weekend at Mira Largo [sic] (Friday) and on [casino owner and GOP fundraiser] Steve Wynn’s Yacht Aquarius on Saturday evening. I can also ask Trump for the meeting.” He noted it might be tough to arrange a meeting for the Angolan defense minister for this weekend, but added, “[W]e can certainly accomplish [it] this month predicated on next deal for BCH and immediate collection of balance.” The message seemed clear: If Angola paid what Broidy believed he was owed and moved ahead with a new project, he would use his political juice to arrange a face-to-face between Lourenço and Trump officials

In this email, Broidy referred to a conversation he had with Sango, the Angolan intelligence chief, a few weeks earlier at a high-end Washington, DC, restaurant: “The bottom line is that Sango looked me in the eye and promised at the Occidental Grill lunch that the funds would be sent by early February; I asked for January payment. Sango was effusive in his praise and said that I had exceeded all of his expectations. He needs to hear from me that this…treatment of us is unacceptable and that payment needs to be made now. I can also convey things directly that he will appreciate.” Then Broidy referred to the two Grupo Simples officials: “Of course Mario and Alberto can join us on the call.” This suggests that somehow the oil deal Broidy was pursuing with Grupo Simples was connected to his interactions with Angolan government officials.

Days later, Broidy wrote directly to Lourenço and asked if he would be “joining us for the events at Miro Largo.” He told the Angolan defense minister, “Many preparations have been made in advance of your visit, including additional meetings at the Capitol and the Department of Treasury.” He added that Sango “promised me that the balance of the payment due would be received by early February.” He asked Lourenço to send the money immediately.

The available emails do not indicate how the Angolans replied. The anti-corruption plan, though, didn’t get that far and fizzled out, according to Zarate. “Doing what we do is hard,” Zarate says. “It requires a real transformation of culture.”

Lawyers for Broidy maintain that Broidy didn’t discuss any Angola projects with either Trump or Secretary of Defense James Mattis, and they insist Broidy did not trade on his White House connections to receive payments from Angola or to win contracts there. “That message was never conveyed” to the Angolans, a Broidy attorney notes. “What was written down there [in Broidy’s February 27 email to Asiru] never happened.”

In May 2017, Lourenço signed a memo of understanding with Mattis to boost “security cooperation” between Angola and the United States. “The Angolan defense minister met with Mattis on his own, having nothing to do with Elliott,” a Broidy lawyer says.

Come June, Broidy was still after the Angolans to pay the $6 million. And in an August 22, 2017, email exchange with Broidy, Korbatov asked him for help for her effort to stop a mass transit project that would pass beneath Beverly Hills High School, and Broidy informed her he had “a path” to Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao. “Let me work on it a bit,” he said. In response, Korbatov said she was “nagging” Asiru—a reference, according to sources familiar with this project, to collecting the payment the Angolan government owed Broidy. “He’s waiting for the [Angola] election to finish,” Korbatov reported.

The Angolan presidential election was the following day. Lourenço won the presidency. Days later, Broidy drafted a congratulatory message that noted, “We look forward to continuing to work together [to] support you and your country….Please let me know if I can be helpful to you during your transition and I look forward to speaking with you soon.” Three months later, after Lourenço had assumed office, Broidy wrote him, offering to set up a visit for Lourenço to the United States and “possibly” a meeting with Trump or Vice President Mike Pence. “I am able to assess and advise in this matter,” he pointed out. At the time, Broidy was still looking to collect the $6 million the Angola government owed him.

That money, as of September 2018, still had not come, according to Broidy’s attorneys, yet his company was still performing services under the contract. His lawyers also note that the oil deal with Grupo Simples—which Asiru said could involve “billions”—never happened. (In May 2017, the new head of Sonangol, Angola’s state-owned oil company, put a hold on concessions it had granted earlier. And once Lourenço took office, he took steps to overhaul Sonangol, which had been criticized for a lack of transparency.) Mendes and Gomes of Grupo Simples did not reply to repeated emails requesting comment. Angola’s embassy also did not respond to requests for comment.

Asiru declined to answer questions about his involvement in Broidy’s deals in Angola. “Regrettably, I must decline to comment since I now realize your questions pertain to outreach programs I support that are helpful to African countries,” he wrote in an email to Mother Jones. “All these endeavors are covered by a range of confidentiality arrangements, hence the reason I must decline to make any further comments.” In a subsequent text message, Asiru said, “I continue to work with major multinational corporations, NGOs and government agencies to improve the economic situation in Africa. I am proud of my relationships and my reputation. I have never engaged in, nor ever been accused of, unlawful activities. Elliott has been involved in many businesses, including a few ventures in which I participated. The accusations against Elliott do not involve me. Guilt based on mere association smacks of a sad era that I thought concluded more than 60 years ago.” He added, “Be assured, I’ll respond vigorously to any libel or slander by you or your colleagues to link me in any way with any of Elliott Broidy’s alleged misdeeds. Please govern yourself accordingly.”

Broidy’s attorneys did not respond to a list of additional questions about his Angola dealings submitted by Mother Jones.

After helping the GOP regain the White House, Broidy has become a poster child for Trump-era corruption. He has generated headlines about multiple controversies—personal, political, and business. And there could be more Broidy stories to come. But the Angola episode illustrates how Broidy, having used the Trump campaign and victory to establish himself as a force within the Republican Party, did business—and indicates there is a public interest in learning the full story of how Broidy put his Trump and Republican connections to personal use.

Disgraced Trump Fundraiser Tried to Use GOP Contacts to Score ...

https://www.motherjones.com/.../disgraced-trump-fundraiser-elliott-broidy-tried-to-us...

:{Dec 12, 2018 - Disgraced :{Trump:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Fundraiser Tried to Use GOP Contacts to Score “Billions” in :{Africa:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:. Here's another chapter in the Elliott :{Broidy:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: saga. ... to provide intelligence services to the :{Angolan:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:government—:{Broidy:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: ... A columnist for :{Africa:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: News in 2009 called him “one of Nigeria's most influential men in America.:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Federal prosecutors probe this big GOP donor potentially selling ...

https://www.alternet.org › News & Politics

:{17 hours ago - Federal prosecutors are investigating whether top :{Trump:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: fundraiser Elliott :{Broidy:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: sold ... :{Broidy:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: invited several officials from :{Angola:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: and Romania to attend inaugural ... Hunter Biden Secretly Marries South :{African:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Beauty.:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Feds investigating whether big GOP donor sold Trump access to ...

https://www.salon.com/.../feds-investigating-whether-big-gop-donor-sold-trump-acces...

:{18 hours ago - Federal prosecutors are investigating whether top :{Trump:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: fundraiser Elliott ... :{Broidy:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:invited several officials from :{Angola:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: and Romania to attend ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Missing: africa ‎| ‎Must include: ‎

africa

Prosecutors examining whether Trump fundraiser Elliott Broidy offered ...

https://thehill.com/.../449676-prosecutors-examining-whether-trump-fundraiser-elliott...

:{1 day ago - According to the Journal, :{Broidy:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: invited several officials from :{Angola:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: and Romania to inaugural events, introducing some of them to members of ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Missing: africa ‎| ‎Must include: ‎

africa

Who Makes Money Off the Trump Administration? – Rolling Stone

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/.../elliott-broidy-donald-trump-swamp-793159/

Feb 12, 2019 - Broidy told Trump about a recent trip he'd taken to the United Arab ..... with Angola and about African nationals paying to attend Trump's ...

Trump Official Helped Broidy Arrange Meetings ... - The Forward

https://forward.com/.../under-the-radar-lightstone-set-up-meeting-for-broidy-with-for...

:{Oct 25, 2018 - ... :{Broidy:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Arrange Meetings Between Senators, :{African:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Leaders by the Forward ... :{Angola:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: paid :{Broidy's:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: company $6 million for intelligence services in ... investigating whether :{Broidy:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:was abusing his proximity to the :{Trump:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

===

Federal prosecutors are investigating whether top Trump fundraiser Elliott Broidy sold access to the president’s inaugural team to foreign clients,

The Wall Street Journal reports.

