Twenty-seven years of civil war as a Cold War proxy
Angola won independence from Portugal in November 1975 and fell into civil war almost immediately. The fighting, broken by fragile truces, lasted until 2002, killing an estimated half a million to 800,000 people while Moscow, Washington, Havana and Pretoria backed rival sides.
The war was mainly a contest between two movements that had both fought Portuguese rule: the communist MPLA and the anti-communist UNITA. Their bases differed sharply. The MPLA drew on the Mbundu people and the multiracial intelligentsia of Luanda, Benguela and Huambo, while UNITA, founded in 1966 by the former FNLA leader Jonas Savimbi, rested on the Ovimbundu of the central Bié Plateau, roughly a third of the population. The FNLA, rooted among the Bakongo of the north and backed by Mobutu’s Zaire, played almost no part once civil war began, and Cabindan separatists pursued a fight of their own.
Portugal had been present on this coast for more than four centuries, founding Luanda in 1575 and Benguela farther south mainly as slave-trading posts supplying Brazil and the Caribbean. Real conquest of the interior came only after the 1884 Berlin Conference; as late as 1906 Portugal effectively controlled around 6 per cent of the territory. Guerrilla war against colonial rule started in 1961 and ended only when a leftist coup toppled the Lisbon regime in 1974, after which most of the roughly 500,000 ethnic Portuguese residents left.
Foreign involvement was exceptional. Cuba became the MPLA’s strongest ally, sending combat troops, with East German and Soviet support behind it, while the United States sharply increased aid to UNITA. South Africa entered in 1975 through Operation Savannah, which began as a mission to guard engineers at the Calueque dam that Pretoria had financed. The conflict became entangled with the South African Border War and the Second Congo War next door.
Heavy fighting came in three bursts, 1975 to 1991, 1992 to 1994 and 1998 to 2002, and ended with MPLA victory. Beyond the dead, more than a million people were displaced, and infrastructure, the economy, public administration and religious institutions were badly damaged; land mines still lie across the countryside.
Source: Angolan Civil War
