« Responder #2 em: Maio 18, 2004, 05:08:56 pm »
3ª parte
Reinforcements for ‘Rommel’
The South Africans suffered their first heavy casualties (heavy, that is, in relation to the tiny size of the Zulu column) on November 12, when Cuban gunners dug in six miles south of Novo Redondo dropped a mortar bomb in the midst of the column as it was crossing an exposed stretch of muddy road between flooded marshes. Eighteen South Africans were wounded, and the fact that only one died was due solely to the speed with which they were got to an airstrip under cover of darkness and whisked back to a field hospital at Rundu.
But "Rommel" was about to receive vital reinforcements; a battery of 25-pounders was dropped at Benguela the same day, and the guns were brought forward overnight and placed in new positions. The surprise factor was enough to win the battle. The Cuban gunners on the other side started firing their rockets into the positions the South Africans had occupied the previous day when "Rommel’s" guns opened up at first light. Then they withdrew, unable to blow the bridge behind them because the flooded river had risen so high that they were unable to fix explosives to the pylons.
Novo Redondo was occupied on November 14. Here the Zulu column halted, although units were sent out to link up with the Foxbat column farther east, in the area of Santa Comba. "Rommel" sent out patrols to reconnoitre the roads farther north, and found that the Cubans and MPLA had blown all the bridges over the Queve river and set up formidable defences on the other side.
The road to Porto Amboin looked like another Death Road. It was impossible to get within four-and-a-half miles of the town cross-country because of the flooded swamps. For the same reason, it was impossible to get off the road. The road to Gabela looked easier, but scouts reported that the positions on the other side were "all manned by whites." The prospect of trying to rebuild a bridge under intensive fire from the Cubans’ "Stalin Organs" was not exactly appetising.
"Rommel" radioed back to Rundu requesting that a paratroop company should be dropped behind the enemy positions at Gabela. His request was refused. Frustrated by his relative lack of firepower and the lack of any means to get across the Queve river, he then asked for permission to pull back to Lobito. He was told to wait. At last, he was told to move east and establish a new headquarters near Cela, in an area where the Foxbat column had run into formidable opposition.
"Rommel" was recalled on November 26. He could console himself for the disappointment at the Queve river with the thought that, during the 33 days the Zulu column was no the move, it covered 1,974 miles - an average of some 60 miles a day.
The bloodiest battles of the war remained to be fought. On the central front, near Quibala, the Cubans were massing. The South Africans were compelled to move in 140mm. guns and to form yet another battle group, code-named "Orange."
Cubans hurled into combat
It was in no-man’s land north of Santa Comba that the celebrated “Battle of Bridge 14” took place. It raged for three days, from December 9 to December 12, and an entire battalion of Cuban troops were hurled into the combat. By the end of the battle, four South Africans and an estimated 200 Cubans had been killed on the eastern front, where the South Africans had responded to a UNITA request to help them to recapture Luso and to clear the Benguela railway right up to the Zambian border. Savimbi’s calculation was that if UNITA could establish its control over the whole length of the railway line it would guarantee the permanent support of land-locked Zambia by offering it a secure outlet to the sea for its copper and other exports.
By this stage there was, of course, no secret about the extent of Kaunda’s commitment to UNITA. Like other visitors to UNITA who travelled via Lusaka, I had found myself received by Jorge Sangumba, UNITA’s ubiquitous Foreign Minister, on the airport tarmac at the end of October, whisked through immigration and customs formalities, and subsequently put on to Savimbi’s personal Learjet (flown by Lonrho pilots) at the Zambian mining company’s airstrip for the flight to Silva Porto.
But Savimbi’s accurate calculation was that the mood could easily change, and that control of the railway would ensure that UNITA’s most vital black African friend would stay friendly.
As it turned out, UNITA never gained control of the entire railway. Luso, which had changed hands several times in the course of the fighting, was taken by a column, code-named "X- Ray," on December 11. This column had been stiffened by another two troops of South African armoured cars, but the advance father east was halted about 12 ½ miles short of Teixeira da Sousa, up against the Zambian border. The problem, once again, was the state of the bridge. A very large bridge had been blown, and South African engineers estimated that it could take up to three months to repair. Savimbi was told that at that stage it was not worth taking.
