Soviets Urge Angola Allies to Talk to Rebels

MOSCOW — The Soviet Union on Thursday urged the Marxist government in Angola to open negotiations on the country’s future with its rebel right-wing opposition, warning that the tentative peace agreement with South Africa will collapse without a quick end to Angola’s 13-year-old civil war.

Deputy Foreign Minister Anatoly L. Adamishin, who played a key behind-the-scenes role in negotiating the peace agreement, told journalists that the ruling Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola urgently needs to “start a dialogue” with the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, or UNITA, as its longtime rival is known.

“In the absence of those negotiations between the two Angolan parties, the . . . negotiations in Geneva will be placed in jeopardy,” Adamishin said, referring to continuing talks among Angola, South Africa and Cuba that are being mediated by the United States. The Soviet Union has taken part in those talks as an “unofficial observer.”

The negotiations on southern Africa resulted last week in an agreed framework for the withdrawal of both South African and Cuban troops from Angola and for the implementation of a 10-year-old U.N. plan for the independence of Namibia, or South-West Africa, a former German colony that Pretoria has administered since 1920 under a League of Nations mandate. The United Nations formally ended the mandate in October, 1966, but Pretoria has retained administrative control.

Promising the full use of Soviet influence to achieve “a just and fair settlement,” Adamishin acknowledged that Moscow had been in “constant contact with our Angolan and Cuban friends” throughout the protracted talks, urging them to search for “a mutually acceptable agreement.”

‘Band of Bandits’

Yet his statement went further than the Soviet Union had gone before in publicly urging talks with UNITA, which the Luanda government again on Thursday denounced as a South African “puppet” and a “band of bandits.”

In Luanda, the Angolan government said it was willing to expand its “amnesty” program to attract more members of UNITA, but it again declared that it would not negotiate with the group, saying that its exclusion from the regional peace talks “was logical, normal and necessary for the establishment of peace.”

But a dispatch by the official Angolan News Agency, Angop, said this did not rule out a program of amnesty to return to society “hundreds of Angolans who were unwittingly used to serve foreign interests and personal ambitions.”

Negotiations Sought

Led by the charismatic Jonas Savimbi, UNITA has received extensive support from Pretoria throughout the long civil war and from Washington during the Reagan Administration. UNITA has actively sought negotiations with the government, arguing that neither side could win militarily and that the conflict should be resolved through negotiations.

The Soviet position as outlined by Adamishin on Thursday appeared closer to that of UNITA than to that of the government that Moscow has supported for nearly 13 years.

“If a settlement is achieved removing external interference in Angola’s domestic affairs, if South African troops . . . are completely withdrawn in a short time and no more aid is given (to UNITA), then the Angolans themselves can settle their own differences,” Adamishin said, stressing the need for the government “to start a dialogue with Savimbi sitting around a table.”

$1 Billion in Aid

But Assistant U.S. Secretary of State Chester A. Crocker, who mediated the negotiations in Geneva, said earlier this week that to ensure the agreement’s success, Moscow also has to halt its aid, estimated at $1 billion a year, to the Luanda government.

American assistance to UNITA, nominally $15 million a year in weapons but widely believed to be much more, would continue as long as the Soviet Union provided aid to the government, Crocker said.

“We will not unilaterally disengage,” he said in Washington, calling on Moscow to make proposals on the issue.

Adamishin said the Soviet Union already is discussing with the United States ways to provide effective international guarantees, probably by the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, of a final agreement on the withdrawal of foreign forces from Angola and Namibian independence. The five permanent members of the Security Council are China, France, Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States.

“When the future agreement is outlined in full detail, we can talk about guarantees in less uncertain terms,” he said. “But we are thinking about forms that guarantees might assume, though a settlement must be reached first.”

A Regional Conflict

Southern Africa was one of the key areas, along with Afghanistan, Cambodia and the Persian Gulf, that the United States and the Soviet Union decided to focus on in their efforts to resolve the regional conflicts that have often brought the two superpowers into rivalry and sometimes confrontation.

In the last 18 months, Moscow has gone through a major reappraisal of its position in Africa, just as it has done elsewhere in the world, and has shifted stance on a number of issues, including the conflicts in Angola and Mozambique and the civil strife in South Africa itself.

Although Moscow previously believed that the region’s problems could be solved only with the abrupt abolition of Pretoria’s apartheid system of white-minority rule, Adamishin said it now sees measures such as the Angolan agreement and Namibian independence as important steps toward eventual majority rule in South Africa.

Under terms of the tentative agreement announced Monday, South Africa promised to have its troops, estimated to number 3,000, out of Angola by Sept. 1. Cuba is eventually to withdraw its troops, believed to number about 50,000, under a timetable that will be worked out at talks later this month.

African diplomats said they expect the actual pullout to begin late this year. If agreement on the Cuban withdrawal is reached, South Africa has pledged to begin implementing the U.N. plan for Namibian independence Nov. 1.