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Angola National Security
![[GIF]](http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/angola/ao05_00a.gif)
An elderly member of the People's vigilance Brigades
IN THE LATE 1980s, ANGOLA was a nation at war, still
struggling to
escape the legacy that one standard history has
characterized as
"five centuries of conflict." Since the 1960s, Angola had
experienced, sometimes simultaneously, four types of war:
a war of
national liberation, a civil war, a regional war, and the
global
struggle between the superpowers. Angola had won its
independence
from Portugal in 1975 after a thirteen-year liberation
struggle,
during which the externally supported African nationalist
movements
splintered and subdivided. However, independence provided
no
respite, as the new nation was immediately engulfed in a
civil war
whose scope and effects were compounded by foreign
military
intervention. Although the Popular Movement for the
Liberation of
Angola (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola -- MPLA)
eventually won recognition as the legitimate government,
it did so
only with massive Soviet and Cuban military support, on
which it
remained heavily dependent in late 1988.
Despite the party's international acceptance and
domestic
hegemony, Angola in the late 1980s remained at war with
itself and
its most powerful neighbor, South Africa. The insurgency
led by the
National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (União
Nacional
para a Independência Total de Angola -- UNITA), bolstered
by
growing foreign support, spread from the remote and
sparsely
populated southeast corner of the country throughout the
entire
nation. South African interventions on behalf of UNITA and
against
black South African and Namibian nationalist forces in
southern
Angola also escalated. Luanda's reliance on the Soviet
Union, Cuba,
and other communist states for internal security and
defense
increased as these threats intensified. Intermittent
diplomatic
efforts since the late 1970s had failed to end the
protracted war;
indeed, each new initiative had been followed by an
escalation of
violence.
Nonetheless, a turning point in this history of
conflict may
have been reached in 1988. After the warring parties
clashed in the
early part of that year at Cuito Cuanavale, in Africa's
largest
land battle since World War II, the exhausted parties
succeeded in
negotiating a regional peace agreement brokered by Chester
A.
Crocker, the United States assistant secretary of state
for African
affairs. On July 13, representatives of Angola, Cuba, and
South
Africa initialed an agreement on a "set of essential
principles to
establish the basis for peace in the southwestern region
of
Africa." They signed a cease-fire agreement on August 22,
to be
overseen by their Joint Military Monitoring Commission.
Finally,
their trilateral accord of December 22 provided for South
African
military withdrawal and cessation of assistance to UNITA;
the
phased removal of Cuban forces from Angola over a
twenty-seven-
month period ending on July 1, 1991; termination of
Angolan
assistance to African National Congress (ANC) exiles in
the
country; and South African withdrawal from Namibia coupled
with
independence for that territory under United
Nations-supervised
elections
(see Angola - Appendix B).
Although UNITA was not a party
to this
historic regional peace agreement, it was hoped that
internal peace
based on national reconciliation would also ensue. Whether
the
trilateral accord would be honored and whether Angolans
would make
peace among themselves were crucial issues in late 1988.
History
suggested that this would be but a brief respite from
endemic
conflict, but the promise of a future free of conflict may
have
provided the impetus to break with the burden of the past.
Data as of February 1989
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