Investigators are probing whether Broidy, who was appointed deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee after raising money for Trump during the 2016 campaign, was paid millions by foreign prospective clients for “special access” to Trump’s 2017 inauguration, according to the report. Selling access to foreign donors could violate campaign finance, lobbying and money-laundering laws.

...angola, romania

http://www.wri-irg.org/node/2284

Child Soldiers: Angola report

01 May 2001 — warresisters

Coalition to stop the use of child soldiers

Has not signed the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child
Population: 11,569,000 Under-18s: 6,049,000 (52%)(1)
Governmental Armed Forces(2)
Active: c. 110,500 Army: c. 98,000 Navy: 1,500-2,000 Air Force/Air Defence: 11,000 Paramilitary: 15,000 Rapid Reaction Police: 15,000

National Recruitment Legislation

Article 152 of Angola's 1992 Constitution(3) declares that: "1. The defence of the country shall be the right and the highest indeclinable duty of every citizen. 2. Military service shall be compulsory. The manner in which it is fulfilled shall be established by law." Conscription was reintroduced in 1993 and the former law on military service(4) was replaced by the law 1/93 on 26 March 1993 and its subsequent decree of application.(5) Military service was made compulsory for all men aged between 20 and 45. In the 1996 Decree, the minimum age for voluntary recruitment was fixed at 18 years for men and 20 years for women.(6) In November 1998, the Council of Ministers approved the compulsory conscription of Angolans born in 1981.(7) This means that the minimum age for conscription has been lowered from 18 to 17 years.

National Recruitment Practice

"Between 1980 and 1988, in Angola, every third child has been involved in military operations and many have fired a gun at another human being."(8)

Children have been recruited and used as soldiers throughout the Angolan conflict. After the Lusaka Peace Accord in 1994 soldiers from both government and UNITA forces were officially demobilized. A total of 8,500 child soldiers(9) were registered (children comprised 12 per cent of UNITA troops gathered in the 15 Quartering Areas), but this figure greatly underestimates the scale of the problem since many soldiers had been recruited as children but had reached 18 by the time of registration.(10) By the end of March 1997, only 2,336 child soldiers had been demobilized and over 50 per cent of the total had deserted the Quartering Areas.(11) "I didn't want to join the Army, they made me join", says Francisco, a 17-year-old Private in the Angolan armed forces, as he explains how soldiers burst into his home on a night three years ago in the interior province of Bie and took him away. "All these years, all I have wanted to do is go home. Now finally, I am going back to Bie to see my family and work with my father on his farm." (12)

According to the Government, no one below the age of 18 years is being recruited but non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and international organisations operating in Angola testify to the contrary. It is reported, for example, that forced recruitment of youth ('Rusgas') continued even after the reintroduction of conscription in 1993. Such recruitment no longer takes place in Luanda but in some of the suburbs and throughout the country, especially in rural areas.(13) It has been claimed that military commanders have paid police officers to find new recruits. Children as young as 14 have been forced to enlist.(14) It is estimated by one confidential source that there are currently more than 3,000 child soldiers in the Angolan armed forces (FAA), although UNICEF claimed that in 1997 there were 520 children in the FAA.

Following the lowering of the age of conscription in November 1998, the military census of all male Angolans born between 1 January 1979 and 31 December 1981 started on 18 January 1999 after a statement of the Minister of Defence, General Pedro Sebastião.(15) The call-up came the day after UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan announced his plan to withdraw the UN peacekeeping force from Angola. The young men have been gathered at an office near Luanda Airport to register. Under existing legislation women between 20 and 45 years of age may also be called up, but they are actually not recruited.(16)

It has been reported that wealthy Angolans have sent their children of draft age overseas to avoid army service. Furthermore, corrupt authorities were accepting money in return for official draft exemption, even though the Minister of Defence had publicly declared that "the defence of the motherland is a duty from which no Angolan citizen should be exempted".(17) Angolan news organisations have been specifically warned by a letter from the Minister of Social Communications, not to incite young men to oppose the country's compulsory military draft registration.(18)

One source, requesting confidentiality, has asserted that boys in their early teens are still being rounded up and deployed. There are said to be very high desertion rates for these children, though it is not clear whether they are able to make it home. The same source claims that where very young children are initially recruited, they are 'thrown back' as the receiving military commanders do not want them.

Paido, an Angolan now 24 years of age, described the Angolan style of recruitment in an interview published in the New York Times at the beginning of 1999. "I was walking with two girls. And they called me. I was too close to them, so I couldn't run. Even though my identification card said I was underage - and that was true - I was big, they insisted I was old enough, and they grabbed me and took me to a police station. It was full of kids. (...) " "They put me in a cell with the other kids, while the cops went to get trucks. When they capture you they immediately send you to the provinces for training, far away where you don't know anyone. I was very lucky. A neighbour saw me being taken and told my mother. My uncle is a policeman, and he talked to the station commander. When the rest of the guys were loaded on the trucks, my uncle got me out." New York Times, 20 January 1999.

Child Participation in Armed Conflict

Civil war has been the norm since the independence from Portugal on 11 November 1975. Following a cease-fire agreement in May 1991 (the Bicesse Accord) between the government and the insurgent National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), in October 1992 renewed fighting started in much of the countryside. A second cease-fire agreement, the Lusaka Protocol, was signed between the two warring parties on 20 November 1994. This peace accord provided for the integration of former UNITA insurgents into the Angolan Armed Forces (FAA). Military integration began in June 1996 and a Government of National Unity and Reconciliation was installed in April 1997. A 7,200-strong UN peacekeeping force (MONUA) was set up to monitor the implementation of the Lusaka Protocol.

In May 1997 the process to extend government into UNITA-occupied areas began, but fighting between UNITA rebels and the FAA continued. As the situation continued to deteriorate a split occurred within the UNITA forces in August 1998 and a new faction calling itself the Democratic Consciousness: Platform for Renaissance and Plural Understanding became semi-public on 2 November 1998.(19) The fighting intensified in November 1998 when the government launched an offensive against UNITA, seeking to capture its headquarters in Andulo and Bailundo.(20) Finally, on 17 January 1999, after the shooting-down of two UN-chartered aircraft in December 1998 and the further increase in the level of hostilities in the country, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan told the Security Council that there was no more peace to keep and that the UN was ending its peacekeeping operations. The 1,000 UN military, police and civilian personnel are expected to be out of Angola by 20 March 1999.

It has been reported that both Namibia and Zimbabwe have sent troops to Angola to back the Angolan armed forces in their offensive against the UNITA rebels, although there are no precise figures on the size of this support.(21) At the same time, Angola has sent troops to the Democratic Republic of Congo to support President Laurent-Désiré Kabila.(22) More recently, Angola accused Zambia and its former Defence Minister, Mr Ben Mwila, of involvement in an illegal support network for UNITA. Mr Mwila angrily denied these charges and asked for tangible evidence of these allegations.(23) On 9 February, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) offered to try to help defuse tensions between the two countries. SADC was prepared only to seek a political solution and would not send a verification mission to Zambia to verify the allegations.(24)

Armed Opposition groups (25)

*Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). It was claimed that some 10,600 of roughly 18,500 UNITA troops had been integrated into the national army and a further 24,000 or so fully-equipped troops plus an additional 35,000 soldiers were awaiting demobilisation.(26) *Following a split within UNITA in August 1998 a new faction called Democratic Consciousness: Platform for Renaissance and Plural Understanding was formed (see above). It was reported that about 4,000 UNITA soldiers had deserted and surrendered their weapons to the Angolan authorities. These men come from the UNITA breakaway faction.(27) *The Front for the Liberation of the Cabinda Enclave (FLEC): this opposition group split into many factions which are currently operating within the enclave : the FLEC-FAC (FLEC-Cabindan Armed Forces) and the FLEC-Renovada. Both number about 1,500-2,000. (28)

