Rebel Angolan Leader Prepares to Launch Offensive; U.S. Supplies Arms

Within a few weeks, the first crates of American military hardware will be unloaded in the Angolan bush, as the United States tries to tip the balance in a hidden, stalemated war.

Soon after, according to Jonas Savimbi’s timetable, his guerrillas will take the American equipment into battle. And as soon as the rains stop in April, Savimbi says, his National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) will face the Marxist government’s biggest counteroffensive.

The Reagan Administration is giving the aid “covertly”--without a public accounting--and its precise impact may never be publicly known. Among Africa’s long and seemingly unwinnable conflicts, the Angolan war is the least visible.

Neither UNITA nor the ruling Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola allows correspondents to witness battles. Both sides issue lists of enemy killed, towns captured and weapons destroyed, but the figures are independently verified.

Reporters invited to Savimbi’s headquarters at Jamba in southeastern Angola have to take his word for it when he reports UNITA’s strength at 60,000 men, including 28,000 full-time fighters and 32,000 militia.

East Bloc Advisers

He says government forces total 80,000 and are backed up by 35,000 Cuban soldiers--thousands higher than most Western estimates--and by 10,000 Cuban technicians, and 9,000 Soviet, North Korean, East German and Portuguese Communist advisers.

A year ago, UNITA said the government had 200 Soviet-built combat planes. Recently, the Soviet Union was said to have supplied tanks and helicopter gunships. Savimbi, who has no air or armor power, pleaded for anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles when he visited Washington a month ago.

No one expects the limited American aid to be decisive. Savimbi says he hopes only to force the government into a cease-fire and negotiations leading to a provisional government involving all Angolan factions, followed by elections and the drafting of a constitution.

Change comes slowly in Angola. Savimbi’s UNITA and the now-governing MPLA have fought each other for a decade, since Portugal ceded independence to Angola and other African territories. Before that, the two guerrilla forces spent years fighting the Portuguese.

Savimbi, 51, has spent more than half his life resisting those who govern Angola. Educated in Portugal and Switzerland, he has over the years remained one of Africa’s most magnetic and complex leaders.

‘Treated Me Very Badly’

In the 1960s, he sought help in the Soviet Union. “They treated me very badly, worse than the Portuguese,” he said in an interview a year ago. “The Russians are racist. They were not prepared to listen to me.”

Then he went to China, where he obtained aid and inspiration from a system that he said related to “the realities of our country.”

“Eighty-five percent of Angolans are peasants, not urban people,” he said. “Our army is 99% peasants.”

Savimbi experienced his own version of Chairman Mao’s Long March. In early 1976, about 1,800 UNITA fighters made a months-long retreat from north and central Angola, winding up deep in the southern bush with only 60 men left.

The UNITA chief later turned for help to such non-Marxist countries as Zaire, Ivory Coast, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and, above all, South Africa. The connection with South Africa’s white-led minority government drew broad condemnation for UNITA. Savimbi says he abhors apartheid, like any black, but he will take aid from wherever it comes.

African Socialist

“I am an African socialist,” Savimbi said, using a term that covers various shades of political thought on the continent, but generally implies a mixed economy at home and a non-aligned stance abroad. He objects to being called right-wing or pro-West.

Above all, he is a nationalist who expounds the idea of black identity--”not a racial approach, but in defense of the cultural values of Africa.”

“I think in Portuguese to speak in English and French. But I am not Portuguese,” Savimbi said. “We accept the values of others but we do not submit.”

His UNITA fighters conduct raids in most parts of Angola, a nation twice the size of Texas, with 9 million people. The movement claims control of the southeastern one-third of the country, but government units took several towns in the area in an offensive six months ago.

Savimbi hopes U.S. aid will enable him to repel the next offensive without further setbacks. The United States hopes to break the deadlock in a struggle whose outcome could affect alliances across southern and central Africa.

Cubans Must Go

If peace is negotiated in Angola, Administration analysts say, the Cubans could leave. That would satisfy both the United States and South Africa, who insist that the Cubans go as part of a plan to make Angola’s southern neighbor, South-West Africa, or Namibia, independent from South Africa. A Namibian settlement would ease tensions elsewhere and perhaps make racial change easier within South Africa.

So far, the U.S. action has stirred protests from the nine black-governed nations of the South African Development Coordination Conference.

The United States has given SADCC members $1.2 billion in aid in five years. But SADCC’s executive secretary, Simba Makoni of Zimbabwe, said there recently that Washington “cannot be friends with Savimbi and friends with Angola and SADCC at the same time.”

Botswana’s vice president, Peter Mmusi, has accused the United States of being “in league with South Africa in fomenting instability in this region.”