Thousands Claimed Killed In Angola

Press, Volume C, Issue 29526, 30 May 1961, Page 9

Thousands Claimed Killed In Angola

(N .Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright)

LONDON, May 27

Between 20,000 and 35,000 Africans have been killed in Portuguese operations in Angola, British weekly magazines estimate.

The Government was engaged in a “war of extermination” one said. In Lisbon, the British Foreign Secretary. Lord Home, told the Portuguese last week that the Angola •problem was for them alone to decide.

The “New Statesman” in Britain declared that “some 35.000 virtually defenceless Africans have already been butchered by machine-guns and napalm.” A writer in the “Spectator” quotes the figure of 20,000 as the “most apparently trustworthy and by no means the largest of the figures that have slipped through the terror-struck censorship.”

The “Economist” says killing of Africans has been indiscriminate and puts the figure at “tens of thousands.” Identified In an editorial, the “New Statesman” says that now the fighting in Algeria is at last ending, “Dr. Salazar is identified, not only in Africa but in Asia and LatinAmerica, as enemy No. 1 of the African people.” The “Economist” says the Portuguese Government is deluding itself if it believes ite own statements that the revolt is not essentially Angolan. According to Bernard Levin in the “Spectator” it is now clear that the regimes in both Spain and Portugal “will die with the dictator who created it, even if, indeed, events do not move so fast as to reverse the order, and bury the builder under the ruins of his house.

“Salazar can kill 20.000 Angola Africans: he can slaughter every black man in the territory . . . but what is happening in Angola spells death for its Iberian version of fascism as certainly and inexorably as DDay did for its German counterpart.”