UNITA 1976
Source: The Workers’ Advocate [U.S.] Volume 6, Number 4, May 12, 1976;
Extracted from The Workers’ Advocate for the MIA Africa pages: by Paul Saba.
The following communique was issued by the Political Bureau and Central Committee of UNITA after the fall of Huambo, UNITA's capitol, to the heavily-armed Soviet-Cuban aggressors. The Angolan people rose to the call of the communique and launched their Second Anti-Colonial War. Today they are fighting heroically.
The communique also won the warm support of the revolutionary people all over the world. Peking Review No. 10, dated March 5,1976, quoted point 5 of the communique, which calls upon the people to wage a people's war against the Soviet-Cuban aggressors, and declared: ''This is the Angolan people's best reply to the Soviet neo-colonialists who are trying to enslave again the Angolan people in place of the old colonialists."
The political and military situation in our country has undergone a rapid evolution which has made it necessary for the Political Bureau and the Military Command to reappraise the situation and decide on the following new guidelines.
The armed forces that the MPLA has used against UNITA and indeed against the Angolan people are not Angolan. We are facing a regular army of Cubans, Czechs, Guineans and Russians with modern and highly sophisticated weapons.
No army in Africa outside Egypt has had to face a war machine of such dimensions as those of the army now invading our country. Our allies who could help us to change the situation, lacked political courage. But we want to make clear, in this communique, our gratitude to the African countries that backed the policy of the formation of a Government of National Unity for Angola.
We single out the Republic of Senegal and President Senghor, the Republic of Ivory Coast and President Boigny, the Republic of Zaire and President Mobutu Sese Seko, the Kingdom of Morocco and King Hassan II, the United Arab Republic and President Sadat, the Republic of Gabon and President Bongo, as well as the Republic of Zambia and President Kenneth Kuanda, and other leaders and countries. Our gratitude also goes to the current Chairman of the OAU, Field Marshal Idi Amin Dada.
The meeting has decided:
1. To save the UNITA army from annihilation at the hands of the regular Cuban, Czech, Guinea and Russian army, and its sophisticated weaponry.
2. To convert with the utmost speed UNITA's army into a guerrilla force.
3. To intensify the mobilisation of the Angolan people against the invasion of our country by foreign forces from Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Guinea and the Soviet Union, which will never be able to occupy our country indefinitely.
4. To reach conclusions about the unfulfilled promises of help, which led to sacrifice of many hundreds of our best soldiers. External help is going to be necessary and we appeal to the conscience of free men and democratic countries, to identify themselves with justice, democracy and socialism.
5. For our freedom and our country we are determined to continue fighting -- in the fields, in the mountains, and valleys, until such time as the Cuban and Russian invaders suffer the same final fate as the former Portuguese colonisers in Angola.
6. We appeal to our internal and external 'cadres' to strengthen unity, for it is only human beings who can make history and freedom for the others.
7. Those who have taken the alleged invasion of Angola by South African troops as a pretext to justify their own enslavement of our country are no more than lackeys of social-imperialism.
And those who have been duped by the non-existent popularity of MPLA and by the sincerity and unselfishness of Russian social-imperialism in Angola will very quickly understand that they have only managed to impose a minority as the rulers of our people, thus creating a satellite of Russian expansionism in Southern Africa.
But Russian social-imperialism shall be defeated in Angola.