Blowback - S6 Episode 10 - "Zero-Sum"

Episode Date: February 16, 2026

The Cold War ends. Apartheid falls. But Savimbi's war continues. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ladies and gentlemen, as you know, I'm in the final weeks of my presidency. You don't have to clap for that. You can't if you want. But I wanted to come to Angola, although I've been chairman of the African-Airous subcommittee for a long time, I'd never made it to Angola. Because although I don't know exactly what the future will hold, I know the future runs through Angola, through Africa. I mean it sincerely.

I'm not kidding. I know that any nation that wants to thrive in the next century, We must work as partners with workers, entrepreneurs, and businesses here in Africa. I know that the connection between our communities, our universities, our sports, our civil societies, our families, our people will only grow deeper. We have to stay focused. The story of that goal in the United States holds a lesson for the world. Two nations of the shared history.

Welcome to Blowback. I'm Brendan James. And I'm Noah Colwyn. And this is Season 6, Episode 10, Zero Sum. In our last episode, we came to the official end of the Cuban intervention in Angola. The comeback staged against apartheid South Africa and its allies at Cuido-Quineval gave the Angolan government and the Cubans leverage in the New York Accords of 1988. This was the agreement that would finally free Namibia from South Africa's control.

and free the tens of thousands of Cuban troops to return home. Alongside the Soviet Union's slide into oblivion and the internal collapse of apartheid, the international dimension, the Cold War character of the Angolan Civil War had by now come and gone. But the war itself was not over. After the New York Accords, it dragged on for several more years, as Jonas Savimbi and his Unita fighters refused to concede, even after their South African sponsor had deserted them. And Unita continued to receive material support as well as covert aid from the United States. but after a new agreement in which the U.S. exhausted with, though still supportive of Savimbi, pressured Unita to participate with the MPLA government

in a transition to multi-party elections. In this episode, the final episode of this season, we'll witness the moment of hope that came with an end to fighting, which had been a daily reality for Angolan's over the decades. The elections of 1992 would open up Angola's politics, creating space for over a dozen new political parties, though everyone knew that the real contest was, as ever, between the MPLA government and Unita. In both the presidential and parliamentary races, the latest showdown was still between these two factions. One, an embattled

government, the other, a state within a state. One, a dysfunctional collection of lapsed Marxists, the other a polished yet brutal cult of personality. The Soviet Union, meanwhile, was undergoing its own political reorientation, if not outright implosion. But it continued to support the Angolan government while also supporting a peace process and talks to achieve that end. The United States, for its part, did not recognize the Angolan government, and in fact continued to send aid to Jonas Savimbi, while disagreeing with him that there would be any realistic military solution to the conflict. And Unita was still popular in 1992, particularly among

the Ovambundu people of the South, but in many other areas of the country as well. And the United States thought there was a good chance that Savimbi and Unita could pull off an election. In any case, everyone seemed ready to step into a new era of politics and progress. Well, almost everyone. There was one caveat to this new era. Jonas Savimbi's troops had not stopped fighting. Earlier today at the White House,

Jonas Zivimbi, the president of the African organization Unita, met with President Bush. Afterward, he came out into the White House driveway and spoke with reporters. Coming up next, we bring you in his comments. to reporters. When Angola came out of the Cold War in 1991, writes historian David Birmingham. Quote, it was a different country from the one that had emerged from the colonial war.

In 1974, a major export had been coffee, efficiently carried by Lorry on asphalted highways built for strategic military purposes. In 1991, one of the exports which exceeded coffee was scrap metal, quarried from the half million tons of junk attached to the thousands of military and civilian vehicles, which had been blown up along Angola's ruined roads during the years of bitter conflict. The graveyard of military vehicles was matched by the graveyard of human victims. End quote. The decades of war had disfigured this country, as had happened in the same stretch of time, to Cambodia, to Afghanistan, to Iraq. Now, the Anita leadership moved from Jamba to Luanda, and thousands of refugees internally

displaced by the war set off to return to their homes. But the Bissas Accords, the latest agreement that was to usher Angola into its election period, had been, to put it generously, half-heartedly implemented. The United States, which still supported Savimbi, had at least admonished him after some bone-chilling revelations went public about the way Unita ran its operations, including the murder of heretics, both real and imagined. Washington, which still did not recognize the MPLA, did also direct funds to go to Angola's Electoral Commission through soft power organs, such as the National Endowment for Democracy

and USAID. This was a two-sided policy. The Janus faced appearance of support to-examination. Angola, while still refusing to accept the current government, either politically or diplomatically. Savimbi was feeling his oats in the lead-up to the elections, which appeared to reassure Washington. Journalist Jeremy Harding, no great admirer of Savimbi's enemies in the MPLA, attended speeches of the Anita leader given in London. Quote, twice on the same day, writes Harding, I went to hear him speak. Unlike Mandela, whose release Savimbi praised, Savimbi could not fill Wembley

