PER UNA CONTRO I LICENZIAMENTI NATIV POETTY regime in recent weeks.
Nito Alves. Ordering all 'people's british press attention is now riveted or the fate of the 13 captured mercenaries on trial in Luanda. Much ot tne report age displays a thinly-disguised sympathy for the 'soldiers of fortune', nine of them British, who went to Angola with no motive but to kill Africans for cash.
By contrast. the British press has not issued a murmur about the fate of sentenced to death. dozens or Angolan leTt-wing militant who have been arrested by the MPLA While preparations for the mercenary trials were underway, the biggest wave of political arrests in Luanda since Angola's indpendence took place. The main victims of the crack-down, in which more than 100 dissidents were arrested, were supporters or me semi-maoist commu wealth. nist Organisation of Angola' (OCA) and the 'Active Revolt faction of the MPLA The official signal for the repression came in march trom interior Minister commissions' to be 'vigilant', he said: •All obviously reactionary individuals - those who are known to belong to the OCA, either as advisers, writers or propagandists, or those who have up to now been passionately loyal to the Active Revolt or have shown such an attitude - will nave to be immediately arrested.
According to the Luanda paper Jornal do Comercio, Alves has called for the leaders of the Active Revolt to be No specific charges are known to have been levelled against the detainees Their 'crime", it would seem, has been Meir criticisms or the DolLIcal CoUrs! charted by the MPLA government -particularly its agreement to allow imperialist corporations like Gulf Oil to resume their plunder of Angola's The Rev Joaquim Pinto de Andrade, who was seized on 18 April, is the most prominent of those arrested. A Touncer member or he MeLAn was elected as the movement's honorary president in 1962. He played a central role in establishing some of the MPLA's first cells in Luanda in the late 1950s, and spent more than ten years in various Portuguese prisons. After his release, Andrade became a leader of the Active Revolt, an MPLA faction which opposed tne bureaucratic charac ter or tne Agostinno veto leadersnip.
Among orner Active Revolt leaders now in jail are Gentil Viana, a former adviser to Neto; Rui Castro Lopo, a former commander of the MPLA's second military regime during the liberation war; and Manuel Videira, a doctor who served on the MPLA's Bastarn wront aunne me wweration war A statement released by the OCA on 23 April charged that the 'MPLA has arrested dozens of outstanding revolutionary militants', including members of the Secretariat of the Coordinating Body of the Neighbourhood People's Commissions of Luanda, Sirgado and Nogueira, as well as other OCA militants such as Henrique Guerra, who spent many years in Portuguese prisons.
ne oce cecares mar ne monson ment of well-known nationalists and democrats belonging to the Active Revolt, who have been threatened with execution .... represents one more step in the wave of repression launched by the MPLA against revolutionists and against all Angolan democrats anc patriots.
The OCA appealed to 'all revolutionar and brocressive politica Torces to ce mand that the vir ta immediately tree all the political prisonars.
WEEKLY