Before December 9, the day the OAU was supposed to meet, the Cubans had a stroke of luck which they were to turn into a major psychological warfare victory: they captured four South African mechanics who had been sent forward to repair a vehicle north of Cela and accidentally drove on too far into enemy-held territory. They were subsequently displayed in Luanda. The attention of the world media was now rivetted on the South Africans. The Cubans did not admit their own involvement in Angola until December 22.
The South Africans were by now intensely worried about the danger of fighting a lone battle against Communism in Angola. The heavy weapons that they had expected the Americans to supply were not arriving. The power of the U.S. Congress - and notably, of the House of Representatives Committee on Intelligence - to demand and get information CIA operations had led to the disclosure, and subsequent leakage to the Press, of five separate programmes, all of which had to be at least partially abandoned. And now South African prisoners were being posed for the cameramen in Luanda.
A secret war had become embarrassingly public, and there were now strong pressures within the Government for an immediate withdrawal. The date had already been fixed: it was to coincide with the OAU summit. But the OAU meeting was suddenly set back; it would now take place on December 18. Should the South Africans wait? The question became acute after December 18. On the last day that Congress met before the Christmas recess, the Senate voted to cut off all further covert assistance to UNITA and the FNLA.
The vote followed the revelation through Congressional hearings of the full extent of covert support for the anti-Soviet movements in Angola, including details of the airlift of light infantry weapons and rocket launchers to Zaire, and the provision of five Zaire-based spotter planes piloted by Americans. After the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 7-0 against military aid to any faction in Angola, an extraordinary coalition of liberals and conservatives voted in the Senate to impose a total ban.
The ghost of Vietnam was stalking Capitol Hill. The distrust of Government secrecy and the fear of embroilment in a potential Third World quagmire now ran so deep that even some of the Senate’s most notable hawks voted for the ban.
The news came to Pretoria as damning evidence of South Africa’s growing isolation in the struggle to determine Angola’s future. The mood of doubt deepened as news came in of heavy casualties around Quibala - and of a further postponement of the OAU meeting until January 9.
Demands of diplomacy
Some frenzied backroom diplomacy took place, involving numerous trips back and forth between black African capitals - notably Lusaka - and Pretoria. There were renewed pleas for South Africa to hold the ring for a bit longer. But Kaunda expressed his concern, on New Year’s eve, that the South Africans should leave before the OAU meeting opened or, at the latest, before it wound up. The British and French Governments both expressed concern that the South Africans should withdraw before the UN Security Council meeting scheduled for early January. While it was understood that the military position of the anti-Soviet forces in Angola could rapidly become untenable if the South Africans left, the Governments that had been discreetly sympathetic were now alarmed by the political and diplomatic situation.
South Africa’s ambassador to the UN, Mr. Pik Botha, darted home for urgent consultations, and met with the Prime Minister, senior Cabinet ministers and defence chiefs at Oubosstrand at the end of December. It may have been at this meeting that the decision on the final withdrawal was taken. The stage was set for the final denouement. On the eve of the OAU’s weekend summit in Addis Ababa, the MPLA paraded another three South African prisoners for the benefit of the world media. (The MPLA is still holding all seven South African captives.) The only thing that the black African leaders who assembled in Addis Ababa were able to agree on was a blanket condemnation of South Africa.
But the depth of black African distrust for the Angolan Marxists and their friends was made plain by the fact that, instead of voting overwhelmingly for a pro-MPLA resolution, the conference split right down the middle. A total of 22 states supported a document drawn up by Senegal’s President Senghor, calling for a "government of national reconciliation" in Angola. The same number supported an alternative text produced by Nigeria’s Brigadier Murtala Muhammed, which called on the OAU to recognise the MPLA as the legitimate Government of Angola.
This was the end of the road for the South Africans. To have stayed on in Angola would have required a new injection of men and material, with no assurance of adequate backing from any major power, but with the certainty that a continued South African presence would be used by the Marxist lobby in the OAU in the bid to get a new vote that would commit the organisation to the MPLA, and in accelerated efforts to isolate South Africa within international bodies like the U.N.
Their losses had been remarkably light - 33 South Africans killed, as against an estimated 2,000-plus Cubans.
The withdrawal of South African forces came on January 22. They pulled back to a line just north of the Cunene river. It is significant, in view of the Cubans’ propaganda claims of heroic victories in Angola, that it took them more than two months to occupy the vacuum left behind by the departing South Africans.