Stadium. However, in Britain, he had a dedicated following of extreme conservatives. Quote, the fatigues and the gun were gone. Instead, he wore a dark collarless suit and plentiful gold on his fingers. About him, there was an unsavory mixture of pomp and conviviality. Today, he listed the great opportunities to be had in Angola. Oil, petrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, forestry, fishing, industrial processing, civil engineering, and tourism. In the hope that he would assume the presidency of Angola, he was already putting the country up for auction, end quote.

And there were indeed interested investors. De Beers, the Diamond Consortium, no stranger to wedding Itspeak in Angola, was eager to dig into diamond deposits. Other European companies awaited lucrative contracts to rebuild Angola. At times, Savimbi's forces

acted like there was no new ceasefire agreement at all. Quote, despite the ceasefire, you need to continue to carry out acts of violence, writes scholar George Wright, including killing four tourists in January 1992

and harassing and killing voter registrars. Moreover, Zavimbi had concealed 20,000 of his guerrillas. Some troops disguised as civilians were deployed in towns or villages, end quote. Unita had also stockpiled huge amounts of weapons provided by the U.S., he adds, including the famous Stinger missiles. Quote, on the other hand, the government troops were demobilized. Tens of thousands did leave the assembly points, largely because they assumed the war was over, and because the facilities lacked food, clothing, and

inadequate housing." The government also promised, as it had in the past, a government of national unity, which would include elements of Unita. But that was not enough for Savimbi. The Americans and Russians even went to the trouble of organizing meetings with Savimbi, as well as President José Eduardo Dos Santos, months before the elections, in order to hammer out some kind of understanding of a post-election carve-up of power. The UN representative, Margaret Anstey, flew everywhere in decrepit aircraft, writes Birmingham,

parsimoniously funded by the United States and courageously piloted by intrepid Russians. She endeavored to harmonize the two partisan armies that were to be partly demobilized and partly integrated into a single national force, end quote. The elections were finally held at the end of September 1992. The United Nations sent in hundreds of election observers, as did the governments of the U.S. and Europe, significantly Portugal, which had played a key role in negotiations that had led to this moment. Turnout was strong, a little over 90%. Early and accurate returns saw a major victory for the MPLA in the parliamentary elections,

about a margin of two to one. The presidential race was tighter, with Dos Santos ahead by roughly 10%. though this was still possibly enough to merit a runoff presidential election, according to the terms of the Bessacords. But Savimbi had seen enough. Within a month, Unita more or less declared war on the government. The day the early returns were announced, Savimbi gave an inflammatory speech on Unita's Radio Vorgon,

rejecting the partial results, says George Wright, claiming they were based on fraud. quote, that same day the Americans sent Savimbi a message, telling him to respect the election results and to petition the Electoral Commission if he had felt there were violations. Savimbi threw Washington a bone by filing the petition, but, more notably, he threatened to restart war in a few days. Not long after that, his unita generals withdrew from the newly integrated National Army. Savimbi secretly flew from Luanda to the central Angolan city of Huambo.

Quote, late that night, reports journalist Victoria Britain, in the heavily guarded radio building, the weary MPLA official in charge of the election results was sitting among the empty coffee cups in the strategy room. Quote, if he's gone to Huambo, it is a declaration of war, end quote. No less than the New York Times agreed. Quote, Savimbi, trailing,

Hints at New War. In the next few weeks, every election monitor involved, including those reporting for the U.S. State Department, certified Angola's 92 elections as free and fair. No widespread fraud. The MPLA won the legislative elections with over 53% of the vote, to Anita's 34%. Dos Santos fell just short of a full 50% in the president,

presidential race, which necessitated a runoff against Savimbi, who had won 40%. Of course, there would be no runoff. On October 30th, Unita attacked several government targets, including the airport and several police stations near Luanda. The government emboldened by its election win wasted no time in cracking down on Unita. The relief that people had felt for the past 18 months evaporated. the war was back on. It's Angola's worst nightmare. Only seven months after the country's first free elections,

fighting has nearly destroyed any chances for peace. Despite new talks, battles now are fiercer than at any time during the country's 18-year civil war. Nowhere, however, are the tragic results more evident than here, in Huambo, where government, forces are trying to regain control of Angola's second largest city from Unita, the National Union for the total independence of Angola, which for years was supported by the United States. This once prosperous city is now in ruins. Most of its 400,000 citizens have fled. No one knows

how many people may have been killed. International relief groups have been trying desperately to get in. The suffering, they say, is indescribable. This new war was different, writes Birmingham. different from the colonial war of 1961, from the interventionist war of 1975, and from the destabilization war of the 1980s. Quote, all three of the earlier conflicts had been fought primarily in the countryside and had only indirectly affected towns. The war of 1992 concerned whole cities. The defeated opposition could do its electoral sums as effectively as any UN observer, and recognized that it was in the urban heartland that it had lost its bid for power. Unita, therefore, set out to destroy disloyal cities.

