Voice from the Commonwealth Commentary, World Views and Occasional Rants from a small 'l' libertarian in Massachussetts
"If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest for freedom, go home and leave us in peace. We seek not your council nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen." - Samuel Adams
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Angola is not saying how it will vote. In this story about the struggles of Angola, by Nick Danziger (who writes some great travel novels), a government official warns that they won't necessarily adhere to the African Union's stance.
The Foreign Minister, João Miranda, will not say how Angola intends to vote, but stresses that his country will not necessarily align itself with the African Union, which is opposed to war. “Angola’s presence on the Security Council was due to the backing of the African Union, but we are not the African Union’s spokesman. Angola will define its position in accordance with its own interests,” he says. “Angola believes it is possible to wage war to achieve world peace.”
In Angola peace came only after a civil war that raged for more than a quarter of a century following independence from Portugal in 1975. Up to 1.5 million lives were lost in the fighting and millions fled to the capital, Luanda.
Washington gave the Angolan Government its support in the conflict against the rebel group Unita, which ended after the guerrilla leader Jonas Savimbi was killed in a gunfight. While Angola has huge wealth from oil, much of it from payments by US companies, three quarters of its people earn less than a dollar a day. This has been attributed to enormous debts run up during the years of strife, but there have been reports that the International Monetary Fund found that hundreds of millions of dollars of government revenues had gone missing.
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