In 1996, UNITA began demobilizing its child soldiers and had returned 2,000 children to civilian life by January 1997.(29) Yet despite pledging not to recruit children again(30) UNITA has continued to recruit great numbers of children into its ranks.(31) In 1998, the Inter-African Network for Human Rights and Development (Afronet) and Human Rights Watch alleged that UNITA was abducting children and young men and women between 13 years of age and their early 30s living in border towns of Cazombo and Lumbala Nguimbo.(32) In addition, it was previously reported that in July and August 1997 Rwandan refugees, including 200 youths, were forcibly recruited when they entered areas of Angola under UNITA control.(33) According to the United States Department of State, in 1998 UNITA conducted forced recruitment, including of minors, throughout all of the country's disputed territory. Recruits were taken to isolated military camps and subjected to psychological stress and extreme hardships; those who attempted to desert were executed. Women, many as young as 13 years old, were recruited forcibly to serve as porters and camp followers, and reports of sexual assault were widespread and credible.(34) It is estimated by one confidential source that the total number of child soldiers in UNITA is currently about 3,000. A number of different sources have also stated that the Front for the Liberation of the Cabinda Enclave also recruited children into their forces. The FLEC-FAC was reported to have children as young as eight years of age among its ranks (35) and that 30-40 per cent of them were girls.(36) A similar situation is believed to exist in the breakaway FLEC-Renovada.(37)

Notes

The extensive list of notes has been removed. Check their website at www.child-soldiers.org .

very long report on hu rights viol: Clinton era

ANGOLA: ARMS TRADE AND VIOLATIONS OF

THE LAWS OF WAR SINCE THE 1992 ELECTIONS

Human Rights Watch Arms Project

and

Human Rights Watch/Africa

(formerly Africa Watch)

Human Rights Watch

New York$Washington$Los Angeles$London$Brussels

Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 94-79743

ISBN: 1-56432-145-2

TOC

V. VIOLATIONS OF THE LAWS OF WAR BY GOVERNMENT FORCES......... 61

THE PURGE OF THE CITIESCOCTOBER 1992-JANUARY 1993......... 61

Luanda............................................................................................ 61

Lubango......................................................................................... 70

Lobito and Benguela.................................................................... 72

Other Cities.................................................................................... 73

CONTINUING ABUSES IN 1993 AND 1994............................................. 74

QuilenguesCSummary Executions On the Front Line............ 74

HuamboCBombs, Mines, Children, and Human Shields........ 75

KuitoCKilling for Food................................................................ 76

MalanjeCCutting Off the Hands of Children........................... 76

INDISCRIMINATE BOMBING AND SHELLING.................................... 77

Applicable Legal Standards........................................................ 82

TORTURE AND MISTREATMENT OF PRISONERS............................ 83

FORCED DISPLACEMENT........................................................................ 84

CHILD SOLDIERS........................................................................................ 85

VI. VIOLATIONS OF THE LAWS OF WAR BY UNITA FORCES....................... 88

THE CITY SIEGES........................................................................................ 89

Huambo.......................................................................................... 89

Retreat from HuamboCSummary Executions........... 90

Semana de Loucura (Crazy Week)............................. 90

Underage Recruitment................................................. 93

Kuito............................................................................................... 93

Shelling........................................................................... 94

Sniper Fire...................................................................... 98

Starvation of Civilians.................................................. 99

Divided families........................................................... 100

Malanje......................................................................................... 100

Landmines.................................................................... 101

STARVATION AS A METHOD OF COMBAT.................................... 102

HUMANITARIAN ASSISTANCE.......................................................... 104

UNITA OUTSIDE THE MAIN TOWNS................................................. 106

Summary Executions.................................................................. 106

Forced Portering......................................................................... 107

"Taxation" of Food..................................................................... 108

Mistreatment of Government Soldiers..................................... 109

Wanton Brutality........................................................................ 109

UNDERAGE RECRUITMENT.................................................................. 112

SLAVE-LIKE CONDITIONS..................................................................... 112

SOBAS......................................................................................................... 115

PRISONERS................................................................................................. 115

HOSTAGES................................................................................................. 116

INDISCRIMINATE LAYING OF MINES................................................ 118

VII. THE U.N. AND INTERNATIONAL MEDIATION ATTEMPTS................. 122

http://www.hrw.org/reports/archives/africa/ANGOLA94N.htm

I. SUMMARY

Angola returned to civil war within one month of its first nationwide elections, held in September 1992. The human cost since fighting resumed is impossible to determine with precision, but the United Nations estimates that more than 100,000 have died. The U.N. reported that as many as 1,000 people were dying daily from conflict, starvation, and disease in mid-1993, more than in any other conflict in the world at that time. In October 1993, 250 child deaths were reported each day in the besieged government-held city of Malanje alone.[[1]](http://www.hrw.org/reports/archives/africa/ANGOLA94N.htm#_ftn1) In September 1994, the U.N. Secretary-General reported that there had been a ten percent increase in the number of people severely affected by the war since February 1994, and that nearly 3.7 million Angolans, mostly displaced and conflict-affected, were in need of emergency supplies, including essential medicines, vaccines and food aid.[[2]](http://www.hrw.org/reports/archives/africa/ANGOLA94N.htm#_ftn2)

In addition to the appalling levels of death and destruction, this war is notable for widespread and systematic violations of the laws of war by both the government and the rebels,the União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola (UNITA).In particular, indiscriminate shelling of starving, besieged cities by UNITA has resulted in massive destruction of property and the loss of untold numbers of civilian lives. Indiscriminate bombing by the government has also taken a high civilian toll. As noted by an Africa expert from the U.S. Department of Defense, "This type of warfare bears mainly, cruelly and disproportionately on the populace, which is caught between the warring parties."[[3]](http://www.hrw.org/reports/archives/africa/ANGOLA94N.htm#_ftn3) If the human cost is staggering, so is the lack of international attention. Angola has earned the sobriquet of "the forgotten war."

This report documents the violations of the laws of war, and the influx of weaponry feeding those violations in Angola since the elections in 1992. The elections were the culmination of a flawed peace agreement, known as the Bicesse Accords, signed in Portugal on May 31, 1991 by the government and UNITA. The accords contained a so-called "Triple Zero" clause which prohibited either side from acquiring new supplies of weapons. During the transition period leading up to the September 1992 elections, the government and UNITA failed to abide by their obligation to demobilize soldiers. Instead, both apparently maintained secret armies, and the government created a new paramilitary police force, known as the "Ninjas." The United Nations, with a limited mandate and grossly inadequate resources, was ineffectual during this period, and was virtually silent on human rights abuses.

When the ruling party of the government, the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA), won the elections, UNITA rejected the results and launched a military offensive. This quickly escalated into a return to full-scale civil war, and fighting remains intense to this day.

The renewed conflict, and accompanying human rights abuses and violations of laws of war, are being fueled by new flows of arms into the country. There is evidence of arms shipments to the government in 1991 and 1992 in violation of the Bicesse Accords, notably from Russia and Brazil. When war resumed in Angola, the government revoked the Triple Zero arms embargo, and went on an international arms shopping spree, buying more than $3.5 billion worth of weapons in 1993 and 1994. Weapons procurement has reached record levels, surpassing even the extraordinary years of the mid-1980s when the Soviet Union was pumping arms into Angola as its part of a superpower proxy war. The government of Angola has unquestionably been the largest arms purchaser in sub-Saharan Africa during the past two years. The government appears to be undermining its economic future through massive arms imports. Some analysts believe that Angola has mortgaged the next seven years of oil production to finance arms buys, even though its current oil reserves are estimated to last only fifteen years.

The government is continuing to purchase a full range of weaponry, from small arms and ammunition to tanks and aircraft, including some advanced systems not seen before in Angola, such as theT-72 tank. The government is buying weapons from numerous sources, including governments in Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America, although much of the weaponry is purchased from private international arms dealers. Most of the arms deals are cloaked in secrecy and subterfuge; many involve false documentation. Many involve multiple governmental and private actors. Russia appears to have inherited from the former Soviet Union the distinction of being the largest arms supplier to Angola. Other nations apparently involved in arming the government include Brazil, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Uzbekistan, North Korea, Portugal, and Spain. Portugal and Russia have acted irresponsibly in undermining their role as members of the official "Observing Troika" for the peace process.

A private South African "security consultant" firm, Executive Outcomes, has apparently provided armed personnel to assist both UNITA and government forces, and currently has a multi-million dollar contract with the Angolan government.