Harding agrees, quote, the Cold War had wreaked havoc in Angola, but at least a proportion of the fighting had been confined to military fronts. Now the fronts were nominal. In fact, they had blurred beyond recognition. This loss of definition meant more torment for civilians, especially in the north where Unita was heavily armed and fighting wherever it saw the chance, end quote.

During the Cold War, a Marxist government backed by the Soviet Union was at war with anti-government forces back by the United States. Last year, Angola had free elections, but the losers, the side that the United States used to support, has refused to accept the results. Our correspondent in Africa, Don Cladstrip, on the consequences. Jonas Savimbi writes Birmingham, quote, refused. to contemplate a compromise solution, recognizing that the presidential system, so attractive to him when he thought he would win, gave all power to the president. He calculated that his only hope of gaining the power which he had craved pathologically since his student days in Switzerland was to seize it through the barrel of a gun. Within weeks of Savimbi stealing away to Huambo,

writes Britain, reports came in describing Unita attacks in the provinces. In Wombo itself, quote, two days of heavy fighting between Unita forces and police backed by government soldiers who individually joined the defense of the town. Dozens of people died in street fighting as as Unita took over the radio station and the hospital, end quote. Back in the capital, armed Unita forces cropped up against the rules of the UN peacekeeping operation, although the UN didn't seem to be raising many alarms. The MPLA, meanwhile, passed around arms to its supporters in an eerie repeat of the defense of Luanda

against the FNLA in 1975. This was the opening salvo of the new phase of Angola's Civil War. In Luanda's embassy district, Britain writes that Unita forces began taking hostages, the logic being that foreign captives would make the MPLA less likely to directly retaliate. And this had apparently caught Washington's attention. The combat in the capital was house to house,

and was in many cases outright slaughter. To the horror of many MPLA supporters, writes Britain, hundreds of young men given guns as protection used them in revenge attacks on supposed Unita supporters, and even on Zaireans suspected of supporting Unita. many Luandaans hid Zairean or Ovenbundu colleagues fearing for their lives if they should be taken for Unita's supporters. In Luanda and other major towns,

Unita's apparent coup attempt was shut down, but Savimbi's forces continued their offensive elsewhere in the country and successfully captured strategic footholds, such as the diamond mines at Kufunfo. The diamond mines of Angola's North would prove to be very important. to Savimbi in the coming years. By the dawn of 1993,

an estimated 10,000 people had been killed since the autumn election. An estimated 3 million people had been displaced by the new fighting, which only seemed to be intensifying. 10,000 Unita troops were dispatched to Wombo, leading to a 55-day siege, which essentially destroyed

one of Angola's best-preserved cities before Unita captured. it. The Angolan journalist William Tonnet walked 250 miles to escape Wombo. He told the Associated Press afterward that the city had been, quote, raised to the ground. 12,000 people were reported to have been killed, and as Unita forces fanned out over the country throughout 93 and 94, they controlled as much as 70% of the territory of Angola. The MPLA, notes Britain, quote, was utterly stunned by the speed of the reverse and unable to rouse any part of the international community to make an effective response, end quote. All the while Angola sank into a humanitarian disaster that experts described as worse than in any of the previous two decades of fighting.

All the while, Unita rebels fired at UN airplanes delivering aid. In 1994, writes journalist Carl Mayer, quote, the UN negotiated a deal to feed the city of Cuito in Angola's Central Highlands, which was besieged by Jonas Savimbi's Unita rebel movement. Under the agreement, half the airlifted food went to the inhabitants of Quito, and the other half went directly to a major Unita warehouse, where it was used to feed Savimbi's army. The effort saved thousands of lives, but it also allowed Unita to continue the siege.

There is a tremendous amount of suffering going on in Africa overall, particularly in the southern African nation of Angola, where the U.S. was at one time very much involved. Because the forces which the U.S. used to support would not abide by the results of a recent election, the civil war in Angola has intensified once again, and more people are dying. every day in Angola as a result of war and hunger than any place else in the world. Here's ABC's Mike Lee. For most, there is no medicine left to ease the pain.