UNITA forces held on to the Salazar bridge, over the south-eastern bend in the Cuanza river, for weeks after the South Africans had gone. When the Cubans finally came inching south, Soviet-made spotter planes were sent ahead to check for any signs of remaining South African forces. The Cubans and the MPLA did not finally reach the border with South-West Africa until April 1, 1976, a week after the South Africans withdrew from their last remaining positions defending the Cunene hydro-electric scheme.
Mr. Vorster said at the time the withdrawal began that the fact "that an acceptable government of unity has not been established in Angola is not the Republic of South Africa’s fault. The Republic was not prepared to sacrifice its last man in a war on behalf of the Free World." I cannot quarrel with that statement.
South Africa was fighting many other people’s battles in Angola. The background will probably never be fully explained by the South Africans themselves for fear of destroying their remaining hopes of detente with black Africa.
Their refusal to go it alone was influenced by other factors. The most crucial was the possibility that the Communists might escalate the war by putting MiG fighters into the air. French intelligence sources (who maintained an excellent listening-post in Brazzaville throughout the war) reported that 12 MiG-21 fighters were uncrated in Pointe Noire in October, 1975, and assembled by Cuban technicians. American aerial surveillance subsequently established that these planes and a further 10 MiG-17s, were brought to airfields inside Angola in December. Big aircraft fuel dumps were established at the eastern diamond mining town of Henrique de Carvalho, which remained in MPLA hands throughout the war.
These planes were not used during the course of the South African campaign, nor (to the best of my knowledge) was there ever a direct threat from the Russians to intervene if the South Africans pushed farther north, or refused to depart. But the presence of the MiGs was a silent threat.
Their deployment would have presented the South Africans with the choice of committing their own Mirage fighters to an aerial battle over Angola - which might in turn have produced a further Communist escalation - or of watching superior hardware win the war for the Cubans. Even without planes, the Cubans (whose strength was up to 15,000 by mid-January) were exploiting their colossal superiority in armaments. No one intervened to stop the shipment of arms and men to Luanda during the campaign.
If there had ever been hopes that the Americans might attempt a blockade, they collapsed after the Senate vote on December 18. Meanwhile, the Soviet navy showed the flag by shadowing East European merchantmen en route to Angola.
Then there was the manpower problem. There were never more than 2,000 South Africans in Angola, as against almost 10 times as many Cubans by the end of the campaign. The troops South Africa deployed in Angola were the national servicemen who could be spared after security requirements in South-West Africa had been fulfilled, led by professional officers and N.C.O.s.
To increase the South African presence, it would have been necessary to to mobilise citizen forces, and that would have meant going to Parliament, with consequent publicity.
Marked lack of solidarity
Iko Carreira, the MPLA Defence Minister whose special contacts with Moscow were discussed in the first article, remarked in an interview in May last year that the victory for his movement in Angola was "in no way extraordinary, since proletarian internationalism exists." He was saying if effect that there will be more Angolas.
One thing the West did not take into account, he added, was "the militant solidarity of our friends, and in particular the Cubans." Sadly, the West showed precious little solidarity when it came to the crunch, let alone "militant" solidarity. How much confidence can Africa or Third World countries that are also targets for Soviet aggression feel after Angola - especially now that Mr. Carter’s newly-appointed ambassador to the U.N., Mr. Andy Young, has said that he does not view Communism as a danger in Africa, and that the Cubans are a force for stability in Angola? Angola’s shadow may prove to be as long as Vietnam’s.
MOSCOW’S NEXT TARGET IN AFRICA
by Robert Moss
Paying the price for Angola
Can the West learn from Angola’s tragedy, or are we condemned to relive the experience? What the Russians learned from Angola is that war by proxy pays off. They will be strongly tempted to use the same technique in other places - and almost certainly in the assault on Rhodesia and South-West Africa.
The Cubans are Moscow’s all-purpose mercenaries, but they are not the only proxy soldiers who are being deployed in the widening war for southern Africa.
The Nigerians are said to be heavily involved in Angola. Western intelligence sources report that Nigerian troops were present at battalion strength when the MPLA and the Cubans pushed south last year. According to UNITA sources in Paris, the Nigerian strength has since been reinforced.
