União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola
| União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola | |
|---|---|
|
|
| Party leader | Adalberto Costa Júnior |
| founding | March 13, 1966 |
| Headquarters | Luanda |
| Alignment | Conservatism , nationalism |
| Website | unitaangola.org |
The União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola ( UNITA ; German National Union for the Complete Independence of Angola ) was founded in the middle of the 20th century as an anti-colonial movement and is now a party in Angola .
history
Anti-colonial guerrilla and decolonization conflict
UNITA emerged as a liberation movement fighting against Portuguese colonial rule and found its supporters mainly among the Ovimbundu in the central highlands of Angola, the largest ethnic group in the country, to which its founder and long-time leader Jonas Savimbi belonged.
UNITA conducted its guerrilla struggle exclusively in the east of the country, i.e. outside the Ovimbundu settlement area, and had little support. Your operations were therefore very limited. Occasionally there were armed clashes with troops from the other independence movements, especially the MPLA , which had also evaded to the east, and rarely the FNLA , which was hardly present here. According to Portuguese files from this period that are now publicly available, she concluded a collaboration agreement with the colonial power Portugal in early 1970 .
It originally received help from China, but from 1974, when Portugal announced its intention to withdraw from its colonies, it came under the influence of the USA, South Africa and (marginally) Morocco . The main source of domestic finance was the sale of blood diamonds from the areas under her control, among others. a. to De Beers .
When Portugal announced its intention to withdraw from its colonies in 1974, an armed conflict broke out between the three rival movements, in which a number of states intervened on one side or the other. In the course of this, UNITA allied itself with the FNLA against the MPLA. As this 1975 in the capital Luanda , the independence of Angola from Portugal exclaimed, FNLA and UNITA did the same together simultaneously in Nova Lisboa (now Huambo) and formed a rival government. However, the coalition was defeated militarily within a short time and disbanded.
Civil war and conversion into a party
The victorious MPLA established a one-party regime in the country based on the model of the socialist countries of Europe at the time. A little later, UNITA began military action against the government. The following civil war in Angola continued with interruptions until the death of Jonas Savimbi in 2002. In this process, UNITA changed significantly due to economic and other imperatives and also prepared itself for its later role as a political party by sending a considerable number of younger people to study abroad (e.g. Portugal, Canada, the USA). sent.
In 1990 the MPLA introduced a multi-party system and UNITA constituted itself in all forms as a political party. In 1992 she took part in the first parliamentary and presidential elections in Angola. She emerged from both of them as a loser, even if she achieved considerable votes. As a result, it did not recognize the elections and immediately went back to civil war. This resulted in a paradoxical situation in that UNITA took part in the political system through its MPs and, in 1997, agreed to participate in a “government of national unity and reconciliation”, while at the same time continuing its guerrilla war. This led to internal tensions and the founding of the "UNITA Renovada" ("renewed UNITA") under Eugénio Manuvakola, a wing that advocated the abandonment of armed struggle and a purely political struggle.
Towards the end of the 1990s, UNITA lost the support of the USA and other Western countries. In 2002 the leader Savimbis was encircled and died in a battle with government troops . Six weeks later a ceasefire agreement was signed between the government and UNITA.
Consolidation attempts as a party
In August 2002 UNITA officially dissolved its military arm. Since then, UNITA has tried to consolidate itself as a political party under its new President Isaias Samakuva.
In the first parliamentary election after the end of the civil war, on September 5 and 6, 2008, the party received only about ten percent of the vote, significantly less than in 1992. This time, it admitted its defeat to the MPLA, which has now become social democratic , albeit reluctantly. In a 200-page publication, she pointed out irregularities in the elections, in which the ruling MPLA received 82% of the vote. The official international election observers declared the election to be "overall free and fair". Some other observers described them as partially free, but by no means fair. In the meantime, it is generally assumed that the election result quite faithfully reflects the attitude of the electorate at the time, which on the one hand did not consider the opposition parties as a whole to be credible, but on the other hand did not want to strengthen UNITA in particular in order to avoid a renewed flare-up of the civil war.
In the second parliamentary election on August 31, 2012, however, UNITA received around 18%. This is all the more remarkable as part of the party, led by Abel Chivukuvuku, split off in early 2012 and founded its own party, the Convergência Ampla de Salvação de Angola (CASA, Broad Convergence for the Salvation of Angola ); this received 6% of the votes. Some of them did not come from the UNITA warehouse. In contrast, the MPLA fell slightly, to around 72%. It is noteworthy that UNITA achieved around 30% in the provinces of Huambo and Luanda, and even 36% in the province of Bié . Huambo and Bié form the heartland of the Ovimbundu , but in the province of Luanda the majority of the population belong to the Ambundu and there is a considerable minority of Bakongo , while the Ovimbundu are numerically negligible.
In the 2017 election, the party increased its result to around 27% of the vote and remained the largest opposition party.
In November 2019, Adalberto Costa Júnior was elected as the new president after his predecessor Isaias Samakuva resigned after more than 16 years.
See also
literature
- Assis Malaquias, Rebels and Robbers: Violence in Post-colonial Angola , Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2007.
- Samuel Chiwale, Cruzei-me com a história , Lisbon: Sextante, 2008 (autobiography and description of the war by one of the leading UNITA commanders)
- Didier Péclard, "Les incertitudes de la nation en Angola: Aux racines sociales de l'UNITA", Paris: Karthala, 2015
Web links
- Unita website (Portuguese)
- French interview of Jonas Savimbi in 1978 (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Linda Heywood, UNITA and Ethnic Nationalism , Journal of Modern African Studies , 27/1, pp. 47–60
- ↑ See Alcides Sakalala, Memórias de um guerrilheiro , Lisbon: D. Quixote, 2006.
- ↑ Guardian, February 25, 2002
- ↑ Savimbi's springs gush , Friday, February 12, 1999
- ^ See Franz-Wilhelm Heimer , Der Entkolonisierungskonflikt in Angola , Munich: Weltforum Verlag, 1979.
- ↑ See Jardo Muekalia, Angola: A segunda Revolução , Lisbon: Sextante, 2010.
- ↑ See Kristi Stuvoy, War economy and the social order of insurgencies: An analysis of the internal structure of UNITA's war economy , Research Center for War, Armaments and Development / Universität Hamburg, Hamburg 2002
- ↑ Parliamentary elections in Angola Opposition admits defeat ( Memento from October 13, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung: Angola - White Paper on the 2009 parliamentary elections ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ Konrad Adenauer Foundation: The parliamentary elections in Angola 2008
- ↑ As in 1992, there were also 100 parties in 2008. The vast majority did not even reach an MP, and even the FNLA fell to less than 2% of the vote.
- ^ Total Nacional. (No longer available online.) Eleicoes2012.cne.ao, archived from the original on September 2, 2012 ; Retrieved June 25, 2015 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ Angola: Adalberto Costa Junior, new leader of Unita - RFI. tellerreport.com, November 16, 2019, accessed April 8, 2020 .
