By Tommy Hansson
Sweden
February 7, 2009

Last year the MPLA regime in Angola finally agreed to hold parliamentary elections after long-standing pressures from the international community. The elections were held in September, the first ones in sixteen years.
The elections in 1992, which were supposed to end seventeen years of civil war, ended in chaos after accusations from the opposition that the elections were rigged. MPLA massacred thousands of followers of the oppositional parties, among which the former guerrilla movement UNITA under the leadership of the charismatic Jonas Savimbi was the largest and most important one.

A number of leading UNITA members were murdered, among them Vice President Jeremias Chitunda and General Elias Salupeto Pena. I met Chitunda during my visit to then UNITA capital Jamba near the Namibian border in the sout of Angola in 1988. Pena I had interviewed on behalf of a Swedish political journal in my home in Soedertaelje, Sweden in 1986.
The turmoil surrounding the 1992 elections led to a renewed armed struggle in this large former Portuguese colony in south western Africa, which did not end until Savimbi was shot dead by MPLA forces in an ambush in 2002.
The MPLA, still by and large a Marxist-Leninist party with a highly corrupt leadership, clung to power for six more years without elections until it finally succumbed to international as well as domestic pressure. The elctions resulted in an overwhelming victory for the MPLA, which won 82 per cent of the votes and 220 of the seats in the National Assembly; UNITA received only eleven per cent and 16 seats, while the other thirteen oppositional parties shared the remaining seven per cent.
This outcome was hardly surprising, given the fact that the President since 1979, José Eduardo Dos Santos, was desperate to get the permission to re-write the constitution which would be the case if the governing party got an absolute majority. Which it, of course, got.

The MPLA, however, did not succeed in convincing foreign observers that the elections had been free and fair. Luisa Morgantini, Vice President of the European Parliament in Strasbourg and leader of a delegation representing the European Union, maintained, according to the French news agency AFP: “There was a lack of transparency in the tabulation of the election results.”
Another Angola observer, Lara Pawson at the Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of Witswatersrand University in South Africa, have been quoted: “They (MPLA) have provided the world with a textbook case of how to hold seemingly democratic elections, obliterate the opposition, and return to a one-party state – and still win the silent support ofthe West, among others.”
When I contacted former UNITA representative in Scandinavia Dr. Luis M. Antunes after the elections, he said: “You know, MPLA is still MPLA. With its economic resources it can easily buy anyone and do whatever they like.” And they did. As a comparison it can be mentioned that the fourteen opposition parties received a total of 14 million U.S. dollars from the state in order to wage their election campaigns; the disbursement was made three days after the campaign officially began. The governing MPLA, on the other hand, had 300 million U.S. dollars at its disposal – well before the campaign started!

When I spoke with Dr. Antunes recently, he said that UNITA had more or less given up: “The MPLA regime has now introduced a law, according to which a party has to have at least two per cent of the vote in order to take seats in the National Assembly. UNITA leader Isaias Samakuva now fears that the MPLA will try to cut UNITA down to size, using cunning political manuevers, before the presidential elections this year.”
As mentioned above, some criticism was uttered in the aftermath of the Angolan parliamentary elections in September 2008. When this is written, however, the international community seems to be comfortable with the fact that elections have taken place at all.
Meanwhile, the governing MPLA continues to hold a firm grip over the Angolan society, where the expected life span is 40 years and 25 per cent of all children dies before they turn five. In the end of January, for example, over 50 children died of hydrophobia after being infected by rabies-sick dogs in Angolan capital Luanda.
According to Dr Luis Antunes, the country´s wealth is distributed in an extremely unequal way: “The rich live in exorbitant luxury, which makes former Zairean dictator Mobutu look like a poverty-stricken devil. The less wealthy majority of the people, on the other hand, shares fathomless poverty.”

Tommy Hansson is an old Angola observer - in the 1980s and 1990s he was Chairman of the Swedish Angola Groups and visited UNITA's guerilla base in Jamba in 1988.