Angola Warns of Imminent Clash With Invaders

Angola warned Thursday of an imminent clash between invading South African troops and its own advancing units. Any such clash would be a serious escalation of the conflict within Angola and might draw in Cuban troops there.

The Angolan Defense Ministry said in Luanda that a South African armored task force has penetrated 150 miles since crossing into the country on Monday. It said the force is approaching the headquarters, at Jamba, of Jonas Savimbi’s right-wing National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), in a move to prevent Angolan forces from attacking the guerrilla stronghold.

If the Angolan account is correct, South African troops could soon find themselves in combat not only with the Angolan forces attacking Savimbi’s headquarters but--in their effort to establish air superiority--with Cuban air-defense units.

South African officials continue to insist that the operation is a limited one. It was undertaken, they say, in pursuit of guerrillas of SWAPO, the South-West Africa People’s Organization, which has been fighting for nearly 20 years for the independence of neighboring Namibia (South-West Africa).

Gen. Constand Viljoen, chief of the South African Defense Forces, announced Thursday that all his troops would be out of Angola this weekend.

Viljoen said that 500 South African soldiers, taking part in what he called a very limited operation that had not gone more than 20 or 30 miles into Angola, succeeded in breaking up guerrilla formations, disrupting their logistics, destroying sizable arms caches and killing two guerrillas.

Air Strikes Continue

South African air strikes were said to be continuing, however, and their impact may be considerably greater.

The South African troops have suffered no casualties so far, Viljoen said, although he acknowledged earlier this week that a South African medical corpsman had been killed in an Angolan government attack while serving with the UNITA guerrillas in a previously undisclosed support effort for Savimbi’s forces.

The conflicting accounts from Pretoria and Luanda have left Western diplomats baffled. This is not the usual time for major attacks by the Namibian guerrillas that the South African operation ostensibly was launched to prevent.

And only two months ago, South African commanders in Namibia were boasting that this has been one of their most successful years in pushing the guerrillas back into Angola from the Namibian border.

Yet such a small operation--reportedly only 500 men operating in 12 teams for less than a week--would seem too flimsy to camouflage the much bigger task force Angola says has driven deep into its territory and is mounting bombing raids on Angolan targets well beyond the area where the Namibian guerrillas operate.

The possibility that South Africa is doing much more than it is admitting, and that the operation was launched more to protect UNITA than to chase Namibian guerrillas, brought a sharp warning Thursday from Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, leader of the white liberal opposition Progressive Federal Party, about the “sheer madness” of South Africa’s becoming involved in the civil unrest of another country.

The government has lied repeatedly, Slabbert said, about its military activities in Angola, Mozambique and other neighboring countries, and might well be lying again.