March 3, 2002 By HOWARD W. FRENCH To judge by his effect on the lives and fortunes of an entire region, Jonas Savimbi, the guerrilla leader who was killed in a shootout with Angolan government troops on Feb. 22, had only one real rival in southern Africa over the last half-century: Nelson Mandela. Mr. Mandela, whose moral stature helped peacefully end apartheid, will probably be remembered as one of the closest approximations of sainthood in 20th century politics. As an archetypal figure of the cold war, meanwhile, Mr. Savimbi epitomized the horrendous waste of the era's proxy struggles. Unlike many cold war confrontations, Washington's Great Game in Angola was largely waged in secret and soon faded from the world stage. Even now, the tragic side effects of America's determination to combat Angola's Marxist government, from Washington's disastrous support of the Zairean dictator Mobutu Sese Seko to African backing for his equally brutal successor, Laurent D. Kabila, remain little examined. Memories of the cold war fighting may have quickly died, but the combatant would not fade away. Instead, after losing internationally supervised elections in 1992, he plunged his country - potentially one of Africa's wealthiest because of rich natural resources - into a new round of civil warfare. For the umpteenth time in his long career, the changeling guerrilla effortlessly shed his ideological clothing, becoming an outright warlord who traded diamonds with global crime networks for guns and money. Perhaps a million Angolans were killed during Mr. Savimbi's 27 years of civil war. The sad fact is that no one really knows how many died. One-third of the population was made homeless, and vast stretches of the country were studded with lethal mines, which continue to maim people by the thousands. Mobutu's Zaire became Washington's conduit for covert support for Mr. Savimbi, and Zaire emerged as the center of a web of interlocking rebellions and gangsterism stretching from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. American officials whose careers were associated with Mr. Savimbi's struggle insist that no apologies are due to Angolans today. Indeed, for Chester A. Crocker, an assistant secretary of state for African affairs from 1981 to 1989, the Savimbi he knew remains a "freedom fighter," even now. "It is a pretty sad story, I agree," Mr. Crocker said in an interview. "There has been horrendous suffering, but I don't think the country would have been better off if we hadn't played the role that we played, of consistently fighting for people to have a chance to shape their own destiny at the ballot box. You can't do that until you get the foreigners out, and we did that." The foreigners Mr. Crocker referred to were, above all, the 50,000 Cuban troops, who, with Soviet funding, poured into Angola to support the new Marxist government after Angola's independence from Portugal in 1975. The Cubans left in 1989, as part of a negotiated agreement for the independence of Namibia. Left unsaid, though, was that Washington long supported Portugal's rule in Angola, perhaps the continent's harshest colonial regime. Moreover, escalation of the proxy war that accompanied Angolan independence started with the United States, which armed Zairean units to invade, and with South African forces, which did the same. Mr. Crocker said Mr. Savimbi enjoyed a strong claim to legitimacy as a leader of the large Ovimbundu tribe, from the country's interior. To his last, the rebel leader played on this, scorning the "Europeanized elites" of the capital, Luanda, while embracing what he claimed were "negritude" and African authenticity. FOR most of his career, though, Mr. Savimbi was dependent on the army of white supremacist South Africa to carry his fight. Washington's longtime support for his Union for the Total Independence of Angola, known by the Portuguese acronym Unita, had, in effect, made it an ally of apartheid - all in the name of combating communism. "It all comes under the rubric of the enemies of my enemies are my friends," said Gerald J. Bender, a professor of international relations at the University of Southern California. Dressed in crisp fatigues and sporting a cane, Mr. Savimbi embodied a sort of counterrevolutionary chic. For a Washington in full campaign against the "evil empire," he was the anti-Che Guevara. But Africans had no use for the romantic images that outsiders often found irresistible. Usually, they were too busy running for their lives. During a seesaw battle for the city of Huambo, in 1993, for example, Mr. Savimbi shelled the city of 400,000 for weeks to recapture it from the government, and reportedly attacked columns of refugees from his own ethnic group. According to Mr. Bender, there were reasons much closer to home to give Washington pause. "When the first Unita rep in Washington, George Sangumba, went back home, Savimbi killed him," Mr. Bender said. "The second guy was put under house arrest, and was later killed in a suspicious shootout. Savimbi personally beat another representative, Tito Chingunji, and his wife and children to death with rifle butts." Nonetheless, Mr. Savimbi remained Washington's favorite African throughout the 1980's. "Linguist, philosopher, poet, politician, warrior," Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan's United Nations representative, once gushed in a toast. "Savimbi has admirers the world over, and I have long been one of them. He is one of the few authentic heroes of our time." THAT Mr. Savimbi could be so many things to so many people attests to the one trait he consistently embodied: opportunism. He was an early member of the independence struggle against Portuguese rule in the 1960's, yet also collaborated with the secret police. He affixed the title doctor to his name, yet never earned a degree. Most impressively, he moved from Marxism to Maoism, to be ultimately hailed by Mr. Reagan, who armed him with Stinger missiles and other sophisticated weapons, as Africa's Abraham Lincoln. With Mr. Savimbi dead, Washington can now work to shut down other insurgencies and help a swath of the continent that is extraordinarily rich in resources to finally deliver advancement for its people. "We have relegated this to a category of ancient history, but we can't really explain the war in the Congo, or much else in this region, until we understand how covert channels into Angola drove U.S. policy" in Central and Southern Africa, said Peter Rosenblum, associate director of the human rights program at Harvard University. "Maybe we did win the cold war in a lot of other places, but we left an open wound across Africa." ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html To contact the List Management, please send an e-mail to: [log in to unmask] ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~