Who is the real Jonas Savimbi?

Editor's note: This is Part III of WorldNetDaily reporter Anthony
LoBaido's exclusive report on UNITA, Angola's anti-communist Christian
rebel movement, currently under siege from the all sides -- the U.S.
State Department, President Clinton's anti-UNITA Executive Order #13098,
the DeBeers diamond cartel, the United Nations, foreign mercenaries from
Zimbabwe and Namibia, and the private mercenary army "Executive
Outcomes."

In Part 1, "A tragedy in Angola,"
LoBaido described how UNITA, one of the last anti-communist movements in
the world, was once openly backed by the U.S. government, but now has
been targeted for destruction by its former benefactor. Part II, "In
Africa, diamond profits are forever," documented the governmental and corporate struggle for
power and diamond profits that is playing itself out in today's Angola.

LoBaido's decade-long research in this area has taken him on several
dangerous trips to southern Africa and involved hundreds of hours of
interviews, and sometimes direct confrontations with parties hostile to
open and independent journalism -- including Russian,
Rhodesian/Zimbabwean and North Korean officials, as well as the KGB and
GRU (Russian military intelligence).

By Anthony C. LoBaido

© 2000, WorldNetDaily.com

TRENDING: 'So cool': Kathryn Limbaugh shares Rush's final moments

MAVINGA, Angola -- Who is the real Jonas Savimbi? A communist or
capitalist? Animist or Bible-thumping Christian? Hoarder of Russian and
Chinese diamonds or independent rebel? Others ask what are Savimbi's
current interests in the diamond trade of Africa?

In the southern Angolan theater, the answers are as diverse as the
people who populate the region itself. But when all is said and done,
the question remains: Is the legendary leader of UNITA -- the National
Union for the Total Independence of Angola -- a Christian patriot or a
Marxist pawn playing the part of a Christian for South African and
Western consumption?

"Savimbi was dumped shortly after a critical article of him was
published in the National Review by the Polish-British journalist Radek
Sikorsky," says Loyal Gould, the Heinz Koeppler Institute Chair at
Baylor University at Waco, Texas. Gould is the former chief Associated
Press correspondent in Eastern Europe and retired chairman of Baylor's
journalism department.

UNITA's legendary leader, Jonas Savimbi

"Sikorsky painted a picture of Savimbi as a radical animist,"
recalled Gould, who is also a former World War II Navy frogman. Gould's
wife Ilsa survived a Nazi concentration camp, which influenced Gould to
devote his life to issues of freedom from totalitarianism. "... Not that
of the wonderful Christian as portrayed to the popular media by
then-President Ronald Reagan."

"I really wonder if a Christian leader, such as Savimbi is proclaimed
to be, would receive training in Red China," says Executive Outcomes
founder Eeben Barlow, a former Special Forces commander with South
Africa's now-defunct 32 Battalion or "Afrikaner Foreign Legion."

RELATED: In Africa, diamond profits are forever

"Many South African Afrikaner soldiers died while fighting for
Savimbi. This was a gross mistake," said Barlow. "We in Executive
Outcomes are really apolitical, but most of our soldiers, if you asked
them, would tell you that they are Christians. I believe we have fought
on the side [with the Marxist MPLA government] which has the best chance
of bringing peace to Southern Africa. This is our home after all, we
have nowhere else to run to -- so peace is vital to the future."

But peace in Angola is elusive and illusory, at the mercy of
multinational corporate greed fixated on the vast diamond, mineral and
oil wealth underneath the ground of this troubled former Portuguese
colony.

Barlow is an intriguing man. Blonde and handsome, a devoted father
and husband, he has reinvented himself and his mercenary organization
Executive Outcomes
into a multimillion dollar transnational corporation sporting everything
from combat forces to mining interests, media, music and a plethora of
other concerns.

A charming host and well spoken, Barlow was a guest on the American
news show "60 Minutes" and, not surprisingly, succeeded in putting his
best foot forward. Barlow has worked for ARMSCOR, the Armaments
Corporation of South Africa -- procuring the atomic bomb for the South
African government in the 1980s, and the Civil Cooperation Bureau, which
set up a vast array of front companies in Western Europe during the Cold
War to circumvent anti-South Africa, U.N.-imposed Apartheid sanctions.

