UNITA Anti-Communist Freedom Fighters Disarm, Surrender to Communist Angolan Government

Associated Press via The Washington Times ^ | April 4, 2002

[rightwing2]

April 4, 2002 Angola, UNITA ink peace deal

LUANDA, Angola, April 4 (UPI) -- The Angolan government and UNITA rebels signed a cease-fire deal Thursday, formally ending a 27-year civil war that killed nearly a million people. Army chief Gen. Armando da Cruz Neto and UNITA head Gen. Abreu Muengo Ukwachitembo "Kamorteiro" signed the deal at the country's National Assembly. "Peace has a price but it is a lesser price than the price of war," Kamorteiro said. Neto said peace in the country would "benefit ... Africa and the world as a whole." The accord comes following a preliminary cease-fire signed over the weekend. U.S., Russian and Portuguese ambassadors also initialed the accord. The countries were observers to the 1994 Lusaka peace accords, which collapsed four years later.

Addressing the National Assembly, U.N. Deputy Secretary-General for African Affairs Ibrahim Gambari said the world body was "glad to note now that peace is being given a chance in Angola." "War in Angola has gone for far too long and has (brought) unimaginable suffering to ... Angola," he said. "There should now be collective determination of the Angolan people that peace will come to this country to stay, forever." In an address to the nation Wednesday, President Jose Eduardo dos Santos, who also was present at the formal signing, called the deal "the reunion on the great Angolan family." "The war in Angola is over and that peace is here to stay," he said. He urged Angolans to "forgive and forget" the civil war that began in 1975 and which claimed about a million lives.

The ruling Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola or MPLA and UNITA rebels have been embroiled in a bitter rivalry since before the country's independence from Portugal in 1975. Following independence from Portugal after 500 years of colonial rule, UNITA and MPLA forces engaged in 16 years of fierce conflict that killed up to 300,000 people. The fighting ended temporarily with a 1992 peace deal that was supposed to lead to elections.

However, UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi, who was killed by government troops in late February, rejected the election results and the fighting resumed. The 1994 accord resulted in the deployment of U.N. peacekeepers to Angola but fighting continued and in 1999 the peacekeepers withdrew. The United States and South Africa supported UNITA in its battle against the MPLA. The MPLA was supported by Cuban ground forces and received military equipment from the former Soviet Union. The civil war has left the oil- and diamond-rich country devastated. According to U.N. estimates, more than a third of the Angolan population is homeless and depends on international agencies as a direct result of the war. The country also is regarded as among the world's least developed.

[FreedominJesusChrist]

Speaking of oil, Angola is not the only place that Bush is interested in with regards to foreign oil. U.S. oil interests are apparently interested in Afghanastan too.

Whether we like it or not, oil interests do play out in the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan. Everyone who has oil and gas interests in Central Asia needs stability in Afghanistan. For years, the U.S. government has had a long interest in involvement with Central Asia and its hopes of accessing oil and gas in that area. Central Asia includes Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan, parts of India and China. Central Asia has enormous quantities of undeveloped oil resources. Apparently, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan are the two major gas producers in Central Asia. Turkmenistan contains the world's eighth largest natural gas reserves. The U.S. also has oil interests in the Caspian Basin, which includes the Caspian Sea and surrounding countries, Azerbaijan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Turkey and Georgia. The Caspian Basin has an estimated $5 trillion of oil and gas resources.

According to experts, the only existing export routes from the Caspian Basin lead through Russia. Investors in Caspian oil and gas are interested in building alternative pipelines to Turkey, Europe, and Asia. Afghanistan occupies a strategic position between the Middle East, Central Asia and the Indian Subcontinent and lies squarely between Turkmenistan and the lucrative, desirable and growing markets of India, China and Japan.

On behalf of oil companies, an array of former cabinet members from the Bush Sr. administration have been actively involved in negotiations with Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan. They include former secretary of state James Baker, Brent Scowcroft, former national security advisor, John Sununu, former chief of staff and Dick Cheney, former secretary of defense and now Vice President.

Apparently, U.S. oil companies have been negotiating with Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan for access to the Caspian Basin for years, but have made no progress because of the political instability in the region. In September of 2000, the Department of Energy said in a factsheet: "Afghanistan's significance from an energy standpoint stems from its geographic position as a potential transit route for oil and natural gas exports from Central Asia to the Arabian Sea. This potential includes proposed multi-billion dollar oil and gas export pipelines through Afghanistan..."