UNITA is purchasing large amounts of weaponry from foreign sources, as well. Such purchases violate both the 1991 Bicesse Accords and the international arms and oil embargo against UNITA imposed by the United Nations Security Council in September 1993. UNITA has been effective in "sanctions-busting" through neighboring countries, especially South Africa, Namibia, and Zaire. UNITA appears to obtain much of its weaponry from private sources, rather than foreign governments, although there is some evidence that Russia, Zaire, and others have provided arms. Zaire has become the most important source of support for UNITA. UNITA uses Zaire as a transit area and conduit for diamond sales and weapons transfers, maintains a number of small rear bases in Zaire, and receives operational support from Zairian troops.

UNITA is financing its military campaign, including illegal arms imports, with Angola's diamond wealth. The De Beers diamond cartel and other international dealers are buying diamonds mined in violation of Angolan law in UNITA-held territory. Most of the diamonds are smuggled across Zaire's southern border, and, to a lesser extent, the Zambian border. De Beers admits spending $500 million to buy legally and illegally mined diamonds from Angola in 1992. Money from the diamond trade is replacing assistance UNITA previously received from the United States and South Africa. U.S. covert aid to UNITA totalled about $250 million between 1986 and 1991.

The Angolan government has been responsible for widespread human rights abusesand violations of the rules of war since the September 1992 elections, including:

! indiscriminate aerial bombardment of population centers;

! use of torture, disappearance, and summary execution, particularly against suspected UNITA supporters in the urban areas;

! the killing of civilians and pillaging during military operations;

! restrictions on relief operations by international and U.N. agencies, and impunity given to army officers and others who profiteer on relief food;

! recruitment of child soldiers and other arbitrary recruitment;

! forced recruitment of foreign nationals under U.N. protection into military service;

! forced displacement of the civilian population; and,

! cruel and inhuman prison conditions.

Government forces, and civilian groups armed by the government, tortured and killed thousands of suspected UNITA supportersCcivilian non-combatantsCbetween October 1992 and January 1993 in a purge of the cities after the war resumed. Thousands more civilians have been killed or injured in the indiscriminate bombing of population centers in UNITA-controlled zones during 1993 and 1994.

UNITA has also committed systematic and horrendous violations of the laws of war since the September 1992 elections, including:

! indiscriminate shelling of besieged cities;

! summary execution and torture;

! attempts to starve civilians by attacking international relief operations, mining footpaths and fields, sabotaging road transportation, and capturing or killing those tending their fields;

! mutilation of the dead;

! abduction of civilians, including women and children, and sometimes treating them like slaves;

! recruitment of child soldiers and other arbitrary recruitment, and denying unaccompanied minors the opportunity to be voluntarily reunited with their families;

! taking foreign nationals as hostages, including using them as "human shields;"

! restriction of the movements of civilians in areas it occupies, confiscating food from them and forcing them to do unpaid labor; and,

! cruel and inhuman prison conditions.

UNITA has laid siege to a number of cities and towns, most notably Huambo and Kuito. UNITA rained as many as 1,000 shells per day on both cities. An estimated 10,000 people died in the battle for Huambo, many of them civilians. After capturing Huambo, UNITA slaughtered many civilians on the roads exiting the city, and many of the civilians who remained behind. It is believed that 20-30,000 people died in the twenty-one month siege of Kuito that completely devastated the city. UNITA sieges have caused widespread starvation of the civilian population, especially in Kuito and Malanje. UNITA attacks on humanitarian relief operations are numerous and well-documented.

Mine warfarehas intensified since hostilities resumed, with thousands of new mines being laid by both the government and UNITA to obstruct roads and bridges, to encircle besieged towns with mine belts up to three kilometers wide, and to despoil agricultural lands. There are an estimated nine to fifteen million mines laid throughout the country. The U.N. has estimated that the number of mine amputees in Angola will reach 70,000 in 1994.

U.N. and other mediation efforts have been undermined often by intransigence on the part of both UNITA and the government, and by attempts by both sides to use the negotiations for battlefield advantage. Despite granting official recognition of the Angolan government,U.S. policy under the Clinton administration has changed little from U.S. policy at the end of the Bush administration: substituting political initiatives aimed at furthering the peace process for the previous policy of arming UNITA. Angola appears to be a low foreign policy priority for the U.S. The Clinton administration largely has kept silent about human rights abuses and violations of the laws of war in Angola.

KEY RECOMMENDATIONS

stone hell

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 page 90 of “Publicists of the Damned”:

e 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 Stone, “He’s too good a source.”

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 Jonas Savimbi, 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. “Black, Manafort played an important part in keeping the Angolan war going,” 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. 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. Another Republican staff member says of Black, Manafort, “Their view is, ‘To hell with the facts, fuck the world.’”

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 – 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 Chris Lehman, 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 National Journal, “How much value do you put on a letter like the one to Savimbi? Is it worth a million dollars? Of course it is!”

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.

The efforts of BMS&K in support of Savimbi are one of the few places where some light has been shed, again thanks to Spy magazine and a now forgotten article on a now forgotten incident, “Fooled on the Hill: How some die-hard Cold Warriors and a Belgian con artist tried to change U.S. policy in Africa”, by David Aronson and David Kamp. I already wrote about this astonishing moment at great length in “Angola, Namibia, South Africa, and a Tea Party Leader”, but I return to it briefly here.

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 peace agreement, 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. Jonas Savimbi, 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.

A bill was moving through Congress, with passage assured, that would have helped fund UN supervision of the transition of Namibia to independence. In order to derail the independence of Namibia, the senator from North Carolina, Jesse Helms, 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. 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 International Freedom Foundation (IFF). 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

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 Stone, “He’s too good a source.”

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 Jonas Savimbi, 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 inAngolalast 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. “Black, Manafort played an important part in keeping the Angolan war going,” 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. 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. Another Republican staff member says of Black, Manafort, “Their view is, ‘To hell with the facts, fuck the world.’”

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 – 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 Chris Lehman, 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 National Journal, “How much value do you put on a letter like the one to Savimbi? Is it worth a million dollars? Of course it is!”

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.

The efforts of BMS&K in support of Savimbi are one of the few places where some light has been shed, again thanks to Spy magazine and a now forgotten article on a now forgotten incident, **“Fooled on the Hill: How some die-hard Cold Warriors and a Belgian con artist tried to change U.S. policy in Africa”**, by David Aronson and David Kamp. I already wrote about this astonishing moment at great length in **“Angola, Namibia, South Africa, and a Tea Party Leader”**, but I return to it briefly here.

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 peace agreement, 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.Jonas Savimbi,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 waswanted for war crimes, killed in his last battle before he could be brought to trial.

Angola, officially the Republic of Angola (Portuguese: in Angola: ʁɛˈpublika de an'ɡɔla; Kikongo, Kimbundu,Umbundu: Repubilika ya Ngola), is a country in Southern Africa bordered by Namibia on the south, the Democratic Republic of the Congo on the north, andZambia on the east; its west coast is on the Atlantic Ocean and Luanda is its capital city. The exclave province ofCabinda has borders with the Republic of the Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The Portuguese were present in some – mostly coastal – points of the territory of what is now Angola, from the 16th to the 19th century, interacting in diverse ways with the peoples who lived there. In the 19th century, they slowly and hesitantly began to establish themselves in the interior. Angola as a Portuguese colony encompassing the present territory was not established before the end of the 19th century, and "effective occupation", as required by the Berlin Conference (1884)was achieved only by the 1920s after theMbunda resistance and abduction of their King, Mwene Mbandu I Lyondthzi Kapova.^[5

^]Independence was achieved in 1975, after a protracted liberation war. After independence, Angola was the scene of an intense civil war from 1975 to 2002. Despite the civil war, areas such asBaixa de Cassanje continue a lineage of kings which have included the former King Kambamba Kulaxingo and current King Dianhenga Aspirante Mjinji Kulaxingo. The country has vast mineral and petroleum reserves, and its economy has on average grown at a double-digit pace since the 1990s, especially since the end of the civil war. In spite of this, standards of living remain low for the majority of the population, and life expectancy and infant mortality rates in Angola are among the worst in the world.^[6] Angola is considered to be economically disparate, with the majority of the nation's wealth concentrated in a disproportionately small sector of the population.

