| | Jonas Malheiro Savimbi was for twenty years a figure as important in Southern Africa as Nelson Mandela, and as negative a force as Mandela was positive. For the last ten years, using the proceeds of smuggled diamonds from eastern and central Angola, he fought an increasingly pointless and personal bush war of sheer destruction in which hundreds of thousands of peasants were killed, wounded, displaced, or starved to death. His death in fighting in the eastern province of Moxico on Friday was greeted with celebrations in the Angolan capital Luanda. |
