UNITA to force negotiations through war

The Angolan rebel movement, UNITA, has said it will continue fighting in Angola until President Jose Eduardo dos Santos agrees to peace talks with its leader Jonas Savimbi. In a Mozambique radio interview monitored by the BBC on Tuesday, UNITA's secretary general, Lukamba Paulo Gato, accused the international community of only taking the government's views into account. "The problem is that nobody has ever listened to us," he said. The Angolan civil war, which resumed in December after the breakdown of the 1994 UN-brokered Lusaka Protocol peace accords, would continue "until the two sides sit at the negotiating table," Gato said. At the weekend, the Angolan Armed Forces (FAA) chief of staff, Lieutenant-General Jose Ribeiro Neco, acknowledged that the military situation in the country currently favoured UNITA. But in its own analysis in a statement on 7 May, UNITA said it had "reinvented itself" and was well equipped to keep up the pressure. It said it now controlled the borders with Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Zambia, and its army had better mobility, morale, equipment and skills. "The SADC (Southern African Development Community) will not get militarily involved in Angola as has been reported," it said. "Zimbabwe has enough problems of its own and Namibia would not make a difference anyway. As long as South Africa is out of it, UNITA sees no threat from the region." Citing its commitment to a negotiated settlement, the statement also said the government had gone too far in rejecting any talks with UNITA and that President dos Santos would be committing "political suicide" if he changed his mind. "The military situation is not offering him a golden way out either. He is standing on quicksand."