Angola is a member state of the African Union, the Community of Portuguese Language Countries, the Latin Union and the Southern African Development Community.

1980s

Main article: 1980s in Angola

[](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SWAPO_and_SA_operations_1978-1980,_Angola_civil_war.png)

[](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SWAPO_and_SA_operations_1978-1980,_Angola_civil_war.png "Enlarge")

SWAPO's and South Africa's operations (1978–1980)

In the 1980s, fighting spread outward from southeastern Angola, where most of the fighting had taken place in the 1970s, as the National Congolese Army (ANC) and SWAPO increased their activity. The South African government responded by sending troops back into Angola, intervening in the war from 1981 to 1987, ^[13 ^]^ prompting the Soviet Union to deliver massive amounts of military aid from 1981 to 1986. The USSR gave the Angolan government more than US$2 billion in aid in 1984. ^[54 ^]^ In 1981, newly elected United States President Ronald Reagan's U.S. assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Chester Crocker, developed a linkage policy, tying Namibian independence to Cuban withdrawal and peace in Angola. ^[55 ^][56^ ^]^

The South African military attacked insurgents in Cunene Province on May 12, 1980. The Angolan Ministry of Defense accused the South African government of wounding and killing civilians. Nine days later, the SADF attacked again, this time in Cuando-Cubango, and the MPLA threatened to respond militarily. The SADF launched a full-scale invasion of Angola through Cunene and Cuando-Cubango on June 7, destroying SWAPO's operational command headquarters on June 13, in what Prime Minister Botha described as a "shock attack". The Angolan government arrested 120 Angolans who were planning to set off explosives in Luanda, on June 24, foiling a plot purportedly orchestrated by the South African government. Three days later, the United Nations Security Council convened at the behest of Angola's ambassador to the UN, E. de Figuerido, and condemned South Africa's incursions into Angola. President Mobutu of Zaire also sided with the MPLA. The Angolan government recorded 529 instances in which South African forces violated Angola's territorial sovereignty between January and June 1980. ^[57 ^]^

Cuba increased its troop force in Angola from 35,000 in 1982 to 40,000 in 1985. South African forces tried to capture Lubango, capital of Huíla province, in Operation Askari in December 1983. ^[55 ^]^

On June 2, 1985, American conservative activists held the Democratic International, a symbolic meeting of anti-Communist militants, at UNITA's headquarters in Jamba. ^[58 ^]^ Primarily funded by Rite Aid founder Lewis Lehrman and organized by anti-Communist activists Jack Abramoff and Jack Wheeler, participants included Savimbi, Adolfo Calero, leader of the Nicaraguan Contras, Pa Kao Her, Hmong Laotian rebel leader, U.S. Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, South African security forces, Abdurrahim Wardak, Afghan Mujahideen leader, Jack Wheeler, American conservative policy advocate, and many others. ^[59 ^]^ While the Reagan administration, although unwilling to publicly support the meeting, privately expressed approval. The governments of Israel and South Africa supported the idea, but both respective countries were deemed inadvisable for hosting the conference. ^[59 ^]^

The participants released a communiqué stating,

"We, free peoples fighting for our national independence and human rights, assembled at Jamba, declare our solidarity with all freedom movements in the world and state our commitment to cooperate to liberate our nations from the Soviet Imperialists."

The United States House of Representatives voted 236 to 185 to repeal the Clark Amendment on July 11, 1985. ^[60 ^]^ The Angolan government began attacking UNITA later that month from Luena towards Cazombo along the Benguela Railway, taking Cazombo on September 18. The government tried unsuccessfully to take UNITA's supply depot in Mavinga from Menongue. While the attack failed, very different interpretations of the attack emerged. UNITA claimed Portuguese-speaking Soviet officers led government troops while the government said UNITA relied on South African paratroopers to defeat the government. The South African government admitted to fighting in the area, but said its troops fought SWAPO militants. ^[61 ^]^

[edit] A war intensifies

[](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SWAPO_and_SA_operations_1981-1984,_Angola_civil_war_es.png)

[](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SWAPO_and_SA_operations_1981-1984,_Angola_civil_war_es.png "Enlarge")

SWAPO's and South Africa's operations (1981–1984)

By 1986, Angola began to assume a more central role in the Cold War, with both the Soviet Union, Cuba and other East bloc nations enhancing support for the MPLA government, and American conservatives beginning to elevate their support for Savimbi's UNITA. Savimbi developed close relations with influential American conservatives, who saw Savimbi as a key ally in the U.S. effort to oppose and rollback Soviet-backed, non-democratic governments around the world. The conflict quickly escalated, with both Washington and Moscow seeing it as a critical strategic conflict in the Cold War.

The Soviet Union gave an additional $1 billion in aid to the Angolan government and Cuba sent an additional 2,000 troops to the 35,000-strong force in Angola to protect Chevron oil platforms in 1986. ^[61 ^] Savimbi had called Chevron's presence in Angola, already protected by Cuban troops, a "target" for UNITA in an interview with Foreign Policy magazine on January 31. ^[62 ^]^

In Washington, Savimbi forged close relationships with influential conservatives, including Michael Johns (the Heritage Foundation's foreign policy analyst and a key Savimbi advocate), Grover Norquist (President of Americans for Tax Reform and a Savimbi economic advisor), and others, who played critical roles in elevating escalated U.S. covert aid to Savimbi's UNITA and visited with Savimbi in his Jamba, Angola headquarters to provide the Angolan rebel leader with military, political and other guidance in his war against the Angolan government. With enhanced U.S. support, the war quickly escalated, both in terms of the intensity of the conflict and also in its perception as a key conflict in the overall Cold War. ^[63 ^][64^ ^]^

In addition to escalating its military support for UNITA, the Reagan administration and its conservative allies also worked to expand recognition of Savimbi as a key U.S. ally in an important Cold War struggle. In January 1986, Reagan invited Savimbi to meet with him at the White House. Following the meeting, Reagan spoke of UNITA winning a victory that "electrifies the world" at the White House in January 1986. Two months later, Reagan announced the delivery of Stinger surface-to-air missiles as part of the $25 million in aid UNITA received from the U.S. government. ^[55 ^][65^ ^]^ Jeremias Chitunda, UNITA's representative to the U.S., became the Vice President of UNITA in August 1986 at the sixth party congress. ^[66 ^]^ Fidel Castro made Crocker's proposal, the withdrawal of foreign troops from Angola and Namibia, a prerequisite to Cuban withdrawal from Angola on September 10.

UNITA forces attacked Camabatela in Cuanza Norte province on February 8, 1987. ANGOP alleged UNITA massacred civilians in Damba in Uíge Province later that month, on February 26. The South African government agreed to Crocker's terms in principle on March 8. Savimbi proposed a truce regarding the Benguela railway on March 26, saying MPLA trains could pass through as long as an international inspection group monitored trains to prevent their use for counter-insurgency activity. The government did not respond. In April 1987 Fidel Castro sent Cuba's Fiftieth Brigade to southern Angola, increasing the number of Cuban troops from 12,000 to 15,000. ^[67 ^]^ The Angolan and American governments began negotiating in June 1987. ^[68 ^][69^ ^]^

Cuito Cuanavale and New York Accords

Main articles: Battle of Cuito Cuanavale and New York Accords

Cuando Cubango province

UNITA and South African forces attacked the MPLA's base at Cuito Cuanavale in Cuando Cubango province from January 13 to March 23, 1988, in the second largest battle in the history of Africa, ^[70 ^]^ after the Battle of El Alamein, ^[71 ^]^ the largest in sub-Saharan Africa since World War II. ^[72 ^]^ Cuito Cuanavale's importance came not from its size or its wealth but its location. South African Defense Forces maintained an overwatch on the city using new, G5 artillery pieces. Both sides claimed victory in the ensuing Battle of Cuito Cuanavale. ^[55 ^][73^ ^][74^ ^][75^ ^]^

With that manoeuvre, Fidel Castro increased the cost to South Africa of continuing to fight in Angola and placed Cuba in its most aggressive combat position of the war, thus fortifying his present argument that he is preparing to leave Angola with his opponents on the defensive. Soon the cost (both political, economical and technical) of maintaining its Angolan military adventure was to prove too taxing for the South African apartheid regime.

