Re: Re: East Timor/United Nations

[Michael Pugliese <debsian@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

A Complicated War: The Harrowing of Mozambique
William Finnegan

Annotation
Powerful, instructive, and full of humanity, this book challenges the
current understanding of the war that has turned Mozambique-a naturally rich
country-into the world's poorest nation. Before going to Mozambique, William
Finnegan saw the war, like so many foreign observers, through a South
African lens, viewing the conflict as apartheid's "forward defense." This
lens was shattered by what he witnessed and what he heard from Mozambicans,
especially those who had lived with the bandidos armado, the "armed bandits"
otherwise known as the Renamo rebels. The shifting, wrenching, ground-level
stories that people told combine to form an account of the war more local
and nuanced, more complex, more African-than anything that has been
politically convenient to describe. A Complicated War combines frontline
reporting, personal narrative, political analysis, and comparative
scholarship to present a picture of a Mozambique harrowed by profound local
conflicts-ethnic, religious, political and personal. Finnegan writes that
South Africa's domination and destabilization are basic elements of
Mozambique's plight, but he offers a subtle description and analysis that
will allow us to see the post-apartheid region from a new, more realistic,
if less comfortable, point of view.

"A brilliant, sometimes devastating eyewitness report of the civil war . . .
that has killed a million Mozambicans." (New York Times Book Review)

"Vivid and arresting. . . . [A] sense of balance and insight distinguishes
this book from the many tract-like accounts that have previously been
written about Mozambique." (Michael Massing, Times Literary Supplement)

"Writing about a country asphysically and intellectually inaccessible as
Mozambique takes courage, patience, and especially a willingness to pay
attention to the particular. Finnegan has all of these. He brings to his
subject a reporter's instinct for the facts of the story and a writer's
sensitivity to character and language." (George Packer, Los Angeles Times)

"This engrossing, sensitive account . . . details the results of a savage
war that began in 1975, a year after Mozambique gained indepence from
Portugal. . . . A small classic about anarchy and the difficulties of nation
building in post-colonial Africa." (Publishers Weekly)


Author Bio: William Finnegan is the author of Crossing the Line: A Year in
the Land of Apartheid (1986) and Dateline Soweto: Travels with Black South
African Reporters (1988). He is a staff writer for The New Yorker.

Cold War Guerrilla: Jonas Savimbi, the U. S. Media and the Angolan War, Vol.
31
Elaine Windrich
>From the Publisher
This is first book on U.S. policy in Angola during the 1980s. It shows how
the Reagan administration led the U.S. media to inflate the importance of
Jonas Savimbi as a "freedom fighter" and to intensify the civil war in
Angola. This well-researched and moving case study shows how the Reagan
administration adopted Savimbi as an ally in the crusade against Third World
governments supported by the Soviet Union and how the mainstream media
followed the administration's agenda and right-wing views about the civil
war in Angola. This text provides insights about how the U.S. media covers
African and Third World issues in the 1990s during the Bush administration
as well.

The State, Violence and Development: The Political Economy of War in
Mozambique, 1975-1992
Mark F. Chingono



----- Original Message -----
From: "Jim Devine" <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, June 28, 2001 7:15 AM
>Subject: [PEN-L:14198] Re: East Timor/United Nations


> Michael the K wrote:
> >The crumbling of the Portuguese empire at this time led the Kissinger
State
> >Department and the CIA to instigate some of the most disgusting "foreign
> >policy" ever perpetrated by the US, as civil wars were deliberately
created
> >in Angola (with the creation of UNITA under the psychotic Jonas Savimbi)
>
> for what it's worth, UNITA wasn't "created" from above. Rather, it arose
as
> part of the war of liberation against Portugal. Savimbi was probably
> corrupt from the start, but he sounded like a revolutionary for awhile.
> Maybe he's an example of power corrupting. In any case, Kissinger found
him
> to be a worthy representative of the "free world." Also, China supported
> him for quite awhile.
>
> Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine
>