Angola's propaganda battle
Fred Bridgland
When the radical American journalist, Anthony Lewis, made a five-day visit to Luanda earlier this year he found an unusual supporter for his argument that the United States should give diplomatic recognition to Angola's marxist MPLA government. T. J. Fahey, an executive of the General Tyre and Rubber Company of Akron, Ohio, which has a 10 per cent interest in a state-owned Angolan tyre company, told Lewis: 'We are delighted to be here. They pay us meticulously — our fees and the salaries of our people. I'm just an old peddler, but . . . I think it's a tragic mistake that we don't recognise Angola. Here is a country with incredible buying power and a need for every product on earth. I'm talking about America's commercial self-interest.' Of course, Mr Fahey was putting the standard businessman's case. He would presumably argue the same way if he were selling tyres to South Africa, Chile, China, North Vietnam or the Central African Empire.
What is curious is the adoption by Lewis, and a number of other leftist commentators, of the profit motives of right-wing capitalism to illustrate the respectability of the MPLA (the popular movement for the liberation of Angola). Mr Lewis's more conventional and admirable concern has been with oppression and the denial of democratic rights under a variety of despicable regimes.
Strange, then, that Mr Lewis, in urging his government to embrace the MPLA, has had nothing to say about the fact that multi-party elections promised for Angola at independence in 1975 have never been held, and that he did not point out that all opposition to the MPLA has been outlawed. It is worrying, also, that he has decided to ignore the fact that, in a period of six months before and after his visit, at least 43 Angolans were executed in the cities of Luanda, Lobito and Huambo for their active opposition to the autocracy they live under.
The Lewis-Fahey axis gives a glimpse of the least obvious of the three wars being fought in Angola today — the propaganda war. The other two, using shells and bullets, are between South Africa and the Namibian liberation movement, Swapo, in the south-west corner of Angola's vast and largely empty territories: and between an Angolan liberation movement, Unita (the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola), and the MPLA, supported by Cuban troops, in the south-eastern corner of the country.
But the propaganda war is the most insidious of the three. I got some taste of it when I returned recently from a 400-mile, three-week journey through south-eastern Angola with Dr Jonas Savimbi's Unita guerrillas. After my repors were published, letters from passionate MPLA supporters admonished me for not telling readers that 1 entered Unita territory with the South African army and, in another case, that I had not been in Angola at all. Neither allegation is true, but they do help illustrate the fact that, in the propaganda war, facts are determined more by prejudice than reality.
As a guest of Unita I had no illusions other than that I had been invited for the movement's own propaganda purposes. My colleague on the trip, Dick Harwood, of the Washington Post summed up the position nicely in one of his reports: `Savimbi gives an impression of great confidence and candour as we begin our conversations . . . What he wants from me is very clear — to communicate to the world outside his views and his assessment of the Angolan situation. He wants the world to know he's alive. These are the things politicians always want from journalists. Savimbi is simply a little more open about it.'
And so we began our attempt to sift fact from propaganda. We wanted to test two important items of Unita and MPLA propaganda. Unita claimed to have captured the town of Mavinga, 160 miles north of the Namibian border in south-east Angola, in September 1980 and to have held it ever since. The MPLA's official communiques said the town was in government hands. We asked Unita to take us there. They did so and we walked down the main street, picked oranges and took photographs.
This was an impressive propaganda victory for Unita, although after we returned home and published our observations the MPLA made a valiant effort to retrieve the situation. The defence ministry in Luanda, Angola's capital, issued a statement on 29 July saying that Mavinga was no longer, in fact, in government hands — it had been taken three months earlier `by the South Africans.'
Unita's Cuban deserters — two youngsters from Castro's army, recruited for Angolan service in their teens, who had walked out of their camp and given themselves up to the guerrillas after their two-year duty tour had been extended — presented more problems. With a fervour possibly designed to impress their Unita hosts privates Miguel Edade and Angel Paulo Mojena embarked on a tale of Cuban terror — villages bombed and napalmed by planes, women and children shot and claimed as guerrilla scalps, of Unita suspects being pushed out of Cuban helicopters in mid-air. The truth of these stories cannot be ruled out, but they will need more positive confirmation.
But it is not in the south-west or the south-east that the Angolan problem will be decided. The key to the conflict lies on the central plateau, a vast fertile area astride the Benguela Railway 500 miles north of the Namibia border and 250 miles south of Luanda. The plateau is Angola's breadbasket and the majority of the country's 6.5 million people live there, mainly in rural communities.
Before independence Angola was almost self-sufficient in food. Now it has to import 50 per cent of its food because agricultural production on the central plateau, other than for subsistence purposes, has collapsed. There are two entirely contradictory explanations for the decline of this once thriving central plateau. The MPLA argues that Unita guerrillas are terrorising the peasant population, confiscating their crops and forcing them to retreat from their fields into the forests.
MPLA officials give different figures at different times for the numbers of these peasant refugees. They vary between 300,000 and 800,000, the latter figure representing one-quarter of the population of the plateau. The difficulty posed by these figures stems from the MPLA's own consistent dismissal of Unita as 'a handful of bandits' and its reports throughout the six years of Angola's independence that the fantoches' (bandits) were on the run before MPLA soldiery. Even stretching logic generously, it is difficult to understand how the social and economic mayhem the MPLA is reporting on the central plateau could be ascribed to nothing more than a handful of retreating bandits.
Unita's own argument is that the MPLA and the Cubans first attempted a 'hearts and minds' campaign among the plateau's rural population, who formed the traditional core of Unita's support during the struggle against the Portuguese. From 1979 the government accepted that it could never dissuade the population ftom feeding and protecting Unita's guerrillas, of whom Savimbi claims to have 20,000, most of them operating on the central plateau. Unita asserts that the Cubans and MPLA began destroying crops and villages to drive the peasantry into the towns in their own version of a fortified hamlets strategy, thus depriving the insurgents of food and intelligence. But Unita will have difficulty 111 substantiating its claims unless it can persuade journalists to make the formidable trek to the plateau region with its guerrillas.
So the truth is difficult to discern. What Strabo, the Greek geographer, warned about another exotic region 2,000 years ago applies equally to Angola today: 'We must hear accounts of India with indulgence, for not only is it very far away, but even those who have seen it saw only some parts Of it, and most of what they tell us is from hearsay. Moreover, what they saw they learnt during a passage along it with an army, on rapid marches. Wherefore they do not give consistent in formation .'
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