The Cuban government joined negotiations on January 28, 1988, and all three parties held a round of negotiations on March 9. The South African government joined negotiations on May 3 and the parties met in June and August in New York and Geneva. All parties agreed to a ceasefire on August 8. Representatives from the governments of Angola, Cuba, and South Africa signed the New York Accords, granting independence to Namibia and ending the direct involvement of foreign troops in the civil war, in New York City on December 22, 1988. ^[55 ^][69^ ^]^ The United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 626 later that day, creating the United Nations Angola Verification Mission, a UN peacekeeping force. UNAVEM troops began arriving in Angola in January 1989. ^[76 ^]^

[edit] Ceasefire

Main article: Gbadolite

As the Angolan Civil War began to take on a diplomatic component, in addition to a military one, two key Savimbi allies, The Conservative Caucus' Howard Phillips and the Heritage Foundation's Michael Johns visited Savimbi in Angola, where they sought to persuade Savimbi to come to the United States in the spring of 1989 to help the Conservative Caucus, the Heritage Foundation and other conservatives in making the case for continued U.S. aid to UNITA. ^[77 ^]^

President Mobutu invited 18 African leaders, Savimbi, and dos Santos to his palace in Gbadolite in June 1989 for negotiations. Savimbi and dos Santos met for the first time and agreed to the Gbadolite Declaration, a ceasefire, on June 22, paving the way for a future peace agreement. ^[78 ^][79^ ^]^ President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia said a few days after the declaration that Savimbi had agreed to leave Angola and go into exile, a claim Mobutu, Savimbi, and the U.S. government disputed. ^[79 ^]^ Dos Santos agreed with Kaunda's interpretation of the negotiations, saying Savimbi had agreed to temporarily leave the country. ^[80 ^]^

On August 23, dos Santos complained that the U.S. and South African governments continued to fund UNITA, warning such activity endangered the already fragile ceasefire. The next day Savimbi announced UNITA would no longer abide by the ceasefire, citing Kaunda's insistence that Savimbi leave the country and UNITA disband. The government responded to Savimbi's statement by moving troops from Cuito Cuanavale, under government control, to UNITA-occupied Mavinga. The ceasefire broke down with dos Santos and the U.S. government blaming each other for the resumption in armed conflict. ^[81 ^]^

[edit] 1990s

Main articles: 1990s in Angola, Angolagate, United Nations Angola Verification Mission II, and First Congo War

Political changes abroad and military victories at home allowed the government to transition from a nominally communist state to a nominally democratic one. Namibia's declaration of independence, internationally recognized on April 1, eliminated the southwestern front of combat as South African forces withdrew to the east. ^[82 ^]^ The MPLA abolished the one-party system in June and rejected Marxist-Leninism at the MPLA's third Congress in December, formally changing the party's name from the MPLA-PT to the MPLA. ^[78 ^]^ The National Assembly passed law 12/91 in May 1991, coinciding with the withdrawal of the last Cuban troops, defining Angola as a "democratic state based on the rule of law" with a multi-party system. ^[83 ^]^ Observers met such changes with skepticism. American journalist Karl Maier wrote, "In the New Angola ideology is being replaced by the bottom line, as security and selling expertise in weaponry have become a very profitable business. With its wealth in oil and diamonds, Angola is like a big swollen carcass and the vultures are swirling overhead. Savimbi's former allies are switching sides, lured by the aroma of hard currency." ^[84 ^]^

[edit] Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly

Main article: Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly

Government troops wounded Savimbi in battles in January and February 1990, but not enough to restrict his mobility ^[85 ^]^ He went to Washington, D.C. in December and met with President George H. W. Bush again, ^[78 ^]^ the fourth of five trips he made to the United States. Savimbi paid Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly, a lobbying firm based in Washington, D.C., $5 million to lobby the Federal government for aid, portray UNITA favorably in Western media, and acquire support among politicos in D.C. Savimbi reaped huge rewards. ^[86 ^]^

Senators Larry Smith and Dante Fascell, a senior member of the firm, worked with the Cuban American National Foundation, Representative Claude Pepper of Florida, Neal Blair's Free the Eagle, and Howard Phillips The Conservative Caucus to repeal the Clark Amendment in 1985. ^[87 ^]^ From the amendment's repeal in 1985 to 1992 the U.S. government gave Savimbi $60 million per year, a total of $420 million. A sizable amount of the aid went to Savimbi's personal expenses. Black, Manafort filed foreign lobbying records with the U.S. Justice Department showing Savimbi's expenses during his U.S. visits. During his December 1990 visit he spent $136,424 at the Park Hyatt hotel and $2,705 in tips. He spent almost $473,000 in October 1991 during his week-long visit to Washington and Manhattan. He spent $98,022 in hotel bills, at the Park Hyatt, $26,709 in limousine rides in Washington and another $5,293 in Manhattan. Paul Manafort, a partner in the firm, charged Savimbi $19,300 in consulting and additional $1,712 in expenses. He also bought $1,143 worth of "survival kits" from Motorola. When questioned in an interview in 1990 about human rights abuses under Savimbi, Black said, "Now when you're in a war, trying to manage a war, when the enemy... is no more than a couple of hours away from you at any given time, you might not run your territory according to New Hampshire town meeting rules." ^[86 ^]^

^ ===^

The Clark Amendment was an amendment to the U.S. Arms Export Control Act of 1976, named for its sponsor, Senator Dick Clark (D-Iowa). The amendment barred aid to private groups engaged in military or paramilitary operations in Angola.

Even after the Clark amendment became law, however, then-Director of Central Intelligence, George H. W. Bush, refused to concede that all U.S. aid to Angola had ceased.^[1][2] According to foreign affairs analyst Jane Hunter, Israel stepped in as a proxy arms supplier for the United States after the Clark Amendment took effect.

The Clark Amendment was repealed by the U.S. Congress in July 1985.

Visiting The Heritage Foundation on October 5, 1989, the ultimate beneficiary of the Clark Amendment's repeal, Jonas Savimbi's UNITA, praised the Heritage Foundation for its critical role in advocating the repeal of the amendment. "When we come to the Heritage Foundation," Savimbi said, "It is like coming back home. We know that our success here in Washington in repealing the Clark Amendment and obtaining American assistance for our cause is very much associated with your efforts. This foundation has been a source of great support. The UNITA leadership knows this, and it is also known in Angola."^[3]

----

Richard Clarence "Dick" Clark (born September 14, 1928) represented the state of Iowa in the United States Senate from 1973 to 1979.

Clark, a Democrat, was successful only in his first election for the Senate when he defeated Republican incumbent, Jack R. Miller in 1972. Clark received 662,637 votes (55%) to Miller's 530,525 (44%). American Independent Party candidate William Rocap received 8,954 votes (1%).

Clark served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and chaired the Subcommittee on Africa, developing considerable expertise on the crisis in Angola. In 1976, he authored the Clark Amendment, which barred aid from the U.S. government to private groups engaged in military or paramilitary operations in Angola.

Clark ran for reelection in 1978, but lost to Roger Jepsen. Clark was then appointed by President Jimmy Carter to be Ambassador at Large and United States Coordinator for Refugee Affairs in 1979. He has served as a senior fellow at the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies since 1980.

IOWA

Jepsen became a paratrooper in the United States Army 1946-1947 and served in the United States Army Reserve 1948-1960. He was active in farming, insurance andhealth care businesses.

Jepsen served as a county supervisor of Scott County from 1962 to 1965 and was a state Senator from 1966 to 1968. He was the 39th Lieutenant Governor of Iowa from 1969 to 1973, having been elected with Governor Robert D. Ray in 1968.

In 1978 he was elected to the United States Senate, narrowly defeating incumbent Richard C. Clark in a major surprise, receiving strong support from National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC). He served a single term from January 3, 1979, to January 3, 1985. He served as co-chairman of the Joint Economic Committee in the 98th Congress.

Fellow Republican colleagues praised Jepsen for persuading President Reagan to lift the agricultural ban against the Soviet Union^[1]

Jepsen was defeated by Democratic Congressman Tom Harkin in the 1984 Senate election. Jepsen later served as chairman of the National Credit Union Administration. He and his family reside in Alexandria, Virginia.

