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Savimbi is well armed and reasonably well financed. Help comes directly from South Africa, which considers UNITA a potential ally in its struggle against the South West African People's Organization (SWAPO), the Angola-based rebel group that seeks to take over Namibia. Ovimbundu refugees, as a result, are allowed into Namibia to escape the fighting, as are some UNITA guerrillas. One wounded fighter recently showed up at a South African border camp, where he accepted a field bandage for his leg and a meal of corn mash and gravy. Leaving for the combat zone, he cockily echoed a line that the charismatic Savimbi impresses on his followers: "Without the Cubans and the Russians, the M.P.L.A. is lost. They know it and we know it."
UNITA receives other weapons, ammunition, medicine and spare parts from abroad through Zaïre. According to In Search of Enemies, a newly published expose by former CIA Agent John Stockwell (TIME, May 22), the agency flew $25 million worth of arms to the F.N.L.A. and UNITA through Zaïre. After Congress cut off such assistance in 1975, Savimbi was temporarily in trouble. Lately, however, UNITA has been getting funds from other sources, including $18 million reportedly provided by a coalition of wealthy Angolan Portuguese living in Brazilian exile, along with French, Iranian and Arab sources interested in bringing down Neto's Marxist government.
Savimbi's increasing success in the bush has forced Neto to launch a major offensive against him, using both M.P.L.A. and Cuban troops. Despite the government's superior firepower the offensive has been going poorly. There is dissension between the two attacking groups: the Angolans sneeringly call the Cubans "town dwellers" who are afraid to go into the bush, particularly at night. Angolan prisoners captured by UNITA tell of M.P.L.A. mutinies and heavy casualties among the Cubans.
Within the M.P.L.A. leadership there appears to be a split along racial lines. Neto is an assimilado, meaning a Portuguese-speaking Angolan who in colonial times had the same privileges as a European. His wife Maria Eugenia da Silva is white—a fact that prompted the appearance of mysterious posters in Luanda demanding "Morte a rainha branca " (Death to the white queen). An unsuccessful coup last year led by former Interior Minister Nito Alves, an Angolan black, may have been triggered by the ethnic split.
The Roman Catholic Church, which represents half the population of Angola, has accused the government of violating constitutionally guaranteed religious freedoms. The church complains that children are being sent to other Marxist states for education. About 60 young Angolans are in Cuba to study citrus-farming techniques, and 150 more attend schools there to learn both Spanish and Marxism-Leninism. The protests have provoked government jitters. Angola's principal newspaper, Jornal do Luanda, recently called for a "struggle against rumors and rumormongering" that might prove "destabilizing." And the death penalty, which was abolished by the Portuguese a century ago, has been reinstated in cases of "counterrevolutionary activity." ∎