Luanda | Monday
ANGOLA’S government on Sunday called for Unita rebels to hand in their weapons following the death of their flamboyant leader Jonas Savimbi, but a guerrilla representative vowed the struggle would go on.
Foreign Minister Joao Bernardo de Miranda said disarming rebel forces was the next priority for Angola’s government after a weekend of celebrations and the showing off of Savimbi’s bullet-riddled corpse on state television.
”We want the (rebel) commanders who have troops to collaborate with the government so that the disarmament can proceed,” the minister told national radio.
But he warned that ”if, for example, they insist on the way of war, the disarmament will also be done by force.”
Angolan state television late on Saturday broadcast pictures of the corpse of the charismatic 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.
According to the Angolan army, Savimbi died on Friday with 21 bodyguards while trying to fend off an attack by government forces in the eastern province of Moxico. State radio said he was buried late on Saturday in the area where he was killed.
Unita gave its own de facto confirmation of the killing when its representative in Portugal attended a mourning ceremony in Lisbon.
”Unita has not died with Jonas Savimbi, as the men and women here show,” said Carlos Morgado, the rebel group’s representative in Portugal.
Quoted by the Portuguese news agency Lusa, Morgado said ”Africa and Angola have lost one of the best sons.”
”Savimbi gave Angolans a lesson of courage by falling in combat among the martyred Angolan people,” he said.
But Morgado refused to speculate on who would take the reigns of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (Unita), although he did hint at the difficulties the group were now facing.
”Unita has a clear structure and we will find a solution within it. This will naturally take some time,” he said. News of Savimbi’s death was greeted with celebration in the streets of Luanda, where supporters of President Jose Eduardo dos Santos paraded over the weekend, chanting victory slogans for the army and carrying placards that read ”The terrorist is gone.”
Several African nations and the former Cold War players in Angola’s civil war urged the nation to take Savimbi’s death as opportunity to relaunch peace efforts in the devastated nation.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said through his representative that the world body was ready to again assist in advancing the peace process.
”As far as the secretary general is concerned, it has created a new situation and he hopes that all stakeholders will take advantage of it to take the peace process forward,” representative Stephane Dujarric said.
The United Nations, along with the troika of Portugal, Russia and the United States, had helped broker and oversee a deal that led to Angola’s first and only multiparty elections in 1992.
Hopes for lasting peace from that deal were dashed when Savimbi refused to accept his loss in the poll, plunging the nation back into war.
Washington, which had supported Savimbi’s National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (Unita) as a proxy force in its Cold War battle against communism in Africa, on Saturday said it remained committed to achieving peace and equitable development in Angola.
”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,” State Department representative Richard Boucher said in a statement.
US President George W Bush is scheduled to meet on Tuesday with the presidents of Angola, Mozambique and Botswana to discuss the situation in southern Africa, including the quarter-century-old Angolan war.
Vice President Jacob Zuma of South Africa, where the former apartheid government also had supported Savimbi, said his government was interacting with the government after being officially informed of the Unita leader’s death.
South Africa’s government expressed hope that Angola would work toward ”bringing about a lasting reconciliation, security and stability to Angola,” foreign affairs spokesman, Ronnie Mamoepa, said in a statement.
In neighbouring Namibia, Foreign Minister Theo-Ben Gurirab said: ”Savimbi is dead and Savimbi’s war is over.
But the actual prospects for peace were unclear in a nation whose war has shifted from a ideological Cold War proxy battle to a struggle for control over Angola’s vast mineral wealth.
Few wars in Africa have taken a more tragic toll, in a nation that in theory would be among the continent’s wealthiest.
More than half a million people are believed killed in the war, while about one-third of its 12-million people have been displaced. – Sapa-AFP