ANGOLA: The Angolan army has killed Jonas Savimbi, who has led the UNITA rebel group's fight for power in the country for more than 30 years, the army and government said in a joint statement last night.
Savimbi (67) was the US's key ally in Africa during the Cold War, and a recipient of substantial CIA aid during the 1980s.
Apartheid South Africa armed and aided his UNITA movement, and South Africa's army repeatedly invaded Angola, occupying a large area in the south and sabotaging roads, railways, bridges, electricity, airports, factories and schools.
Only the presence of tens of thousands of Cuban troops supporting the MPLA government prevented the apartheid regime and its UNITA allies from taking power.
Savimbi's death yesterday means the end of the most destructive guerrilla movement the world has ever known.
For two generations, hundreds of thousands of Angolan peasants were killed,wounded and displaced. Tens of thousands of children, boys and girls, were kidnapped and forced into UNITA's army as porters, sex slaves or fighters.
Angola today is in economic and social ruin despite its oil wealth. After a UN-monitored election in 1992, which Savimbi lost, he plunged the country back into civil war, reneging on a peace agreement brokered the previous year by the US.
After that humiliation of the UN, his movement proceeded to shoot down several UN planes delivering humanitarian supplies. The UN Secretary General's special representative, Maitre Alioune Blondin Beye, was killed in a plane crash in 1998.
A UN report in 2000 detailed UNITA's use of diamonds mined in the areas controlled by its army to fuel the war and the movement was put under strict sanctions.
The Organisation of African Unity and the southern Africa group of countries, SADC, declared Savimbi a war criminal.
The Canadian ambassador, Mr Robert Fowler, who headed the UN sanctions, forecast then that if "the outside world ceases and desists from providing military assistance to Savimbi, he will not be able to maintain this war". However, the shady world of diamond dealers has continued to buy from him despite sanctions.
Presidential spokesman Mr Aldemiro de Conceicao said in an interview yesterday with a Portuguese radio station that Savimbi had died in the province of Moxico.
Asked if Savimbi was dead, he said: "I confirm it. In fact, the government just released a statement confirming the death of Jonas Savimbi, which occurred today at 3p.m. (1300 GMT) in the province of Moxico."
The government added it would now prepare for an end to Angola's civil war, which has been fought for most of the past 27 years, and said it was ready to implement fully a 1994 peace accord which called for regular democratic elections.
The army in recent months has been closing in on Savimbi's column, which was moving through the remote province of Moxico, about 480 miles south-east of Luanda, the capital and close to the Zambian border.
Several senior UNITA officers have recently been captured in that area. Many others have defected in the last two years as the government army routed UNITA from its strongholds.