FNLA, UNITA THREATEN INDEPENDENCE

Imperialist aims con verge in Angola

By WILLIAM POMEROY

LONDON — The victory in-
dependence celebration in Angola
Nov. 11 marked one of the great
Steps forward by the African
peoples in their long struggles for
freedom from colonial and neo-
colonial bondage.

Angolan independence is marked
also by a bitter and_ difficult
Struggle against neo-colonial
aggression which is striving to
nullify the newly-won freedom.

Independence was proclaimed in
the capital city of Luanda by the
Popular Movement for the
Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the
only liberation force that fought a
revolutionary armed struggle
against Portuguese fascist rule for
over a decade. Its leader, Dr.
Agostinho Neto, became head of
State in the independent govern-
ment.

MPLA has the overwhelming
Support of the urban. masses in
Angola, of the trade unions and
workers in general, and of the
intellectuals; MPLA maintained
for years an effective government
with Social services in wide
liberated rural areas where the
people gave the movement full
backing.

The aggression’ and threat to
genuine independence for Angola
Comes from two movements
which, unlike MPLA, have no real
mass base among the people.
FNLA (National Front for the
Liberation of Angola) and _ its
leader, Holden Roberto, remained
m neighboring neo-colonial Zaire
(while MPLA fought) sustained by
U.S. money in preparation for
intercession when independence
drew near. On the eve of inde-
pendence the Chinese Maoists sent
military instructors and aid to
FNLA to provide the finishing
touches for intervention.

UNITA (Union for the Total
Independence of Angola), headed
by Jonas Savimbi, did not exist
until the Portuguese revolution
occurred. It sprang up, with the
backing of the Portuguese white
Colonists in Angola, as the in-
strument to protect their interests.
When most of the white colonists
fled the country, Savimbi turned to
the U.S., South African and
Chinese assistance. The im-
perialist press admits the UNITA
is “‘weak’’ militarily and lacks a
mass base.

When the Portuguese armed
forces, the last remnant of Por-
tugal’s rule, pulled out of Angola on
the eve of Nov. 11, they failed to
turn independence over to any of
the three movements, although
MPLA was on the ground and
claimed administrative control
over 14 of the 16 districts of Angola.

While the Armed Forces
Movement in Portugal in the main
has backed MPLA, the army
commanders in Angola had been
hostile to it and deliberately
fostered the growth of FNLA and
UNITA. High ranking Portuguese
fascist officers, members of the old
fascist PIDA (intelligence agen-
cy), and counter-guerrilla
elements that had fled from
Mozambique when FRELIMO won
there, joined and took com-

manding positions in FNLA and
UNITA.

One of the top: commanders of
FNLA is the Portuguese Colonel
Santos e Castro who led the
criminal Black mercenary gangs
called Flechas (Arrows) during
Portugal’s colonial war of sup-
pression. They were responsible
for the massacres of entire villages
in Mozambique.

In the south, UNITA’s attack on
MPLA-held areas has’ been
spearheaded by an armored
column of 900 mercenaries (South
Africans, Portuguese fascists,
West German mercenaries and
others). This column is equipped
with French-made armored cars
(France supplies arms to South
Africa), and with helicopter
gunships of the type used by the
U.S. in Vietnam.

MPLA reports a third invasion
force, ELP, the ‘‘Portuguese
liberation army,” the ‘right-wing
counter-revolutionary group that
has also made attacks on Portugal
from bases in Spain. This is a
diehard colonial group that op-
poses the independence of Angola.

The invading forces represent
the various imperialist interests
that want to dominate a country
that, in resources, may be the
richest in Africa. The U.S.-backed
FNLA is seeking to seize the north
of Angola, where the U.S. Gulf Oil
Company is exploiting in the
Cabinda district, the biggest oil
field in Africa south of the equator.

South African intervention in the
south is related to large-scale
diamond mining by the South
African Anglo-American Corpora-
tion through its De Beers Con-
solidated Mines. A De Beers

.

Several hundred people,

“i H
Th LLENY YD DUY
D3 m ENEMIES

including students from a number of African countries, took part in this

demonstration outside the South African embassy in Bonn in the Federal Republic of Germany. The
demonstrators, urging support for the MPLA’s bid for Angolan independence, also protested interference by

West German economic interests.

subsidiary, Giamang, has the
diamond monopoly in Angola in
agreement with the former Por-
tuguese rulers, and has 62 mining
sites covering a total area of 500
square miles.

Also in the south, near the border
of apartheid-ruled Namibia, is the
large Cunene River dam and
hydroelectric project, costing $800
million, from which South Africa,
by agreement with fascist Por-
tugal, had hoped to get electric
power for its own economy.

Another major foreign stake is in

CIA director Colby
admits NCLC funding

William Colby, director of the
Central Intelligence Agency, has
admitted that his agency is giving
$90,000 annually to the National
Caucus of Labor Committees,
according to reports in two West
German newspapers.