They are victims of Angola's forgotten war, an African crisis, which has not attracted the kind of international attention focused on Somalia. Yet, in the past year alone, up to 100,000 Angolanes have died. Many others have lost a hand, an arm, or a leg. Children have been blinded. Mothers dumbfounded with grief. It's a country in agony.

That's dying, surviving, dying, surviving. It's a very long, long illness, and the illness is the war. The civil war has raged recently, but it dates to the mid-70s when Angola won its independence. The Soviets supported a communist group, which later became the democratically elected government. The US supplied the rebel, the rebel Unita movement, but has since withdrawn that support because Unita is now trying to

take by force what it could not earn at the polls. The U.S. is among the largest contributors of food supplies to Angola, but emergency flights are often shot at by America's former ally, Unita. The U.N. warns that 3 million people could starve to death without food flights. Politically speaking, the Bush administration sat on the sidelines as all of this unfolding. in the 90s. For months before the election, there had been signs that Savimbi would not accept an election. In fact, early on in 1992, another pair of Unita's most senior leaders publicly defected. They warned that Savimbi was preparing for another round of war. Still, Bushworld took few, if any, steps to constrain him. But autumn of 92 had also been election time in the United States.

As war in Angola restarted, the lame duck Bushites did not respond with much public criticism of Savimbi. Instead, America's Hank Cohen had condemned the MPLA for its, quote, seeming winner-take-all post-election attitude, while he quietly urged Savimbi to accept the election results. When it became clear that Savimbi wouldn't accept the results, the American position somewhat shifted. quote, the UN and U.S. response to Unita's capture of Huambo, writes George Wright, quote, was to pressure Unita into negotiating by condemning its aggression and improving relations with the Angolan government, end quote. Although the American's goal was still national reconciliation between the factions in Angola, Savimbi had reneged on a U.S. supported peace agreement.

He had rejected U.S. supported elections. He had begun attacking American-owned oil facilities, and, finally, Unita was unwilling to make any concessions in negotiations with the MPLA that had been hastily assembled by the Americans. Bill Clinton had not sought to make major changes to America's strategy in Angola, but in the post-Cold War thaw, Unita had pushed Washington too far. Savimbi had, if anything, gone rogue while the MPLA stuck to his own. word as the situation deteriorated. In May 1993, the Clinton administration officially recognized the Luanda government, as Angola fell out of the news, becoming, as GQ Magazine called it,

the following year, the forgotten war. President Clinton has announced today that after 15 years of refusing to do so, the U.S. is going to recognize the formerly Marxist government of Angola in southern Africa. Mr. Clinton said the Angolan government has earned America's recognition by making a good faith effort to end the civil war, which is still going on against a guerrilla force the United States used to support. Cut off from the White House, cut off from a now apartheidless South Africa, and even sanctioned directly by the UN Security Council. How did Savimbi make this new war work? The answer is a combination. Of diamonds, of mercenaries, and of arms supplied by the then-ongoing collapse of the Soviet Union.

In an interview, historian Justin Pierce told us more about this. The 1990s are a decade in which mercenary activity flourishes throughout the African continent and not only. The apartheid has ended in South Africa. The largely white army of South Africa is being disbanded. what do the white former South African army officers do? They set up so-called security companies mercenary outfits. So, you know, one of the important sources of security for the MPLA government after 1990 is a South African mercenary company called executive outcomes.

Many of those soldiers would have fought against the NPRA in the apartheid-era South African Defense Force. You know, they know Unita very well because you used to be on their side. Unita is now the enemy, which they are fighting against. So it's a question of earn money from oil, spend money on mercenaries, on hired guns. Where do the guns? When did the transport come from? Well, the Soviet Union is in the process of disintegrating as well. You have a lot of Soviet planes and weaponry and pilots now kind of selling themselves on a global market. So, you know, you will see Antonovs, the new oceans, the planes of the Soviet Union,

which are now being run by private operators and are used to fly soldiers and weapons around Angola. So it's everything for hire, really. On the side of Unita, it no longer has its diplomatic support, but it still has access to diamond fields. What's very important for Unita early in that 1990s phase of the war is it takes control of the northeast of Angola, which is the most important diamond mining area. It's able to get those diamonds out onto global markets via Zaire, the neighboring country, now the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Mabutu de Sessi Sehoku, the long-term leader of Zaire, has long been an ally of Unita. And those diamonds get out through Zaire onto international markets in Belgium and in Israel. Sovimbi's diamond wealth, though substantial, was not sufficient to match the MPLA's oil money. By late 1994, Margaret Anstey successfully led negotiations for another round of peace talks in the capital of neighboring Zambia. The Lusaka Protocol of November 1994, writes Birmingham, generated none of the euphoria that had accompanied the peace signed in 91. Quote, Savimbi showed his contempt for the unpalatable necessity of suspending hostilities by staying away from the signing ceremony. This cold hostility, neither war nor peace, lasted for four years, end quote.

