Angola Says It Killed Leading Rebel Savimbi

The Angolan government reported Friday that rebel leader Jonas Savimbi, who has led a struggle for power in that country for almost 30 years, was killed during fighting with the army.

A statement read on Angolan radio and television said Savimbi, who led the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola--or UNITA, under a Portuguese acronym--died earlier in the day during an army attack on the rebel group in Moxico province in southeastern Angola.

There was no independent confirmation of the claim, and UNITA officials were not available for comment. A spokeswoman for the State Department in Washington said, “We have heard from multiple sources” that Savimbi is dead. But U.S. officials could not confirm the reports.

A presidential spokesman in Angola told reporters in the capital, Luanda, that Savimbi’s body would soon be shown to the public.

The reported death of Savimbi, 67, could signal an end to the 27-year war in the former Portuguese colony, foreign observers said. On Friday, the government indicated to reporters in Luanda that it was ready to implement a 1994 peace accord that called for regular democratic elections. The U.N.-brokered deal had collapsed in 1998, as did two earlier agreements.

The fighting has claimed the lives of an estimated 500,000 people, while 4 million others--or roughly one-third of the population--have been driven from their homes in the southwestern African nation, according to U.N. statistics. Human rights groups claim that both sides have committed atrocities.

Born Jonas Malheiro Savimbi to a poor family in the central highlands village of Munhango, the veteran guerrilla leader was educated in Protestant missionary schools.

Savimbi, the imposing, jovial son of a railway stationmaster, studied medicine in Lisbon, the Portuguese capital, and political science in Switzerland. He left Europe in 1961 to fight Portuguese rule and formed UNITA, gradually managing to amass a force of more than 60,000 troops.

At independence in 1975, Savimbi, a member of the country’s majority ethnic Ovimbundu group, began fighting government troops of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, or MPLA, led by his longtime rival, current President Jose Eduardo dos Santos.

The conflict would become one of Africa’s longest-running wars. Those who knew him say Savimbi’s insatiable lust for power was largely to blame.

“I spent a lot of time with Savimbi in the U.S. and in Angola and always found him on the surface to be a charming, erudite and intellectually interesting guerrilla leader,” said one former U.S. government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Yet below the surface, he was nothing short of a maniacal megalomaniac.”

Savimbi became a key player in the Cold War struggle for dominance in Africa, acting as a proxy of the United States and South Africa in the battle against Angola’s Marxist government.

“There was a side of him that was very charming, but he was an immensely manipulative man,” said Judith Matloff, a U.S. journalist who met Savimbi on several occasions and is the author of “Fragments of a Forgotten War,” an account of the Angolan conflict. “He was a man of Maoist ideologist background that he never really dropped. But he was able to fool the West that he was anti-Communist and pro-capitalist.”

But with the demise of the Soviet Union, Savimbi was no longer crucial as a Cold War player. The Angolan government had begun to shed its Marxist cloak and move close to the United States.

A succession of U.N. peace plans led to elections in September 1992. UNITA lost. Savimbi denounced the elections as rigged. Critics called him a spoiler. His resistance to democracy made him increasingly isolated.

“What was terrifying for him was that suddenly the world order had changed, the Cold War was over, and, God forbid, he lost the elections,” Matloff said. “It was too much to bear.”

Months later, fighting resumed. Another deal, brokered in 1994, unraveled in 1998. A stockpile of diamonds sold on the black market is believed to have helped UNITA fund its war, despite a U.N. oil and arms embargo.

“Savimbi was the most negative influence on Angola over the last few years,” Matloff said. “All of these decades of war were largely due to him.”

The toll in terms of civilian lives, infrastructure and Angola’s economic development has been astronomical.

Kenzo Oshima, the United Nations’ emergency relief coordinator, told the Security Council last week that the deadly combination of famine and guerrilla warfare has made conditions in Angola “among the worst in the world.”

Savimbi’s troops “continue to destabilize large parts of the countryside” and routinely steal donated food and medical supplies and harass aid workers in the country, Oshima said.

Life expectancy in Angola is now only 44 years, and declining. One in three children dies before age 5. And young boys are being press-ganged into military service by rebel and government forces alike, according to Oshima.

“The status of children is catastrophic,” he said.

In recent months, the government has chased UNITA out of its main strongholds. Several senior officers have reportedly been killed. There have been reports of high-level defections from Savimbi’s military ranks. And U.N. sanctions designed to choke off support for the Angolan rebels have seriously weakened UNITA.

But still Savimbi refused to compromise, continuing to insist that the people loved him and that he alone could lead Angola into a free and democratic age.

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Times staff writers William Orme at the United Nations and Bob Drogin in Washington contributed to this report.