Angolan Troops Shell Rebels From Namibian Side; Atrocities Reported

WINDHOEK, Namibia — Angolan government troops crossed the border into Namibia on Sunday and shelled rebel UNITA positions in Angola, witnesses said.

Fighting in the region has intensified in recent days as Angolan forces try to increase the pressure on the UNITA rebel movement, whose troops are hiding out in dense bush in the far southeast of Angola.

Angola’s ruling MPLA last week asked Namibia for help in its campaign, and Namibia said it would let Angola use Namibian air bases to attack UNITA, reversing earlier statements that suggested it would not aid its neighbor.

The Angolan government is locked in a 25-year civil war with the UNITA rebels and has reportedly scored major gains in recent months. Regional analysts are concerned that Namibian support for Angola could lead to a wider conflict in the region.

Witnesses said Angolan government troops who have swept through a rural area along the border in the last several days have left in their wake burned huts and the bodies of men who apparently had been executed.

Government forces rounded up men, women and children on Tuesday across the Kavango River from Namibia, 12 miles east of Rundu, and marched them into the bush further into Angolan territory. Gunshots were heard later in the day.

An Associated Press reporter who went to the site afterward found the bodies of nine men, all with gunshot wounds to the forehead. The bodies had been doused with fuel and set on fire, but rain had doused the flames. All the men wore civilian clothes. One body had been scalped, and a hand was chopped off.

It was unclear what happened to the other people who were marched away at gunpoint.

In a half-mile area of Angola near the border, every home and straw hut had been torched. Toys and other possessions were scattered among the ashes.

Angolan government soldiers took cattle, beds and other looted items across the river into Namibia and sold them, witnesses said. Angolan government soldiers, in uniform and armed, were seen drinking in Namibian bars. Foreign tourists have been evacuated from the area 370 miles northeast of Windhoek, the Namibian capital.

“There is no law over there anymore. Now it’s just the law of the AK-47,” said Schalk Visser, who owns the Manyana Lodge on the Namibian side of the river.

Mano Branco, an Angolan police officer swigging from a bottle of liquor, predicted that UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi’s days are numbered. “One more week, he is finished,” Branco declared.

But the whereabouts of the leader of UNITA, an acronym for the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, are unknown. Analysts say that although UNITA has suffered recent battlefield defeats, Savimbi could keep fighting a low-level bush war as he has for years.