A Change in the Weather

The rains have stopped in Angola, and for the first time Portuguese troop carriers have been able to range freely on the dirt roads of the back country. A swath through northern Angola, extending 130 miles south from the Congo frontier, now lies scorched as the Portuguese advance, burning the underbrush to smoke out hidden rebels. The rebels, badly armed, have no answer. Villages lie deserted; livestock, farms and gardens are abandoned as terrified natives flood into the lower Congo. Many know little about the rebellion.

From his Leopoldville headquarters in a dirt-floored former bar, Rebel Leader Holden Roberto admitted his rebels were fighting a losing battle, but were not yet knocked out. Roberto's forces, once 50,000 strong, now number only 10,000 unpaid men; and his only contact with them is through couriers, who take ten days to make the round trip between Leopoldville and Angola's desolate battlefields. "We have made mistakes and we are paying for them," he told his followers in the Congo. "We are now changing our tactics and retreating into the forests until the dry season is over."

But every rebel killed and village burned was costing Portugal more prestige in the eyes of the watching world. In New Delhi, India's Prime Minister Nehru (who has already thrown the Portuguese out of two small enclaves and would like to put them out of Goa, on India's west coast) urged the United Nations to invoke economic sanctions against Portugal because of the "tremendous revulsion of feeling all over the world" to events in Angola that are, he said, "horrible almost beyond belief."

At week's end Portugal's Premier Antonio de Oliveira Salazar told the National Assembly that he had no intention of complying with the U.N. resolution calling on Portugal to "halt measures of suppression" in Angola. Salazar charged that the U.S. was serving Communist subversion in Africa by voting for the resolution and offering support to Africa's black anti-colonialists. Said Salazar: "Everything in this world is beginning to be so topsy-turvy that those who do injury are considered worthy, those who defend themselves are criminals, and the states . . . which limit themselves to securing order in their territories are incriminated by the very countries that are at the root of the disorder created there."

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