During part of his tenure in the Senate, Jepsen sat at the Candy desk.

Jump up

^ ^

^clark ^targetted ^by ^NCpac

^ ^

Richard Clarence "Dick" Clark (born September 14, 1928) represented the state of Iowa in the United States Senate from 1973 to 1979.

Clark, a Democrat, was only successful in his first election for the Senate when he defeated Republican incumbent, Jack R. Miller in 1972. Clark received 662,637 votes (55%) to Miller's 530,525 (44%). American Independent Party candidate William Rocap received 8,954 votes (1%).

Clark served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and chaired the Subcommittee on Africa, developing considerable expertise on the crisis in Angola. In 1976, he authored the Clark Amendment, which barred aid from the U.S. government to private groups engaged in military or paramilitary operations in Angola.

He was educated first at the University of Maryland, Wiesbaden, and the University of Frankfort from 1950 to 1952, while serving in the United States Army. He completed his BA in 1953 at Upper Iowa University and his Masters in 1956 at the University of Iowa.

Prior to being a Senator, Clark was a professor at Upper Iowa University, and then served as an assistant to congressman John Culver. While working for Culver, Clark helped put together a campaign that kept Culver in Congress in 1966.

As senator, he served on the Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry, the Committee on Environment and Public Works and the Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

from savimbi:

===

see red scorpian

IFF 86-93 S afr made crime to be commie US declared ANC terrorists Rusel Chrystal //JA Jamba woodstock for intil FF; savimbi no use after cold war, so same SA intel pvt army hunted him down Exec Outcomes

IFF trip: b1 bob dornan, inhofe,j helms, phil crane, buz likens, lichenstein D'Souza wrote for mag (later sil vly guru)

craig williamson SA spy infiltrated and became leader, got ppl jailed and killed

hayek award to vaclav klaus wreck crew

stone hell:

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 ofStone, “He’s too good a source.”

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 Jonas Savimbi, 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. “Black,Manafort played an important part in keeping the Angolan war going,” 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. 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.Another Republican staff member says of Black, Manafort, “Their view is, ‘To hell with the facts, fuck the world.’”

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 – 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 Chris Lehman, 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 National Journal, “How much value do you put on a letter like the one to Savimbi? Is it worth a million dollars? Of course it is!”

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.

The efforts of BMS&K in support of Savimbi are one of the few places where some light has been shed, again thanks to Spy magazine and a now forgotten article on a now forgotten incident, “Fooled on the Hill: How some die-hard Cold Warriors and a Belgian con artist tried to change U.S. policy in Africa”, by David Aronson and David Kamp. I already wrote about this astonishing moment at great length in “Angola, Namibia, South Africa, and a Tea Party Leader”, but I return to it briefly here.

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 apeace agreement, 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.Jonas Savimbi, 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.

A bill was moving through Congress, with passage assured, that would have helped fund UN supervision of the transition of Namibia to independence. In order to derail the independence of Namibia, the senator from North Carolina, Jesse Helms, 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. 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 theInternational Freedom Foundation (IFF).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 world⁴²(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-three/#ftnote42).

stone bksh spy PR of damned

http://books.google.ca/books?id=qnVC8yS4N_AC&lpg=PP1&rview=1&pg=PA90#v=onepage&q&f=false

Namibia (/:{nəˈmɪbiə:(style="border-bottom-width:1px;border-bottom-style:dotted"):}:/, /:{næˈ-:(style="border-bottom-width:1px;border-bottom-style:dotted"):}:/),^[5][6] officially the Republic of Namibia (German: *Republik Namibia* (:{help:(style="cursor:help"):}:·:{info:(style="cursor:help"):}:); Afrikaans: Republiek van Namibië), and formerly South West Africa, is a country in southern Africa whose western border is the Atlantic Ocean. It shares land borders with Zambia and Angola to the north, Botswana to the east andSouth Africa to the south and east. Although it does not border Zimbabwe, less than 200 metres of the Zambezi River (essentially a small bulge in Botswana to achieve a Botswana/Zambia micro-border) separates them at their closest points. It gained independence from South Africa on 21 March 1990, following the Namibian War of Independence. Its capital and largest city is Windhoek. Namibia is a member state of the United Nations (UN), the Southern African Development Community (SADC), theAfrican Union (AU), and the Commonwealth of Nations.

The dry lands of Namibia were inhabited since early times by San, Damara, and Namaqua, and since about the 14th century AD by immigrating Bantu who came with theBantu expansion. Most of the territory became a German Imperial protectorate in 1884 and remained a German colony until the end of World War I. In 1920, the League of Nations mandated the country to South Africa, which imposed its laws and, from 1948, its apartheid policy. The port of Walvis Bay and the offshore Penguin Islandshad been annexed by the Cape Colony under the British crown by 1878 and had become an integral part of the new Union of South Africa at its creation in 1910.

Uprisings and demands by African leaders led the UN to assume direct responsibility over the territory. It recognised the South West Africa People's Organisation(SWAPO) as the official representative of the Namibian people in 1973. Namibia, however, remained under South African administration during this time as South-West Africa. Following internal violence, South Africa installed an interim administration in Namibia in 1985. Namibia obtained full independence from South Africa in 1990, with the exception of Walvis Bay and the Penguin Islands, which remained under South African control until 1994.

Namibia has a population of 2.1 million people and a stable multi-party parliamentary democracy. Agriculture, herding, tourism and the mining industry – including mining for gem diamonds, uranium, gold, silver, and base metals – form the basis of Namibia's economy. Given the presence of the arid Namib Desert, it is one of the least densely populated countries in the world. Namibia enjoys high political, economic and social stability.

[hide]

1 History

2 Geography

3 Politics and government

- 3.1 Foreign relations
- 3.2 Military

6 Demographics

- 11.1 Lists

12 References

13 External links

History:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

Main article: History of Namibia

The name of the country is derived from the Namib Desert, considered to be the oldest desert in the world.^[7] Before its independence in 1990, the area was known first as German South-West Africa (Deutsch-Südwestafrika), then as South-West Africa, reflecting the colonial occupation by the Germans and the South Africans (technically on behalf of the British crown reflecting South Africa's dominion status within the British Empire).

Pre-colonial period:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

The dry lands of Namibia were inhabited since early times by San, Damara, Nama and, since about the 14th century AD, by immigrating Bantu who came with the Bantu expansion from central Africa. From the late 18th century onwards, Orlam clans from the Cape Colony crossed the Orange River and moved into the area that today is southern Namibia.^[8] Their encounters with the nomadic Nama tribes were largely peaceful. The missionaries accompanying the Orlams were well received by them,^[9] the right to use waterholes and grazing was granted against an annual payment.^[10] On their way further northwards, however, the Orlams encountered clans of the Hererotribe at Windhoek, Gobabis, and Okahandja which were less accommodating. The Nama-Herero War broke out in 1880, with hostilities ebbing only when Imperial Germany deployed troops to the contested places and cemented the status quo between Nama, Orlams, and Herero.^[11]

The first Europeans to disembark and explore the region were the Portuguese navigators Diogo Cão in 1485 and Bartolomeu Dias in 1486; still the region was not claimed by the Portuguese crown. However, like most of Sub-Saharan Africa, Namibia was not extensively explored by Europeans until the 19th century, when traders and settlers arrived, principally from Germany and Sweden. In the late 19th century Dorsland trekkers crossed the area on their way from the Transvaal to Angola. Some of them settled in Namibia instead of continuing their journey.

German rule:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

From 1904 to 1907, the Herero and the Namaqua took up arms against the Germans and in calculated punitive action by the German occupiers, the 'first genocide of the Twentieth Century' was committed.^[13] In the Herero and Namaqua genocide, 10,000 Nama (half the population) and approximately 65,000 Hereros (about 80% of the population) were systematically murdered.^[14][15] The survivors, when finally released from detention, were subjected to a policy of dispossession, deportation, forced labour, racial segregation and discrimination in a system that in many ways anticipated apartheid.Namibia became a German colony in 1884 under Otto von Bismarck to forestall British encroachment and was known as German South-West Africa (Deutsch-Südwestafrika).^[12] However, the Palgrave mission by the British governor in Cape Town had determined that only the natural deep-water harbour of Walvis Bay was worth occupying – and this was annexed to the Cape province of British South Africa.

