MANUEL MUANZA, Luanda | Sunday
THE Angolan government has shown off the bullet-riddled corpse of veteran rebel leader Jonas Savimbi, confirming his death and raising hopes peace could be within reach after more than 25 years of civil conflict.
Angolan state television on Saturday broadcast pictures of the corpse of the flamboyant 67-year-old Unita leader, who waged almost non-stop war against the government after the southern African nation won independence from Portugal in 1975.
The footage of the clearly recognisable Savimbi bearded, pockmarked with bullet holes and dressed in his battle uniform supported government claims that he had been killed on Friday in fighting with troops in eastern Moxico province.
Angolan state radio said Savimbi was buried late on Saturday in Lucusse, where the government claimed he was killed. Earlier reports had said his body would be flown to Luanda and put on public display.
Some television pictures showed a bullet wound to his throat while a report by a journalist from Portuguese national television station RTP said Savimbi had taken 15 bullets, including two to the head.
“He is dead, clearly dead,” said the correspondent from RTP, which also showed footage of the body.
Savimbi was wearing a belt to which two red and green strips of fabric were tied, “apparently representing an amulet or something magical for his protection,” Angola’s official Angop news agency said.
Analysts and opponents greeted Savimbi’s death as a new opportunity for peace in a country torn by decades of civil war, and some even predicted the complete collapse of the Unita rebel movement.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said through a representative that the rebel leader’s death “has created a new situation, and he hopes that all stakeholders will take advantage of it” to move toward peace.
In Washington, the United States urged the warring parties to seek peace.
US State Department representative Richard Boucher said in a statement: “The death of the Unita leader is yet another casualty in a war that should have ended long ago.
“We call upon both sides, in conjunction with the peaceful opposition, civil sectors and international community, to fulfil their obligation to bring peace to the Angolan people,” he added.
Portugal and South Africa also called for peace efforts to continue.
“Jonas Savimbi was really a total dictator,” said Georges Valentim, Unita’s former “minister of culture” and a one-time close aide to Savimbi, estimating that no-one within the group was capable of succeeding the guerrilla leader.
Even if the rebels try to continue the civil war, Savimbi’s former aides, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they doubted Unita could stave off the army’s offensive without their charismatic strongman.
Savimbi created his National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (Unita) in the 1960s to wage a liberation battle against Angola’s Portuguese colonisers.
After independence he transformed the conflict into a civil war that has become one of the longest running and most brutal in Africa.
The death toll is estimated at more than half a million people, while about one-third of Angola’s population of 12-million have been displaced.
Savimbi’s rejection of the results of 1992 elections, held under an internationally supported peace process, plunged the country back into war.
The conflict has intensified since 1998 when the government launched a broad new offensive to crush the rebels after a 1994 peace accord collapsed.
During the 1980s, at the height of the war, Savimbi and Unita were backed by the United States against Luanda’s Soviet-supported Marxist MPLA regime.
As Angola became a supplier of oil to the United States and the Cold War ended, Washington ditched its ally, who then relied on diamond running to fund his guerrilla enterprise. – AFP