Leaders arrive for Angolan summit

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33870, 16 June 1975, Page 17

Leaders arrive for Angolan summit

(N.Z.P. A. -Reuter —Copyright)

NAIROBI, June 15.

A summit meeting between the leaders of Angola’s three liberation movements will begin near Nairobi today aimed at bringing peace among them after four months of bloodshed in which more than 1000 people have died.

The summit meeting is being held in Nakuru, 150 kilometres from Nairobi, under the chairmanship of President Jomo Kenyatta, of Kenya, who has played a leading role in bringing the three leaders together. Mr Holden Roberto, leader of the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (F.N.L.A.) and Dr Jonas Savimbi of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (U.N.1.T.A.) arrived yesterday. Kenyan officials who waited all day yesterday for the third leader, Dr Agostinho Neto, of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (M.P.L.A.), learned he would arrive this morning.

Fighting between the liberation groups erupts after the three leaders met last January to formulate a united policy for independence negotiations with Portugal. Their talks resulted in the formation of an Angolan transitional government which included the three nationalist groups and the Portuguese military to guide the country to independence on November 11. But since then, followers of the Marxist-oriented M.P.L.A. and the Zaire-based F.N.L.A. have clashed repeatedly, causing more deaths than occurred during the nationalists anticolonial war with Portugal U.N.I.TA. was brought into the fighting for the first time earlier this month when Portuguese officials accused 'the M.P.LA. of killing at

least 10 people in an attack on a U.N.I.T.A. office in Luanda.

Meanwhile, in Luanda the "Provincia de Angola” newspaper yesterday said that an Italian engineer and a Portuguese architect had been shot dead by sympathisers of one of the liberation movements. It did not say which one.

The newspaper said that the killing took place on a road south of Malange, a city 350 kilometres east of the capital, which has had fierce fighting recently.