At the end of two years, it was, quote, estimated that Savimbi, war chest had grown to $2 billion, and that he had recently been able to buy another 45 tons of weapons flown in from Bulgaria to the mile-long airstrip which Yinida conscripts had built in Central Angola, end quote. But deal-making like this, without a patron like the U.S. or South Africa behind him, could only take Savimbi so far. Both Nelson Mandela and South Africa had traveled a long way to get to this moment. More than 300 years of white domination ended for good with the swearing in of Nelson Mandela as this African nation's first black president. He was the most famous opponent of the brutal racist system of apartheid, imprisoned 27 years.

Today Mandela paid tribute to his new vice president F.W. DeClirk, the last apartheid president who negotiated the historic transfer of power. Mandela then called for unity in this racially diverse and racially divided land. The time for the healing of the wounds has come. The moment to preach the cousins that devises has come. The time to build is upon us. This was something few people ever had expected to see, a peaceful transition after years of bloody racial strife. hundreds of dignitaries from around the world came to witness history. To see the South African military, which once had enforced apartheid,

fly overhead in tribute to Nelson Mandela, trailing the colors of the new South African flag. The nation of South Africa was no longer a patron of Savimbi's, and in fact had become an active antagonist to his goals. Present P.W. Balta resigned from office in early 1989, after suffering a stroke, and he was replaced by F.W. DeClerc, who now led a genuine reform program, the beginning of the end of the apartheid system. In early 1990, he lifted bans on the African National Congress and freed Nelson Mandela from prison. That March, Namibia, formerly apartheid's vital military protectorate, officially became an independent nation.

After a period of continued violence and instability in 1994, South Africa held free elections for the first time in its history. The ANC came to power in a government led by Nelson Mandela, who would try to broker peace between Savimbi and the MPLA. But the leader of Unita wanted none of it. There had been another factor in Savimbi's continued success and stubborn as a rebel in the 90s, his alliance with Zaire. Between 86 and 91, the CIA had used Zaire's Kaminah airfield to transport arms and supplies to Savimbi, a task for which Zaire's dictator,

Mobutu Seseko, had successfully negotiated huge aid packages from Washington every year. And even after the CIA left Kameenna, Mobutu had kept open Savimbi's arms transports as well as his lucrative smuggling routes. But, after years of wobbling, due to various crises, the decades-long rule of Mobutu in Zaire finally came apart in 1997. Fleeing to Morocco, he died there of cancer later that year. His downfall was celebrated across the world.

But for Jonas Savimbi, writes Victoria, Britain, the fall of Mobutu was a dramatic setback from which he could never recover. Quote, it left him without the rear base which had served as the all-important conduit for the illegal diamond sales that financed his war, transported his equipment, and served as a way in and out from his headquarters, end quote. Backed into a corner, Savimbi rejected yet another set of tentative peace measures in 1998, and conflict in Angola again re-intensified. Today was the deadline to complete a proposed peace agreement in Angola,

a country devastated by the longest civil war in Africa. But there will be no celebrating today because there is no peace. ABC's Carol Simpson is on special assignment in Angola. Particularly damaging in this phase of the war were Unita's attacks on United Nations aid planes. After Unita downed two chartered aid planes, the UN terminated its four-year, $1.5 billion peacekeeping operation in Angola. Reporting from a hospital in Wombo, the New York Times found that, quote,

the halls smell of sweat and urine, and there is a shortage of soap, linens, and clothing. Nurses in the pediatric ward said that there were 156 admissions last month, 123 for malnourishment. Six of those children died. I sleep with hunger here, an elderly woman told the reporter. I wake up with hunger. There is nothing for us here.

End quote. On top of the hunger and displacement was the presence of another familiar weapon of war. Landmines. Nine-year-old Victorino is trying out his new artificial leg. A few months ago, he was collecting fire. when one of his friends stepped on a mine. Three boys were killed instantly, and Victorino's leg was blown off.

He is being treated at the Red Cross Orthopedic Center that Princess Diana visited a year ago. It was her trip to Angola's minefields that focused worldwide attention on the problem. As we've mentioned by now, landmines became an enduring and deadly feature of Angola's landscape. In fact, writes Birmingham, one of Angola's, Angola's own sophisticated demining experts had been trained in Cambodia. These are some of the nearly 90,000 landmine survivors in Angola. Hundreds of thousands have been killed. You need 150 grams of prission to make the mine blow.

