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."

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