Although Afghanistan is the only Central Asian country with very little oil, it is by far the best route to transport the oil to Asia.

Enron, who we all know about now, and was the biggest contributor to the Bush-Cheney campaign of 2000, conducted the feasibility study for a $2.5 billion trans-Caspian gas pipeline which is being built under a joint venture agreement signed in February 1999 between Turkmenistan, Bechtel and General Electric Capital Services.

From what I've read, in 1994, Cheney as CEO of Halliburton, a multi-billion oil and gas services company, helped to broker a deal between Chevron (now ChevronTexaco) and the state of Kazakhstan when he sat on the country's Oil Advisory Board.

I took all this information from handouts and notes that I learned about in one of my Poli. Sci. classes.

[GOP_1900AD]

So what will WE do about it? I know you to favor a fortress America approach. Isn't that likely to speed the roll back (of Freedom, that is)? We'll have a fine time trying to deal with it when only a small enclave around the USA are still free. My approach is one never before tried. Instead of cowering in our corner, let us hit the beast face on. The way we should have in '45 in E. Europe, in '52 in the PRC, in '65 in Indochina, and, of course, in a number of other particular places and times. How can you criticise an approach that have never even been tried? The approach is the proactive destruction of all enemies of Western Civilization. You know what this means. I know you do.

The Final Phase

[GOP_1900AD]

Bad link....

The Final Phase

[eleni121]

Savimbi - a hero in a world with so few. This is horrible news and weakens my respect for Bush.

[LenS]

Savimbi was another African totalitarian with himself as the center of the cult. If his cause was so strong, it would have survived his death. The real losers as always is the Angolan people.

[rightwing2]

How can you criticise an approach that have never even been tried? The approach is the proactive destruction of all enemies of Western Civilization. You know what this means. I know you do.

Sure I know what this means. Launching pre-emptive nuclear strikes against all our enemies weaker than us--namely the rogue states of Communist China, Iran, Syria, Libya, and some would say Iraq. Nuking our enemies is not the way that God would have us go. Nuclear weapons are indiscriminate. You cannot annihilate entire civilizations and their innocent populations and hope to still be saved in the Kingdom of our God. This is the madness that the Bushies are now preaching. Even as they dismantle virtually our entire strategic nuclear deterent and de-alert most of what's left to make the world safe for a nuclear first strike on the US by the superior offensive and defensive nuclear forces of the Russian Federation, the Bushies want to build and deploy micronukes which they hope to use against rogue states.

While I have no problem with this idea in theory as long as it is confined to purely military targets, using tacnukes against our enemies would merely serve to guarantee that they are used against us beginning with our tens of thousands of troops (and ships) stationed abroad occupying countries and regions whose populations rightly view them as occupying armies. We almost tried this before when we began implementing the Morgonthau Plan whose goal was to so deindustrialize post-war Germany as to reduce them to an agricultural subsistence level which was intended to result in the deaths of two thirds of the German population or the planned murder by starvation of 40 million lives. That would have made Churchill and Truman worse than Hitler and Stalin and almost as bad as the greatest mass murderer of all time the Satanic disciple himself, Mao Tse Tung. We must always remmber you cannot fight evil with evil.

[rightwing2]

I know you to favor a fortress America approach.

Not quite true. I favor a Fortress Americas approach in which the US invades moves against, embargoes and isolates any enemy nation in its hemisphere such as invading Cuba and retaking the Panama Canal from Communist China reoccupying it with 10,000 troops. I would also create a large force of Border Troops to guard our borders from incursions by illegal immigrants and terrorists and authorize the creation of Immigration Police to identify and expel all illegal immigrants from this country, which are perhaps the single greatest source of crime and terrorism in this country.

Meanwhile, abroad we would pursue the same strategy as the British Empire, which was to preserve the balance of power by preventing any combination of nations from challenging us as a superpower, which would entail cutting off entirely our constant stream of trade, aid, credits, and military technology and supercomputers to Communist China which are building it into the best nuclear superpower enemy that money can buy. This would weaken our growing global peer competitor, the Sino-Russian alliance by depriving them of the funds to build up their nuclear and conventional forces.

The US would also play to its strengths (as the British Empire did in the 18th and 19th centuries) by using its superior naval and airpower to deter aggression and threaten our enemies and if necessary engage in attacks to repel invasions using the ground forces of our allies rather than our own forces, thus minimizing to the greatest extent possible the loss in US lives. I might favor keeping our troops in Korea if we were to pull them back to a more defensible and survivable position in the Pusan peninsula out of DPRK SRBM range where they could not be overrun by invading forces.