Now with the help of the United Nations and the international community, the Angolan government has begun the monumental task of removing an estimated 13 million landmines, which maim and kill 150 Angolan's every week. As Unita's war against the Angolan government persisted throughout the 90s, Jonas Savimbi's movement had lost something from the previous decade. Although the leader himself had been personally murderous and Unita forces had committed undeniable atrocities, many perceived that there was a stable, even attractive, ideological base to their movement.

However, writes Justin Pierce, as you need a battle to keep control of territory and people by force of arms, it lost all but its most loyal supporters. At the turn of the millennium, the odds were totally against Savimbi. He was in a very similar situation, listeners may find, to Pol Pot in the 1990s. By this point, the Angolan military forces chasing him, included experienced former Unita commanders turned MPLA generals, as Savimbi increasingly relied on thousands of child soldiers. Wary of being tracked, he rarely used his satellite phone,

writes journalist Sunni Khalid, in a detailed account of Savimbi's last days. Quote, in the midst of this grim situation, writes Khalid, Savimbi made an unusual personal request to some of his remaining diplomats in the West. In the past, the Anita leader had usually requested that they send him books or music. His literary tastes were eclectic, ranging from philosophy, biography, and history to art. But his musical tastes usually favored classical composers, specifically Beethoven, Schubert, and Mozart, an odd cultural phenomenon among the educated elite in many Central African capitals.

The rebel leader disdained most of Angola's lively Latin-tinged popular music. Most artists supported the government and had personally targeted Savimbi in some of their songs. Savimbi, however, had also been a fan of the music of late Jamaican reggae superstar Bob Marley. But this time, he wanted just one particular song on a CD produced by one of Marley's contemporaries, cruner Jimmy Cliff. The title of the song Savimbi wanted, Many Rivers to Cross. In 1999,

Savimbi was driven out of his headquarters. In the following year, the United Nations put formal sanctions on Yanita's leadership. The sanctions severely curtailed the group's money-making operations. The MPLA, on the other hand, was sitting on diamond mines,

a whole country of them, that were either idle or losing money as the Civil War dragged on. And so, in the fall of 2000, according to Khalid, an Israeli businessman who held significant concessions in Angola's diamond trade approached the MPLA. The Unidentified Israeli said he could assist the government's efforts to eliminate Jonas Savimbi, who was cutting in on his profit margin. But the MPLA had no idea where the Unita leader was. The unidentified Israeli had close contacts with the IDF and Mossad, Israel's intelligence service. He arranged for a group of former IDF and Mossad officers to travel to Angola, where they arrived in late 2000.

End quote. For about a year and a half, this team worked to trace Savimbi's location in eastern Angola, finally tracking him down in early 2002. For a while in the 1990s, Unita controlled a large part of the diamond fields, but, you know, as the MPLA government starts winning back diamond-producing areas, that trade relationship with Israel is important. You know, I think the most solid evidence I have is from around about the time when Savimbi was killed in February of 2002, talking to people in Luana. the garrison town in eastern Angola, which is the base of military operations for the operation that killed Savinbi in the end.

I was told there that there had been a number of Israeli surveillance experts operating surveillance equipment in that town right up until the day when Zizimbi died, and they then packed up and went home. The Angolan military ambushed Sivimbi in a remote town of the eastern Mexico province. He was reportedly killed as he was reaching for his pistol.

The 67-year-old, an Angolan nationalist, turned rebel, turned warlord, was, reported the BBC, shot a total of 15 times, once in the throat, twice in the head, and the rest in the chest, legs, and arms.

End quote. Two items from Africa tonight in Angola, the government says that a rebel leader the U.S. has supported for years has been killed by the army. Jonas Savimbi was head of the Unita movement which has been fighting the government for almost three decades. The government of Angola today confirmed the death of rebel leader Jonas Zubimbi by putting his body on display in a remote village near where they say he was killed

in a gun battle with Angolan troops. The government is now urging Zavimbi's followers to end the civil war that has killed a half million people since the 1970s. As we saw in the elections of 1992, the alternative to Jonas Savimbi, the MPLA government, was preferable to the majority in Angola. But the MPLA was hardly the beacon of liberation and self-determination that people thought of back in the early 1970s. By now the party was personified by its president,

the successor to Augustinio Neto, Jose Eduardo Dos Santos. At his presidential headquarters at Fottongo de Bellas, writes historian Martin Meredith, quote, a modern complex built for him by the Cubans on a promontory overlooking the sea, Dos Santos resided in luxury, rarely leaving the compound, remaining remote from the squalor of Luanda, its decrepit buildings, its power shortages, its outbreaks of cholera, its stench, and decay. Though the MPLA still proclaimed itself to be a Marxist-Lenist-Lenist party, its commitment to socialism was entirely bogus, end quote. By the early 90s, the MPLA went the way of many socialist parties and announced a new