The two newspapers — Die Tat
and Unsere Zeit, both published in
the Federal Republic of Germany
— stated that Colby made the
admission during briefings with a
Congressional committee last
month.

The funds were reportedly given
to New Solidarity, newspaper of

the NCLC which is distributed
around the world in several
languages.

Better known in this province as
the North American Labor Party,
the NCLC masquerades as a
‘‘Marxist, pro-Soviet’’
organization while it carries out
disruptive activities throughout
the labor movement.

The group’s newspaper which
apparently received the CIA funds
has already become involved in a
$10 million lawsuit initiated by the
United Automobile Workers which
claims that the NCLC illegally

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ANNUAL VOCHENBLATT
BANQUET

Sunday, January 25 at 6:30 p.m.
at the Peretz School, 6184 Ash St.

50 Years of Progressive Jewish Press
Joseph Gershwin, editor

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used the name of the union’s
newspaper Solidarity as a guise for
carrying out anti-union activities.

The reported admission by CIA
director Colby gives yet more
substantiation to a number of
recent charges that the NCLC has
been funded by the CIA and has
carried out the agency’s work.

According to the reports in the
two West German papers, the
NCLC has some 120 members in
the FRG of whom 80 are on full-
time staff. The group maintains at
least 13 offices in the country,
many of them in_ high-rent
buildings.

The annual operating costs of the
NCLC’s operations in the FRG are
estimated at about $400,000.

The two newspapers also
reported that the group — known in
Europe as the European - Labor
Committee — bought 10 new telex
machines in 1974 and paid cash.
Each machine costs between $4,000
and $8,000.

The telex machines are used
extensively by the group to link
European and other foreign
organization with the U.S. where
the NCLC is based.

As a result of increasing ex-
posure of its nefarious activities,
the NCLC has stepped up its
threats against labor and Com-
munist organizations and recently
sent a newsletter around the U.S.
which attempted to tie the U.S.
Communist Party and the Marxist
newspaper, the Daily World, to the
bombings at New York’s La
Guardia airport.

Writers at Unsere Zeit who broke
the story of the Colby admission,
also stated that they had been
threatened.

iron ore, one of Angola’s greatest
riches. A monopoly on this has
been held by the West German
Krupp interests which have held a
contract for exploiting areas with
over 250 million tons of ore.

Krupp financing of this has come
in part from the U.S. Export-
Import Bank and General Electric
Co. The West German tie with
South Africa is well known, and
Krupp would benefit from the
South African backing of UNITA
and FNLA.

Right-wing Portuguese interests
want to retain the coffee-growing
and exporting industry (Angola is
the third largest coffee exporter in
the world) that had been earning
over $100 million a year. Other
resources that have been exploited
by foreign companies are uranium,

sulphur, phosphate, sugar, sisal, ,

cotton, maize, as well as banking,
insurance and transport.

Angola is also of major strategic
interest for imperialism. U.S.
policy-makers have made no
secret of their aim to forge a great
neo-colonial arc of countries under
USS. control from Namibia through
Angola and Zaire, which, with
Rhodesia, would literally dominate
the south and centre of Africa and
would be a flanking threat to many
of the more progressive African
countries. For South Africa’s
apartheid regime this would be its
long-sought ‘‘bridge”’ to control for
imperialism Africa south of the
equator.

Congo |

N ) LUANDA

Atlantic
Ocean @Lobito

Nova Lisboa

Porto
Vg Alexandre

Namibia
(SWAfrica)

-erucial of all

Cabinda Zaire

eMalanje

—Tass photo

The Chinese Maoists have given
support to this imperialist scheme
of things. They have had close ties
with the notorious Mobutu regime
in Zaire that is armed by the U.S.
During a Mobutu visit to China in
1973, arrangements were made for
Maoist aid to Holden Roberto’s
FNLA. (Roberto is the brother-in-
law of Mobutu and also visited
China around the same time.)

The survival of the government
established in Angola by the MPLA
is of critical importance for Africa.
The Organization of African Unity
is now made up of 48 independent
states which cover a spectrum of
political and social development,
ranging from non-capitalist and
socialist trends to neo-colonial sub-
servience with reactionary
capitalist phenomena. Right-wing
regimes, of which Zaire, Ivory
Coast, Sudan and others are
examples, desire the elimination of
the MPLA government and the

triumph of the spurious “‘govern-
ment’’ proclaimed by FNLA-
UNITA.

A complete MPLA victory on the
other hand, would _ greatly
strengthen the forces of genuine
independence and freedom in
Africa and would lead to a more
rapid isolation of and overcoming
of the apartheid dictatorship in
South Africa.

The Angolan struggle is the most
.the liberation
struggles that have been occurring
in Africa for the past decade and a
half.

eLuso

Gaco e
Coutinho

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—JANUARY 16, 1976—Page 3