Barlow has also taken on British citizenship, and thus, does have
somewhere "else to run to," as the anarchy, AIDS, rape, murder and crime
of the "new" Communist-run South Africa engulfs the Afrikaners in the
country they ran not too long ago.

UNITA soldiers on parade, with Savimbi's picture on banner

Jacques Migeotte, a Frenchman who served as a civilian pilot on
covert South African Defense Force missions carried out in the 1980s
against the Marxist SWAPO, or South West African People's Organization,
was brought to Pretoria, South Africa to be interviewed by
WorldNetDaily.

An articulate and courageous pilot held in high esteem by other South
African special forces operators, Migeotte accused Savimbi's forces of
gross environmental crimes involving the slaughter of elephants for
ivory. He said that ivory, teak wood and diamonds from UNITA had filled
Afrikaner coffers for more than three decades.

Migeotte also claimed Savimbi's father told Migeotte, "his son Jonas
[Savimbi] was a bandit" and that the younger Savimbi had once been
"arrested as a thief while working at a local post office."

"The Chinese saw tremendous potential in Savimbi," Migeotte said.

"In 1964 he attended the Political Warfare Academy in Nanking, China.
Savimbi then returned to Angola and launched UNITA, while playing both
sides of the fence. By November of 1975, the South African
government-military complex made a deal with Savimbi, and told him to
start reading his Bible because he was going to be a Christian from now
on."

Did Jonas Savimbi's brief time in Communist China in the 1960s turn
him into a committed, life-long communist? Have Barlow and Migeotte been
playing the disinformation game in their analysis of Savimbi as a
committed Marxist? After all, Savimbi still has many Christian,
anti-communist supporters in the West.

Another former Chinese-trained communist, Chiang Kai-shek, trained in
Moscow in 1923 as a communist soldier. Yet he became a staunch opponent
of Chairman Mao and the founder of modern Taiwan. After seeing what
Marxism was all about -- the gulags, forced abortions and other evils
that plague modern China -- did Savimbi decide there had to be a better
way?

Peter Hammond of Frontline Fellowship, a South African missionary
organization that serves Sudan, Rwanda and Angola, told WorldNetDaily
that "Jonas Savimbi is the son of a well-known evangelist in Angola."

"Savimbi is a professing Christian," said Hammond. "He claims that in
Red China, he learned how to fight a war and how not to run an economy.
He has many times gone on record condemning Marxism, communism and
atheism, while also expressing his Christian faith. Certainly there is
complete religious freedom in the UNITA-controlled areas," added
Hammond.

Bobby Booyse, a former South African special forces commander of the
black African Qwa-Nbele homeland, told WorldNetDaily, "Savimbi is
probably a socialist. I wouldn't fight and die for him. But who's to say
exactly what is in someone's heart. He has fought for many years against
communism, however. So one has to take that into consideration."

"My main question about the whole Angolan situation is this," Barlow
said. "Why aren't people asking questions about the lack of direction
and will the South African soldier had to endure due to those at the top
of our Apartheid government who weren't interested in allowing the
Angolan war to end?

Executive Outcomes' founder Eeben Barlow

"During those years we fought a war solely to enrich certain people
in the government," said Barlow, "while the general public was being fed
disinformation. Perhaps it is time someone asked how the personnel of
Executive Outcomes could turn the tide of the war in 18 months,
something the combined might of the South African Afrikaner government,
citizenry and military-industrial complex could not do over a period of
15 years between 1975 and 1990."

From Russia with love

Several Russian military officers who fought in Angola -- some of
whom now live in the United States, Thailand and Cambodia -- all
recently interviewed by WorldNetDaily claimed the Russian military
machine deliberately sent defective equipment to Angola to prolong the
war.

Scores of Afrikaner and UNITA soldiers interviewed by WND also
claimed that equipment provided by the Central Intelligence Agency was
outright defective or lacked the parts necessary to keep them
operational. Their intimations of a purposefully protracted and drawn
out war lines up with Barlow's theory of Afrikaner governmental
betrayal.

Barlow's connections with the DeBeers diamond cartel helped expedite
the start-up of Executive Outcomes. Barlow worked for DeBeers in the
late '80s and early '90s, handling DeBeers' corporate
counterintelligence -- that is, protecting their diamond mines and
industrial secrets.

During Barlow's tenure with DeBeers, the diamond giant founded by
Cecil Rhodes experienced the greatest crisis in its one-hundred-plus
years of operations in Africa.

