organised.' According to Sean Gervasi of the Centre for National Security Studies in Washington, the US has also sent a naval task force to Angolan waters. Gervasi says that the aircraft carrier USS Independence, supported by a guided-missile cruiser and three destroyer escorts, was placed under contingency orders between November 15 and 23 'for a mission in the Angolan conflict'. The Independence carries 90 Phantom F-4 jets and was armed after 15 November with "several hundred tons of napalm, Sidewinder missiles and anti-personnel fragmentation bombs in pods'.
The US Senate voted on 19 December by 54 to 22 to cut off US funds for the Angolan war. President Ford, however, is lobbying to ensure that the Senate vote is reversed by the House of Representatives when Congress reassembles on 20 January. Ford might also use his veto power over the Senate decision. In the meantime, Ford and Kissinger are using funds already voted to finance the United States involvement in the war.
COLLABORATION On 6 January, the minister with responsibility for Africa in the British Foreign Office, David Ennals, held discussions with the US assistant secretary of state for African affairs, William Schaufele. Ennals - like the Labour Government as a whole - failed to denounce the US and South African aggression against the Angolan people.
The Labour Government has also done nothing to oppose the South PRODUCED. AND RATEC African invasion of Angola. Of course, this only dovetails with Britain's long record of collaboration with the racist South African regime. British trade with South Africa is massive, British capitalist interests have over £2,000 million of investments there and the Labour Government one year ago joined the US and France in casting a triple vote in the UN security council against a bid to expel South Africa from the UN.
COORDINATED There is mounting evidence that the South African invasion of Angola is being closely coordinated with the US intervention. David Ottoway wrote in the Guardian on 7 January that the US originally urged the South African invasion. Gervasi puts the number of South African troops now in Angola at between 4,000 and 6,000. There is no doubt, wrote Stanley Uys in the 2 January Guardian, *that behind the scenes South Africa is in close contact with Zambia, Zaire and the US government, and also enjoys, in the same measure, their support for its military presence in Angola' Vorster called on 1 January for "bigger western involvement, not only in the diplomatic but all other fields' According to the South West African Peoples Organisation (SWAPO), Vorster's aim is not just to overturn the Luanda-based MPLA government but also to annex a 60-km wide stretch of territory running the length of the Namibian border.
DIRECTED BYCHENRY KISSINGER STARRING THE C.I.A. AT ACOST OF MILLIONS African freedom bears little commdictatorship to use american arms Africans were killed.
Woman soldier in MPLA's forces guese dictatorship. Hundreds of North Carolina. Since 1962, the US representatives in the United all major resolutions condemning Portuguese colonialism.
guese colonialists. In February of codified Washington's support for ibia and South Africa. The policy way that constructive change can come is through them'.
stance towards the white regimes, and (in line with Vorster's later restrictions on the white states. UNITA soldier treads wreckage on Benguela railway-the copper export lifeline on which Zambia depends ent. Washington allowed the Salazar (supplied through NATO) to supress the Angolan uprising of 1961. 50,000 Between 1962 and 1968, the US sent more than 39 million dollars in military aid and 124 million dollars in economic assistance to the PortuPortuguese troops received US military training, some at the US counter-insurgency school at Fort Bragg.
Nations abstained on or voted against In 1970, the Nixon administration stepped up its support for the Portuthat year, the US government adopted a secret policy (Option 2 proposed in National Security Study Memorandum 39, known as 'Tar Baby') which Portuguese colonialism and the white ing at the United Nations, ignored UN sanctions against Rhodesia by allowing Rhodesian chrome imports into the US, and extended a 436 million dollar Export-Import Bank credit loan to Portugal in 1971.
UNSTUCK The US' stepped-up aid to Portugal's colonial wars was a losing venture. Tar Baby first came unstuck with the April 1974 overthrow of the Caetano dictatorship and the collapse of direct Portuguese colonial rule in Africa. Jonathan Steele, writing in the Guardian on 9 January, noted the dangers that then concerned Washington's policy-makers. "The prospect emerged of a strong central Angolan government which might well carry the liberation fight farther south to Namibia.
Whereas the Frelimo regime in Mozambique, Steele pointed out, 'was weakened by close economic ties to South Africa, Angola was rich and remote enough to be able to be more independent, more militant and more hostile to the south'. In Steele's opinion, the US minimum aim was a military stalemate whose effect would be fourfold - to deny the Russians a propaganda victory, dent the reputation of the most internationally respected of the three Angolan liberation movements, restore doubts about the option of violence as a strategy for change in Southern Africa, and once again buy time' Calculating that it was better to have three squabbling factions than a political victory for one, the US has sought in Steele's view to ensure a military stalemate on the battle-front and to achieve a diplomatic stalemate in the OAU. Under these conditions, supporters of Angola's independence must rally throughout the world to the defence of Angola's right to self-determination. In Angola, revolutionary socialists, while not giving political support to the MPLA, fight together with the MPLA against the imperialist assault.
Let us examine US imperialism's objectives a little more closely. support, have radical aspirations. After the downfall of the Caetano regime, the Luanda workers engaged in a powertul wave of strikes, de onstrations and even mini-uprisings taking them considerably to the left of their leaders.
On 8 March 1975, thousands marched through the streets of Luanda in protest against a Mobilisation Law' (voted by the MPLA FNLA and UNITA ministers in the Transitional Government) which allowed the Government to militar ise labour. In May and June the Luanda dockers, who had been plac under muntary Junsaicuon u accor with the Mobilisation Law, defied the Government and went back on strike, winning pay increases between 33 percent and 55 per cent SELF-DEFENCE Thousands of workers armed themselves in the Luanda shanty-towns between July and November 1974 after white settler gangs attac ed the muceques killing over 200 blacks. The MPLA leaders joined th UNITA and FNLA ministers in the Transitional Government in attemp ting to disarm the workers (in a decree of 3 February 1975) but again they were unsuccesful.
•We have been accused', MPLA leader Lucio Lara explained last Ma 'of arming the civilian population. Indeed, part of the population has been armed, but that was done in July 1974 to resist aggression from reactionary whites. These self-defence units have placed themselves since under the MPLA banner, but we do not control them. It is essent ial to understand that we are not in a position to disarm them.
As a petit-bourgeois movement with a bourgeois-nationalist progr amme, the MPLA has more recentl stressed its support for foreign inv estment in the country (granting a loan to DIAMANG) and its oppos ition to strikes and independent working class action. According to the 23 October Le Monde the MPL also dissolved by decree the self-defence bodies in the Luanda muceques, reorganising them with
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*Despite Congressional efforts to keep the US out of the Angolan civil war,' the Christian Science Monitor reported on January 2 'the covert American operation is increasing and becoming more