program of economic reform and officially discarded its Marxism-Leninism. For many in and outside of the party, this was not unwelcome. The disfigurement of the civil war had not rendered the MPLA's socialism as a particularly attractive system. But, Meredith writes, quote, the reforms it instituted provided yet more business opportunities for the elite, notably the privatization of state assets. What the MPLA had come to represent by then

was little more than a front for a cabal of wealthy interrelated families linked to the presidency whose central purpose was self-enrichment. Birmingham lays out a general criticism of the Dos Santos years, a corrupt program of privatization, facilitated by shady companies and foundations that soaked up public monies and resources, redirecting them to the president

and his small club of fellow travelers. Stage displays of public support that occasionally became nasty and xenophobic when the dispossessed turned on local minorities. And a more formal level of ethno-nationalism, such as a government campaign against Congolese and Middle Easterners in country, codenamed cancer one.

In our conversation with Professor Antonio Tomas, who hails from Angola, he still gives Dos Santos credit for holding the country together. Angola is a very complex country to govern, particularly with like these larger-than-life personalities like Savimbi, right? And how he managed to deal with Savimbi,

I think it really, you know, gives a lot to his own. personality and how he solved problem. He was not very, you know, like ideological positions, right? He was not a communist. He was not a Marxist, right? He was not a capitalist and so on. He was a pragmatist, right? And I think, I think that this is my own ideas, right?

Because even after, you know, the failed coup 77, were a great number of people who could fight for power within inside the Impela died. And Los Santos, you know, came to be one of the few, you know. So he could like sort of create his own sense of leadership, right, and rule the party. And the constitute a dictatorship in the way he was part of it, right? in the way he cultivated it. Two months after Savimbi's death in 2002, Unita came to a peace deal with the MPLA.

This time, the Civil War really did come to an end. Although landmines still littered the country, creating tens of thousands of amputees, the worst of the violence was now over. At the time of his death, Jonas Savimbi was widely recognized. as a butcher. Not long after the news broke, the New York Times columnist Nicholas Christoff eulogized Savimbi as, quote, may be responsible for more than 500,000 deaths since 1975.

This is perhaps a conservative estimate. More than most conflicts, because of the remote areas in which most of the fighting took place, the Angolan Civil War's body count is difficult to place, but higher-end estimates are closer to one million. A further four million people were displaced, noted the Guardian in 2023. Quote, about 70,000 lost limbs. At the conflict's conclusion, almost two-thirds of Angolan's lacked access to drinking water. For the bulk of the 1990s, Angola's state funds had been largely siphoned away by corruption among the MPLA, and by the massive security outlays required to fight Savimbi.

With the destruction of large towns and, by the end of the war in 2002, there was sustained famine. International agencies were already caring for 2 million people, reported the Irish Times, not long after Savimbi's death. Quote, in the last six months, that caseload has increased by a further million. End quote. A month after his death, Savimbi's remains. fans in Washington gathered at the Army and Navy Club for a dinner two blocks from the White House. According to the Washington Times, Jean Kirkpatrick, the former ambassador to the UN under Ronald Reagan, she was on hand to eulogize Savimbi as, quote, extraordinarily educated,

intelligent, and cosmopolitan, a guerrilla leader on our side, end quote. Brad Phillips, the evangelical activist and son of Howard Phillips, cornerstone of the Savimbi Lobby, called the dead warlord, one of the most promising leaders of our times. In 2016, Jose Eduardo Dos Santos announced that he would be retiring from Angola's presidency in two years' time. After 38 years at the helm of the MPL, stepping in after the death of Augustinio Netto in 1979,

Dos Santos had become the second longest-serving head of state on the continent. Although Angola's oil and diamond industries had stabilized in the years since the Civil War ended, a fall in oil prices, triggered by the great financial crisis of 2008, had helped push Dos Santos out of office. When he left office in 2018, D'Ossanto's publicly spoke of having made mistakes as Angola's leader. But he defended his overall record. And although D'Santos was widely reported to have amassed untold riches in corruption, he himself died in 2022 in comparatively modest circumstances

while seeking medical treatment in Europe. But the late president's daughter is a different story. Isabel D'Santos is alleged to have amassed a $2 billion dollar fortune as the richest woman in Africa, exploiting her proximity to her father, the president. Under investigation and prosecution from multiple governments, Isabel now lives in Dubai, after her home country's government asked for Interpol to issue a red notice for her arrest. Dos Santos's successor as Angolan president, Jualo Lorenzo, had been the MPLA Secretary General and a longtime leader in the party. And although economic conditions in the country remain unequal and dire, Angola today is at peace.

