Abstract

Savimbi, Bloody Savimbi

Two days before Angola's multiparty elections in September 1992 the top U.S. diplomat in the country boasted to Antonio da Costa Fernandes, a former Unita party official, that his old boss, Jonas Savimbi could not fail to win. Everyone in the Western intelligence fraternity working on Angola knew Fernandes's information was true, but Washington chose to ignore it and stuck with Savimbi. As a result of this decision, in the past twenty months, half a million Angolans have been killed in a Unita offensive. The agricultural and economic infrastructures of the country have been smashed. Angola has been destroyed by Jonas Savimbi's determination to take by force the power that successive U.S. administrations promised him, but which the Angolan people denied him in the 1992 election.