I am divided on keeping our troops in NATO, now an imperialist aggressor alliance rather than a defensive won, which is in the process of being completely neutralized by the entry of Communist dominated Eastern European countries including the KGB led Russian Federation. I oppose NATO, which was bothersome as an entagling alliance all along, but having the Eurocorps replace it does not suit me either.

Lastly and most importantly, I would build a massive national missile defense system on land, the sea and in space potent enough to shoot down the entire nuclear arsenal of all of our enemies if fired simultaneously and extend this nuclear umbrella to all of our allies. I would retain all 6000 of our remaining strategic nuclear weapons--deployed and at full readiness to deter nuclear war and preserve our superpower status and I would threaten their use pro-actively against the aggression of rogue states abroad.

[FreedominJesusChrist]

I agree with you. Whoever was promoting this "annihilation" theory is obviously a couple marbles short of sanity, not to mention human decency. When it comes to war, I would say that the Catholic Church's Just War Doctrine sums up my views on war very well, even though I am not even Catholic. If war is necessary it must be justified, and when war is waged, it must be waged as ethically as possible, which in most cases means differentiating between the government and its civilians. Many times innocent civilians are held captive by the few powerful elite who run the entire government and should not be held responsible for the tyrannous actions of a few.

[happygrl]

Thank you for posting this. I'm afraid that, once again, the most ruthless have prevailed. If the totalitarians in Africa align themselves with the newest totalitarian movement, Islam, which is making big overtures to sub-Sahara Africa, the U.S. will come to regret having failed the pro-Western leaders such as Savimbi.

[GOP_1900AD]

We largely agree then. Thanks for the clarification and sorry for the misunderstanding on my part.

[DoughtyOne]

Thanks. It's nice to know a few people still have their heads glued on sqarely.

[rightwing2]

When it comes to war, I would say that the Catholic Church's Just War Doctrine sums up my views on war very well, even though I am not even Catholic. If war is necessary it must be justified, and when war is waged, it must be waged as ethically as possible, which in most cases means differentiating between the government and its civilians. Many times innocent civilians are held captive by the few powerful elite who run the entire government and should not be held responsible for the tyrannous actions of a few.

This is a perfect rendition of my own Just War Doctrine even though I too am not Catholic, but rather a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Right and moral ideas and principles are not restricted to any church, but rather are absolute and universal. I only wish it were strictly adhered to by our US policymakers and warmakers.

[rightwing2]

I'm afraid that, once again, the most ruthless have prevailed. If the totalitarians in Africa align themselves with the newest totalitarian movement, Islam, which is making big overtures to sub-Sahara Africa, the U.S. will come to regret having failed the pro-Western leaders such as Savimbi.

We shall come to regret it indeed. Kudos from a former Californian native! Hope you elect Simon over Governor "Red" Davis.

[rightwing2]

Your #27 was the most excellent, superb, and cogent explanation for our BEST over-arching foreign policy. Ditto all the way.

Thank you very much for your generous compliment here. You are too kind.

[WALLACE212]

We must have been separated at birth, your post is a startegy for national defense that (gasp), would actually work. Imagine a FREE, STRONG<, safe America. Wow, what a concept. You would think someone in Washington would espouse a similar defense doctrine.... yeah right.

The only thing I would add would be aggressive R&D into new, better nuclear weapons; ie. withdrawal from the Test Ban treaty. It is not healthy to sit on your laurels and believe that your wonder bombs will always be the best, you must keep developing better ones, or somebody will eventually beat you to it.

[rightwing2]

We must have been separated at birth, your post is a startegy for national defense that (gasp), would actually work. Imagine a FREE, STRONG<, safe America. Wow, what a concept. You would think someone in Washington would espouse a similar defense doctrine.... yeah right. The only thing I would add would be aggressive R&D into new, better nuclear weapons; ie. withdrawal from the Test Ban treaty. It is not healthy to sit on your laurels and believe that your wonder bombs will always be the best, you must keep developing better ones, or somebody will eventually beat you to it.

I'm with you 100%. We need to maintain and modernize our nuclear deterrent forces and resume nuclear testing NOW! I am in the process of refining and elaborating on my post above and posting it as a vanity post for further discussion. I will be sure and copy you when I do.

[WALLACE212]

Excellent. Let me know.

[Scholastic]

Thank you president Bush for your continued cooperation with terrorism and communism (oops did I say the "C" word?). You must make your father proud.