UNITA sources have tapes of radio intercepts showing that at least 5,000 Nigerian troops have been deployed in Angola. They are operating as far south as Mocamedes, and are also based in Lobito, Luanda and the eastern diamond mining town of Henrique de Carvalho. UNITA claims to have intercepted radio communications in English (the common language between the Nigerians, the Cubans and the MPLA), in the Ibo, Hausa and Yoruba dialects, and in a form of pidgin Creole that could indicate the presence of forces from Sierra Leone as well.
An intriguing sidelight is that UNITA also claims that a British shipping line played a key role in ferrying Nigerian troops and military supplies to Angola. Nigeria, rich in oil and boasting an army of some 210,000 men, can clearly afford to be more than rhetorical in its backing for the guerrilla movements of southern Africa.
The Tanzanians have also moved into the region. President Nyerere has put 1,400 of his troops into northern Mozambique to help the FRELIMO Government to suppress the major revolt of the Makonde tribes led by Lazaro Kavandame. Mozambique’s army is largely recruited from the warlike Makonde.
Yet another African army is reported to have sent units south: Somali troops are said to be quietly moving into Mozambique. Rhodesian guerrillas in Maputo have bragged to Portuguese correspondents that Somali tanks will be used in future operations against Ian Smith’s forces. The story may not be as bizarre as it sounds. Somalia, like Cuba, is a Soviet satellite whose armed forces and intelligence services operate under the direct supervision of Russian officers. Although the Somali army is small (some 25,000 men), it is well-endowed with Soviet armour and has performed well in border skirmishes with the Ethiopians. The Somalis have 200 Soviet-made T-34 tanks and about 50 T-54s.
The black expeditionary forces' task may be to free the Cubans for a future offensive against Rhodesia, South-West Africa - or Zaire, which is also a prime target for the Russians. But the Cubans in Angola still have their hands full coping with the continuing guerrilla war, and the total number there has probably increased since the end of the South African campaign; some estimates range as high as 22,000.
There are more than 1,000 Cuban advisers and "technicians" in Mozambique, nominally assigned to the Senna sugar plantations or to the port of Beira. Many are believed to be military instructors for the ZIPA guerrillas from Rhodesia and the FRELIMO forces.
In Somalia, at least 600 Cuban instructors are attached to the Somali army and the pro-Somali guerrillas from Djibouti - the French-controlled port on the Red Sea that is expected to become independent later this year. The Cubans are also active in Equatorial Guinea, where President Macias has established one of the bloodiest dictatorships in black Africa. Some 200 Cuban instructors train his paramilitary forces and his personal bodyguard. There are another 300 Cuban advisers in Sekou Toure’s Guinea.
In Sierra Leone, Cubans are training an internal security unit, and Cuban "technicians" have also been sent to the strategically-placed former Portuguese possessions in West Africa: Guinea-Bissau, the Cape Verde Islands, and Sao Tome e Principe.
The Cubans are particularly well-entrenched in Congo-Brazzaville, the main staging-point in their invasion of Angola. They maintain at least 400 men at the Pointe Noire docks and the Maya Maya air base, and there are reports that reinforcements have recently been moved in from Angola in preparation for an attempt to put renewed pressure on Zaire’s President Mobutu, whose supply of routes to the Atlantic are now endangered. In Tanzania there are at least 150 advisers and "technicians," some of them attached to the Tanzanian People’s Defence Force.
All in all, it is not a bad effort for a Caribbean sugar-cane republic of eight million people. Of course, someone else is picking up the tabs. The Russians have not only been subsidising the Cuban economy to the tune of more than $1 million a day; they invested over $500 million in the Angolan campaign, and are believed to have supplied weaponry and equipment to Angola worth more than $350 million since the South Africans pulled out.
But Cuba’s role as a Soviet proxy is even more striking if you take account of the Cuban presence in the Caribbean (where Castro’s men are training Jamaican police) and in the Middle East (where 150 Cuban instructors are training international terrorists in Iraqi camps), not to mention the Cubans’ efforts to take control of the non-aligned countries’ news pool and the role of the Cuban intelligence service, the DGI, in orchestrating the activities of Latin American exile groups and transnational terrorists in Western Europe. Is it possible to imagine an anti-Communist country of the same size acting on the same scale today?
