Turning the Tide Of Refugees

Reverse airlift to Angola

ATTENTION, ANGOLANS! read Portuguese newspaper ads last week. ALL PERSONS WHOSE NAMES ARE LISTED HERE SHOULD GO TO THE ANGOLAN EMBASSY ON A MATTER OF GREAT IMPORTANCE TO THEM. The scores of people listed were refugees who had been airlifted to Lisbon from the former Portuguese province in 1975, when civil war threatened their lives and the prospect of a new Marxist government in Luanda threatened their property. The "matter of great importance" was approval of their longstanding applications to return to Angola. In a surprising reverse airlift, 569 refugees have already made the fateful trip back home, while some 1,600 others are awaiting transport via the Angola airline TAAG. A cargo ship is being readied to return the possessions they brought with them in their desperate flight three years ago.

The countercurrent of refugees is a mere trickle compared with the tide of 350,000 that swept into Portugal shortly before Angola became independent in 1975. Nonetheless, the reverse exodus is a sign that life in Angola is returning to some form of normality. According to reports from returnees who have resettled in various parts of the country, Angolan President Agostinho Neto's Cuban-backed government has finally prevailed over two rival revolutionary groups: Hoiden Roberto's National Front for the Liberation of Angola (F.N.L.A.) and Jonas Savimbi's National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). Apparently willing to forgive and forget, Neto's government hopes that the returnees, many of whom are technicians, professionals and skilled workers, can help rebuild the devastated country. Says Luanda's ambassador to Lisbon, Adriano Sebastiao: "All skilled Angolan workers who want to return will have a job waiting for them. What we need to do now is reactivate the industries that closed down when the Portuguese left."

Even some Portuguese merchants and farmers whose property was expropriated by the Neto government are seeking to return. At a temporary shelter on the outskirts of Lisbon, set up to house would-be returnees, Dulce Pereira da Silva, 54, last week was waiting for a flight to take her back to the village of Musulo in northeast Angola, where she once owned a general store. Says she: "My son, who is a mechanic, is already working and I've had letters and phone calls from the family and they say everything is all right there." Angelino Jose de Castro, 23, formerly a rural schoolteacher in Angola, and his wife Virginia are equally optimistic: "We ran away from the war in Angola in an American plane. But we decided to keep Angolan nationality. So now, for better or worse, we prefer to go to our own country. I know I can get work there and the government has to give us a house. Here I've been mostly out of work. When we were moved to the north, I even had to take a job sweeping floors."

Much of the refugees' nostalgia for Angola springs from Portugal's difficulties in assimilating them. Many were blacks or people of mixed blood who were born in Africa. The majority of the whites had originally been dirt farmers from the impoverished north of Portugal; they had emigrated to Angola in the hope of a better life. Although few got rich, most had deep roots in Africa. Many of the refugees found it extremely difficult to adjust to a Portugal that was still in the throes of the post-Salazar transition to democracy and a mixed economy. Jobs, housing and schooling were scarce: thousands still live in wretched urban shantytowns.

The return of refugees was worked out by Portuguese President Antonio Ramalho Eanes and Angolan President Neto last summer at a summit meeting in Guinea Bissau, another former African province of Lisbon. Until then, relations between Lisbon and Luanda had been virtually nonexistent because of Angola's expropriation of Portuguese property and Portugal's destruction of Angola's food-distribution system. At the meeting, Eanes and Neto agreed to exchange ambassadors, to settle the property issue and arrange for the voluntary return of refugees to Angola. It was later decided that the cost of repatriating the refugees would be borne by the Portuguese and Angolan governments and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees.

The refugees' return is a bitter blow to UNITA, which continues to harass Neto's forces from guerrilla bases in southern Angola. Savimbi, reasonably enough, fears that the returnees' technical and management skills will bolster the Neto regime. Declared a UNITA representative in Lisbon last week: "The Portuguese know the country, and through them Neto could recuperate; UNITA does not want them to go." Claiming that four people who went back to Angola had already been taken prisoner by UNITA forces, he warned that any mass exodus would put the returnees "in grave danger." That seemed to be an empty threat since most returnees are settling in areas well out of UNITA control. -

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