Most Africans were confined to so-called native territories, which later under South African rule post-1949 were turned into "homelands" (Bantustans). Indeed, some historians have speculated that the German genocide in Namibia was a model used by Nazis in the Holocaust.^[16] The memory of genocide remains relevant to ethnic identity in independent Namibia and to relations with Germany.^[17] The German government formally apologized for the Namibian genocide in 2004.^[18]

South African rule:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

After independence:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

Since independence Namibia has successfully completed the transition from white minority apartheid rule to parliamentary democracy. Multiparty democracy was introduced and has been maintained, with local, regional and national elections held regularly. Several registered political parties are active and represented in the National Assembly, although the Swapo Party has won every election since independence.^[24] The transition from the 15-year rule of President Sam Nujoma to his successor Hifikepunye Pohamba in 2005 went smoothly.^[25]

The Namibian government has promoted a policy of national reconciliation and issued an amnesty for those who had fought on either side during the liberation war. The civil war in Angola had some impact on Namibians living in the north of the country. In 1998, Namibia Defence Force (NDF) troops were sent to the Democratic Republic of the Congo as part of a Southern African Development Community (SADC) contingent. In August 1999, a secessionist attempt in the northeastern Zambezi Region was successfully quashed.^[25]

Jonas Savimbi

Jonas Malheiro Savimbi (1934 - 2002) was a rebel leader in Angola who founded the Unita movement in 1966, and ultimately proved a central figure in 20th century Cold War politics.

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.

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.

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 Ronald Reagan to the White House. Reagan spoke of Unita winning "a victory that electrifies the world...."

Equally important, Savimbi also 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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

After surviving more than a dozen assassination attempts, Savimbi was killed four years later, in February 2002, in a battle with Angolan government troops.[1]. A ceasefire between UNITA and the MPLA was signed six weeks later.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article, Jonas Savimbi, and licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.

SourceWatch resources

Jonas Malheiro Savimbi (1934 - 2002) was a rebel leader in Angola who founded the Unita movement in 1966, and ultimately proved a central figure in 20th century Cold War politics.

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.

Equally important, Savimbi also 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. Savimbi's U.S.-based supporters ultimately proved successful in convincing the Central Intelligence Agency to channel covert weapons to Savimbi's waragainst Angola's Marxist government, which greatly intensified the conflict.

After surviving more than a dozen assassination attempts, Savimbi was killed four years later, in February 2002, in a battle with Angolan government troops. [1]. A ceasefire between UNITA and the MPLA was signed six weeks later.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article, Jonas Savimbi, and licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.

SourceWatch resources

Category: Angola

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonas_Savimbi

7/2/06	JACK ABRAMOFF’S WHITE MAN’S BURDEN: How the Sleazy Republican Lobbyist Served Apartheid By Danny Schechter

	Mediachannel.org Picture the scene. It was a quiet night in June 1985 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’ Savimbi’s Unita movement, a tribal secessionist movement bizarrely funded, at the same time, by Communist China and the CIA. 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, “Leaders of the Afghan mujahedin, Nicaraguan contras, Laotian guerrillas and members of the Oliver North American right.” (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.” 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. 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. 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.) 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. 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. “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.” 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. 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. 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, Jack Abramoff had actually first visited South Africa in 1983, as head of the College Republicans National Committee (CRNC). 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”. 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. The movie was “Red Scorpion” starring the very Aryan-looking Dolph Lundgren. It pictured African liberation fighters as surrogates for Soviet totalitarians. 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.” Jack Ambramoff’s alter ego and fantasy was now on the screen. The movie was made in South African-occupied Namibia. 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. 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: “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.” Why the military? The newspaper reveals: “The IFF was ostensibly founded as a conservative think-tank, but was in reality part of an elaborateSouth African military intelligence operation, code-named Operation Babushka. Established to combat sanctions and undermine the African National Congress, it also supported Jonas Savimbi and his rebel Angolan movement, Unita.” The movie was modeled romantically on Savimbi’s “War for Freedom” but also riddled with stereotypes and propaganda, Sample exchange: “Colonel Zayas: Are you out of your mind? Lt. Nikolai: No. Just out of bullets. [Burps].” Abramoff turned to his connections and got a soviet-madeWWII-era T-34 tank with a 76mm canon for in the final battle sequence. 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.” 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. “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.” 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. 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. 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.) Quietly backing racist South Africa was high on the Republican agenda then, a fact that the media mostly ignores. 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.

7/2/06

JACK ABRAMOFF’S WHITE MAN’S BURDEN: How the Sleazy Republican Lobbyist Served Apartheid By Danny Schechter

Mediachannel.org

Picture the scene.

It was a quiet night in June 1985 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’ Savimbi’s Unita movement, a tribal secessionist movement bizarrely funded, at the same time, by Communist China and the CIA.

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, “Leaders of the Afghan mujahedin, Nicaraguan contras, Laotian guerrillas and members of the Oliver North American right.” (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.”

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. 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.

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.)

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.

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

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,

Jack Abramoff had actually first visited South Africa in 1983, as head of the College Republicans National Committee (CRNC). 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”.

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.

The movie was “Red Scorpion” starring the very Aryan-looking Dolph Lundgren. It pictured African liberation fighters as surrogates for Soviet totalitarians. 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.” Jack Ambramoff’s alter ego and fantasy was now on the screen.

The movie was made in South African-occupied Namibia. 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.

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:

“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.”

Why the military? The newspaper reveals: “The IFF was ostensibly founded as a conservative think-tank, but was in reality part of an elaborateSouth African military intelligence operation, code-named Operation Babushka. Established to combat sanctions and undermine the African National Congress, it also supported Jonas Savimbi and his rebel Angolan movement, Unita.”

The movie was modeled romantically on Savimbi’s “War for Freedom” but also riddled with stereotypes and propaganda, Sample exchange: “Colonel Zayas: Are you out of your mind? Lt. Nikolai: No. Just out of bullets. [Burps].”

Abramoff turned to his connections and got a soviet-madeWWII-era T-34 tank with a 76mm canon for in the final battle sequence.

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.”

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.

“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.”

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.

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. 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.)

Quietly backing racist South Africa was high on the Republican agenda then, a fact that the media mostly ignores.

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.

http://www.hrw.org/legacy/wr2k2/africa1.html

Table of Contents > Africa >Angola

Human Rights Developments

Defending Human Rights

The Role of the International Community

HUMAN RIGHTS DEVELOPMENTS

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 Angola (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.

The situation worsened since the breakdown of the Lusaka Peace Protocol in 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. 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.

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.

In an apparent bid for international attention, UNITA struck against government targets several times while foreign officials visited Angola. 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."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. After an international outcry, rebels handed over the children to a Catholic mission.

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.UNITA deliberately targeted humanitarian workers and aircraft. 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 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.

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.When no displaced civilians appeared, concerns arose over their safety.Also in February, UNITA forces held the town of Quibaxe in Bengo province, killing and abducting many civilians and causing others to flee. An estimated 8,000 people from Quibaxe were missing.

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.

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.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.

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.

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.

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. Two days later, the Angolan army uncovered a large cache of weapons close to the Mavinga airport.

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.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.

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 Folha 8, 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.

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.

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.

DEFENDING HUMAN RIGHTS

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.

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.

THE ROLE OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY

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 Business and Human Rights.)

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.

United Nations

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.

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.

Two high-level U.N. visits were made to Angola during the year. 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," and 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.

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.

European Union

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.

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.

United States

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. 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.

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.

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. U.S. development and humanitarian assistance was over U.S. $39 million for FY 2001.

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Angola

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Formation[

Human rights record[

Party organizations[

Foreign support[

Electoral history[

Child Soldiers: Angola report

National Recruitment Legislation

National Recruitment Practice

Child Participation in Armed Conflict

Armed Opposition groups (25)

Notes

1980s

[edit] A war intensifies

Cuito Cuanavale and New York Accords

[edit] Ceasefire

[edit] 1990s

[edit] Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly

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Jonas Savimbi

SourceWatch resources

SourceWatch resources