The strategic effect of the loss of Angola is summed up by two statements that oddly coincide: one from the Soviet paper Izvestia, in a major article last August; the other from South Africa’s Prime Minister, Mr. Vorster, in his New Year’s message. Izvestia said that "revolutionary events have seized southern Africa - the last strong bulwark of colonialism and racism - and the speed of the spread of the flame attests to the huge supplies of ‘explosive material’ accumulating there." Mr. Vorster, in simple but chilling words, showed that the message had not been lost on him: "The storm has not struck yet. We are only experiencing the whirlwind that goes before it."
Were the effects of the Cuban victory foreseen by the men who sat down in the American Senate on December 17, 1975, to debate whether or not they should vote to cut off all United States support to the anti-Soviet movements in Angola? With a few honourable exceptions, it seemed that the Senators were talking about another war. Senator after Senator recalled the anguish of Vietnam, the peril of getting sucked into another quagmire, the hopelessness of trying to shape events in a far-off place of which Americans knew nothing.
Continuing fight against Marxists
Hubert Humphrey caught the prevailing mood: "The United States better start taking care of things it knows how to take care of. We know so little of Africa, the 800 and some tribes that make up Africa... I say it is like a different world."
Senator McGovern jumped up to argue that it made no difference which of the black movements won anyway. Senator Tunney thought the rival Angolan movements were only nominally pro-Soviet or pro-American. At heart, all of them were "basically pro-Angolan, Socialist and highly nationalistic." Most of the senators who spoke that day found it difficult to believe that the Russians would be able to establish a secure foothold in Angola, and some suggested that Angola could prove to be Russia’s Vietnam.
It was not a wholly absurd idea. To this day, three anti-Soviet guerrilla movements are continuing the struggle in Angola: UNITA in the south and centre of the country, the FNLA in the north, and the secessionists of FLEC in the Cabinda enclave. Unlike left-wing revolutionaries from other countries who fly off to university sinecures or their Swiss bank accounts after suffering defeat on their home ground, Jonas Savimbi is carrying on the battle deep inside Angola.
He has claimed that UNITA has 22,000 armed supporters, although Western intelligence sources believe that the figure is probably no more than 6,000. It is virtually impossible to get reliable information on the guerrillas’ military capacities, but one index of UNITA’s ability to harass the regime is the fact that no train has been able to cover the whole length of the Benguela railway - from the Zambian border to the coast - since the beginning of the war. UNITA’s political base is still largely intact, and the MPLA has had little success in building up support among the Ovimbundu peoples, traditional UNITA sympathisers.
This means that it might well be possible for UNITA and the other anti-Soviet groups to inflict a serious humiliation on the Cubans and the MPLA - if they could count on effective outside support. But no Western Power is disposed to play the part of armourer and adviser to UNITA in the way that the Russians and Chinese played it for the Vietcong.
South Africans maintain contacts
Now that the MPLA regime has been admitted to the United Nations, backing UNITA has become diplomatically tricky - although some Western Governments are more strait-laced than others. The French were ahead of the stampede to recognise the MPLA back in February, 1976 (much to the annoyance of their EEC partners, who had expected to be consulted) but this did not inhibit them from remaining deeply involved with UNITA and the FNLA.
Zambia’s President Kaunda has come under intense pressure from his "frontline" colleagues to sever all links with UNITA, and finally had to ask Jorge Sangumba, UNITA’s chief foreign spokesman, to leave his customary haunt, the Intercontinental Hotel in Lusaka. Jorge now gives his patronage to the Intercontinental Hotel in Kinshasa.
The South Africans maintain contact with the anti-Soviet movements, and there is a large colony of white Angolan refugees. But they are inhibited by their desire not to provide a pretext for a Communist-backed invasion of South-West Africa.
Ironically, if any outside power is ready to adopt a "forward policy" in Angola, it could still prove to be China. The Chinese have backed both the FNLA and UNITA in the past. Many UNITA leaders, including Savimbi’s number two, Miguel Nzau Puna, have received training in China. Puna complained to me when I last saw him about the rigours of the Chinese training schedule (which continued into the night with political indoctrination sessions). The Chinese cut off support to UNITA at the end of 1975, when hard evidence of South Africa’s involvement seeped out.
But the Chinese are angry that they have lost nearly every point to the Russians in the contest for power in black Africa - despite the fact that they have spent considerably more in economic aid. So renewed contact with UNITA is a possibility, if a remote one.