Government says key town seized by UNITA

The Angolan rebel movement UNITA has seized the strategic northern town of M’banza Congo 500 km north of the capital Luanda after several days of intense fighting, according to news reports on Thursday. Local news broadcasts monitored by the BBC quoted Defence Minister Pedro Sebastiao as telling the national assembly that M’banza Congo had been seized on Tuesday after a battle which would now make it easier for UNITA to attack key oil-producing sites. The town itself is on the road to the Texaco oil installations in Soyo. “Yesterday, when we were assessing the political and military situation here, M’Banza Congo, capital of Zaire Province, was under an all-out attack, within the framework of the strategy for its occupation, which occurred later,” Sebastiao told Portuguese Antena 1 Radio. The latest attack follows the resumption of war in Angola last month which shattered the UN-brokered Lusaka Protocol peace accords between the government and Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA movement. In a strategy to isolate Savimbi, the government has said it would only deal in future with the breakaway UNITA faction, UNITA Renovada. Fighting in the central highlands, the east and the north of country, and the shooting down of two UN-chartered transport aircraft, has prompted the UN to pull most personnel in the 1,000-strong UN Observer Mission in Angola (MONUA) back to Luanda from the provinces for their safety. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, last week recommended the withdrawal of MONUA from Angola. But diplomats told IRIN on Thursday that the three-nation Angola observer group representing Russia, the United States and Portugal has asked the UN Security Council to maintain a smaller observer mission in Angola which could act as a political liaison office for contacts with the protagonists and to assist humanitarian relief operations.