Former U.S.-backed rebel leader Jonas Savimbi on Saturday leveled charges of fraud in Angola's first multiparty elections and said his backers could take up arms again if he does not win.
Savimbi said the governing party, former Communists who held a 2-to-1 lead in partial returns, stole ballot boxes, beat up electoral officials and inflated returns from the two-day voting last week.A cease-fire monitoring commission called an urgent meeting to discuss Savimbi's speech on the radio station of his National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, or UNITA.
Most international observers said voting had run relatively smoothly in this southwest African nation, where a 16-year civil war left 350,000 people dead before a truce in May last year.
But Savimbi vowed to ignore the findings of election monitors, insisting the party of former Marxist President Jose Eduardo dos Santos "is not winning and cannot win."
"There are men and women who are prepared to give their lives for the country to be redeemed," Sav-im-bi said on UNITA's radio station.
Savimbi's hard-line comments intensified fears he will lead UNITA back to the bush and reignite the civil war.
The conflict was a flash point of the Cold War, with the United States backing Savimbi and the Soviets supporting dos Santos. The civil war devastated the oil-based economy of this once-prosperous former Portuguese colony.
The cease-fire paved the way for the elections. Dos Santos has since sought reform. Savimbi, criticized for human rights violations, no longer is funded by Washington.
In Washington, State Department African affairs specialist Jeffrey Davidow said the U.S. gov-ern-ment has confidence in U.N. election monitors.
Davidow said Savimbi's comments actually were aimed "at calming down the situation." He did not elaborate.
"If Savimbi or any candidate has allegations of fraud or irregularity, the system has procedures for this to be investigated," Davidow said.
Jeffrey Millington, head of the U.S. liaison office in Luanda, said Friday, "What impressed me most was that there was no violence and no significant fraud. The Angolan people should be very proud."
Earlier this year, Savimbi's support in Washington was rocked by the defection of two leading UNITA members who accused him of killing dissidents and their families.
The government had no immediate comment Saturday on Sav-im-bi's accusations. But a government official quoted anonymously by Portugal's Lusa news agency called it "a real declaration of war."
The president of the electoral council, Caetano de Sousa, denied Savimbi's accusations. He said the council received formal protests from UNITA about alleged irregularities in only two of the 5,608 polling stations. The nearly 800 international observers have filed no protests, he said.
Savimbi said Angola "will not depend on any international organization to say that the elections were free and fair. It will only depend on the observations of the Angolan people."