It seems that in 1990, DeBeers, operated by Anglo-American magnate
Harry Oppenheimer, while accounting for $21 billion in assets and 70
percent of the world's diamond trade, was suffering from the breakdown
of a highly secretive Cold War arrangement -- with the Russians, of all
people.

WorldNetDaily's Anthony C. LoBaido

Back in the 1950s, during the darkest days of the emerging Cold War
between the Soviet Union and the West -- which then included South
Africa, a special target of Russia due to her strategic mineral wealth
-- news of vast diamond discoveries in Soviet-controlled Siberia
unleashed shockwaves throughout the diamond world.

DeBeers' blue chip stock fell more than 25 percent in a single day,
as its tidy monopoly was threatened by the news from Russia. Undaunted
in his role as the quintessential ultra-captialist, Oppenheimer sent his
British and Afrikaner representatives to the Kremlin to make a secret
deal with the Russian leadership.

In this deal, DeBeers offered to buy Russia's entire production of
rough diamonds at high prices. The transactions flowed with stealth
through various DeBeers European subsidiaries, unknown to the South
African public and even the CIA.

Until 1990 that is -- when the crumbling Soviet Empire wanted to
negotiate a new five-year deal with DeBeers. In this new contract,
Moscow would sell 95 percent of its diamonds for a cool $1 billion per
year through DeBeer's Central Selling Organization.

But Oppenheimer and his operation could not outrun history. In 1992,
the U.S.S.R. dissolved and DeBeers was required to sign yet another
agreement with the Siberian-based Yakutian mining conglomerate "ARS."
The province of Yakut has since adopted English as its official
language, a development that no doubt would have thrilled Cecil Rhodes,
the man who dreamed of a world federation of English-speaking people,
run by Anglo-American corporations.

Unfortunately for Oppenheimer and DeBeers, ARS was caught in an
intra-Russian diamond war against Moscow's Committee on Precious Metals
or "CPM." The Committee on Precious Metals began to leak stockpiles of
diamonds on the open market in an effort to subvert ARS's deal with
DeBeers. In 1994, the CPM leaked almost $1 billion worth of diamonds
onto the open market.

But that was only half of Oppenheimer's problem. Closer to home,
UNITA was selling billions worth of diamonds through its connections in
Belgium and Holland.

Complicating matters further was the fact that UNITA was still the
sworn enemy of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress, and
provided a potential haven for anti-Marxist guerillas and Afrikaner
patriots to infiltrate Namibia and the "New" Communist South Africa, as
well as to train Christian anti-communist rebels from Rwanda, South
Sudan, Mozambique, Zambia and Uganda.

With the blessings of both the ANC and DeBeers, Barlow launched
Executive Outcomes and attacked UNITA, seeking to take over her diamond
fields. Victory over UNITA naturally would have put billions of
additional dollars of profits into the hands of DeBeers.

In 1998, President Clinton signed Executive Order 13098, which
forbade U.S. companies from doing business with UNITA. It also sought to
block UNITA's exportation of diamonds. This demand was carried out by
the United Nations, most believe at the behest of DeBeers.

Now, against all odds, UNITA fights on alone. Supporters cite the
boycotting of DeBeers diamonds and the enforcement of a no-fly zone in
Southern Angola, carried out by the U.S. Army and Pentagon, as the best
hopes of securing freedom for UNITA's anticommunist, Christian
citizenry. They have fought valiantly since 1965 against a vast array of
enemies.

Indeed, the strange alliance of DeBeers, the United Nations,
Executive Outcomes, Communist South Africa, Zimbabwe and Namibia, with
the all-important helping hand of President Clinton and the U.S. State
Department, forms a story of corporate intrigue and deceit, the final
chapter of which has yet to be written. Since America is so heavily
involved, the outcome of the story, to a great extent, depends on the
response Americans have to the plight of those brave souls who have
struggled for so many years, and who continue to fight -- against
communism, totalitarianism and greed in the heart of the dark continent.

Readers can make their voices heard on this and any other public
policy issue by contacting their elected representatives through
WorldNetDaily's Legislative Action Center.

Anthony C. LoBaido is an
international correspondent for WorldNetDaily and WorldNet
Magazine. He is also the author of "The Third Boer
War," which he describes as "an apocalyptic novel about a future war in
South Africa between the Afrikaners and the UN/ANC."