Portugal's Guerrilla Wars in Africa by Al Venter

Author:Al Venter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Modern / General
ISBN: 9781910294307
Publisher: Helion and Company
Published: 2013-12-19T05:00:00+00:00

PAIGC attempts to stymie events at Tite reflected only one aspect of the kind of clandestine operations conducted by insurgent forces in this Portuguese colony. At the same time, it barely concealed the more salient characteristics of guerrilla strategy: that apart from the military effort, there were also economic and political considerations that involved a huge measure of intimidation of the locals.

If someone was believed to be colluding with the government, at whatever level – attending a government clinic, visiting a relative in a military camp or perhaps paying a government tax – a brief Comintern-type show trial would be held in the village and that person would be executed. Kafka would have immediately recognised the pattern had he been able to visit the place.

Unarmed civilians had long been a focus of PAIGC attrition. So had public services, lines ofcommunication, transport, commerce, industry and agriculture – the warp and woof of everyday life in Portuguese Guinea and, to a lesser extent, in Angola and Mozambique.

Such operations as the rebels conducted against the hated colonials were directed – it was repeatedly claimed in their communiqués – to attain greater freedom of action with regard to the real objective – the destruction of the fabric of the nation.

By then these same arguments were being bandied about in other guerrilla struggles in South East Asia, Indonesia, Tanzania, and later in southern Africa, almost as if they had emanated from a single source, which they probably had, though clearly, Beijing by then had almost as much influence in some of these Third World conflicts as Moscow.

The guerrilla strategy in Portuguese Guinea was neither offensive nor defensive: it was principally evasive.

For example in areas where government control was relatively weak, the insurgents would go onto the offensive. But that rarely happened. It was more a case of seeking out a soft underbelly, which wasn’t difficult in a country so grossly undeveloped.

Elsewhere, evasion remained the keynote of PAIGC military strategy.

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