OWN CORRESPONDENT, Luanda | Thursday 9.30pm.
THE split in the rebel Unita movement, in which five of leader Jonas Savimbi’s top aides announced an alternative leadership on Wednesday, has been greeted with delight in Luanda and presented as a rift between those who want peace and hardline “belligerents”.
The official Angolan media set Luanda’s tone on Thursday by describing the dissidents as “the new leaders of Unita”, while Savimbi, who has come under increasing fire for slow implementation of the 1994 United Nationes-brokered peace accords, was described as an “outlaw” and “international terrorist”.
The ruling MPLA, which accepted Unita as the main legal opposition when it claimed to have disarmed all its troops early in March, said that in future it will recognise the breakaway movement as “the only valid interlocutors”.
MPLA leaders called on President Jos Eduardo dos Santos’s government and the international community to do likewise and deal with the breakaway faction as showing a new attitute and being “serious about concluding the peace process”.
Savimbi loyalist Horacio Junjuvili, Unita’s top delegate on a joint commission with government and UN representatives monitoring the peace settlement, blamed the split in Unita on government manouevres and said that it is just a divisive tactic. But he acknowledged that Wednesday’s defection has gained support from seven district administrators in northern Uige province, a mtraditional rebel stronghold.
Meanwhile the Angolan air force said on Thursday that Unita shot down a civilian plane with 20 passengers on board, including military personnel, last Friday. The Antonov 26 plane was “destroyed by Unita” as it flew from Kafunfo, in the north-eastern province of Lunda-Norte, to the northern town of Malanje, an air force statement broadcast on national radio said. No other details on the incident were given, including the possibility of survivors.
Several minutes before the broacast, civilian aviation authorities in Angola announced the loss of a plane, saying last contact with the crew indicated there was a fire on board.