[been in adily JSA. in NETO'S ETO'S RIVAL…]

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been in adily JSA.

in NETO'S ETO'S RIVAL DEFEATED RIVAL successfully defeated a coup d'etat led by his former Minister of the Interior, Commander Neto Alves.

The President's object now seems to be to politically behead the small but significant Angolan working class and resolve a crisis which has been inevitable since the MPLA took power in 1975.

In 1974, faced with the attacks of right wing gangs, the workers from Luanda shanty towns set up self defence militias to defend their houses.

With their support the MPLA defeated the reactionary 'Liberation" armies of the FNLA and UNITA in the battle of Luanda, the turning point of the civil war.

After victory, the MPLA, petit-bourgeois movement ruling a country in which the economy was shattered by the civil war, had neither the will nor the immediate ability to provide the material benefits which the working class expected from the "revolution"

In the summer of 1975 Neto attempted to dissolve the militias. They refused to give up their arms; battalions refused to leave Luanda to march to the front, and the MPLA backed down.

It was then that Neto Alves, the only MPLA leader born in the shanty towns became champion of "popular power"

But he always opposed any attempt to direct the indignation of the masses towards independent action against the MPLA.

Instead he set out to raise himself up within the leadership of the movement, concentrating his tire on the social and racial origins of individuals in Neto's cabinet.

Popular power was not the only card Alves used to advance himself. He was also known to be 'Moscow's man in Luanda"

If the MPLA bureaucracy was to defend itself against his attacks and against the working class they had to pursuade the Russian bureaucracy to disown him.

In October 1976 President Neto went to Moscow. A few days after he returned Alves was dropped from the political bureau of the MPLA and his supporters in the secret police were purged.

On 21 May he was expelled from the Central Committee of the MPLA. At that point Alves had to show the bureaucracy the extent of his popular support if he was to force them to take him back into the fold. It was pure self interest that brought him to lead his supporters to • _ occupy a radio

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On May 27, after a four hour gunbattle, President Neto of Angola