All right, well, as President-elect Trump continues to make the headlines, the man who is still our president is making news overseas in Angola. President Biden's trip marks the first visit from a sitting U.S. president and the first visit to sub-S.-Saharan Africa since 2015. He gave remarks at the National Museum of Slavery to honor the past and future of the Angolan U.S. relationship. Take a listen. We hear them in the wind and the waves. Young women, young men, born free in the highlands in Angola, only be captured, bound, and forced in a death march along this very coast, to this spot by slave traders in the year 1619.

Angola's relationship with the United States of America is, for now, friendly. The Lorenzo government has put substantial resources behind diplomacy. hoping to make Angola a regional power player, as nearby countries like the Congo, formerly Zaire, are hobbled with their own troubles. Like other third world countries, Angola wants to make deals with both the U.S. and China. Or, as Lorenzo himself put it recently,

the world is a rainbow. It's not made of two colors, end quote. The last country that Joe Biden visited as president was Angola, on a trip that emphasized America's historical connection to Angola via the slave trade, as well as its current connection to Angola via the Lubido Corridor, the path along which the Bengela Railway travels, bringing minerals necessary for the green transition from the Congo to Angolan ports on the Atlantic. Inevitably, the African continent itself has become yet another front in the contest between a declining USA,

and arising China. There's no doubt that for decades now, Beijing has eagerly reengaged the continent from trade to aid. Much as we saw in places like Cambodia, Chinese investment is a massive and indispensable part of development finance for Angola and many other African states. Hundreds of Chinese companies operate in Angola alone. The United States has alleged that what appears to be a new era of Sino-African cooperation is actually an objectively sinister neocolonial debt trap, in which poor countries are swindled by Chinese loans. As no less than the upstanding ex-U.S. Attorney General William Barr put it during the first Trump administration, the U.S. position is that China is, quote, loading poor countries up with debt,

refusing to renegotiate terms, and then taking control of the infrastructure itself. But the existing literature disputes this. Chinese loans are open to negotiation, and there has been no such wave of asset seizure under debt-trap diplomacy, much less at the barrel of a gun. Other academics, Chris Alden, Daniel Large, and Ricardo Soros de Oliveira, have argued that, like most countries go, quote, as the actors vary, so does the action from place to place. We find Chinese oil firms drilling without a permit in a Gabonese nature reserve, while Chinese construction firms rebuild large parts of the infrastructure of post-war Angola and other states,

not always resource-rich ones, where the West has hung back, end quote. For Angola in particular, China has been an alternative to Luanda's testy dealings with entities such as the IMF. writes scholar Manuel N. S. Ferreira, quote, Angola's pressing need for physical reconstruction, especially in infrastructure, found the right source of financing in the Chinese. The Chinese modus operandi fits perfectly with Angola's needs at a time when the Angolan government seemed unable,

either to attract non-oil investment into the country, or to ensure the holding of an international donors' conference, end quote. The terms and the logic are hard to, that of the socialist bloc during the Cold War. But China's help in providing investment for infrastructure, Wright Alden and Co., is why, quote, irrespective of the concerns voiced in some circles in Africa, Chinese involvement is widely considered to be a positive sum game, end quote.

In an interview with us in the summer of 2025, Professor Antonio Tomas talked about the opportunity of libido and U.S. investment, and how ultimately, whatever the vicissitudes of the U.S.-China rivalry, the promise of a better future is down to Angolan's themselves. Angola has to bring a social agenda to the table, you know. Angola cannot expect that, you know, that the West determines, you know, that it's the West who says, yeah, if we invest here, you have to use these amount of resources for educational or health or any other thing, you know.

The initiative to bring the social agenda has to come from Angola, you know. And people in power, they don't have this sensibility. They are not interested in that, right? They have other kinds of priorities that are not the kind of priorities that Angolan's have. So what I want to say is that as long as, as, as, The government in Angola doesn't bring, you know, doesn't create, doesn't think of, doesn't conceive of a social agenda, right, that brings the social in disagreements, right? It's going to be just a sex traction and exploitation.

That about does it for our sixth season. We'd like to thank all of our guests, Antonio Thomas, Piero Glehesus, Nogash Abduraman, Marissa Mormon, William Minter, Chas Freeman, and Justin Pierce. Now, since you are an honored and esteemed subscriber, stay tuned for more subscriber goodies, such as bonus episodes and your discount code for this season's merch, designed by our old pal and yours, Josh Lynch. As always, we appreciate all your support, and we'll see you next time.

Adios. Son!