Obituary: General Arlindo Pena

FEARED BY his enemies, respected by his peers and a hero amongst his own men, the former chief- of-staff of the Angolan rebel movement Unita, Arlindo Pena, died a broken man.

The short life of Pena, who was nicknamed "Ben Ben" after the Algerian revolutionary leader, Ahmed Ben Bella, reflects much of the tragedy of his times. He was born in 1955, part of a generation which grew up in an Angola gripped by relentless violence, first against Portuguese colonial rule and then, after independence in 1975, in a bitter civil war that remains unresolved to this day.

Pena joined Unita at the age of 13, and rose through the ranks to become an inspirational military commander and a brilliant strategist. He undertook basic military training in Europe and qualified as an artillery instructor in Morocco, and by 1985 had become Unita chief-of-staff for the Northern Front. That year, when a government offensive pressed against the southern town of Mavinga, Pena marched his men on foot from Malange, hundreds of miles to the north, to mount a relief operation. The two-week journey quickly became the stuff of legend. Within a year he had been promoted to division general and in 1989, aged only 34, he became Unita's chief- of-staff.

Such a rapid advance also in no small measure reflected his close family connections with the movement's charismatic but unpredictable leader, Jonas Savimbi, who has appointed a number of relatives to sensitive posts since launching his struggle in 1966. Pena's mother was the Unita president's sister, a relationship that in Ovimbundu culture made him more like a son than a nephew to Savimbi, and the young chief-of-staff was often regarded as his protege and potential successor.

Pena's most daring and celebrated moment, however, came not on the battlefield but in the chaos of defeat and retreat in late 1992. Unita had rejected the results of elections designed to set the seal on an uncertain peace process. As tensions rose and the country slipped back to war, Pena was one of a number of senior rebel officers trapped in the firmly pro-government capital. With his brother Salupeto, Unita's senior negotiator, he tried to break out of the city, running a number of roadblocks. His brother was killed, but Pena emerged in rebel territory, his status as a martyr further enhanced.

In the year that followed, Pena led Unita to a string of victories which saw large parts of the country fall to the rebels for the first time. Even then, however, colleagues recall the chief-of-staff drinking heavily and behaving erratically. "In our macho culture, though," says one associate, "the idea of a Unita general being unable to handle his drink was unthinkable." One biography lists his hobbies as "karate, music, reading (war stories)."

When events on the battlefield turned the government's way - ironically following the intervention of South African mercenaries who as part of the apartheid state's expeditionary force in 1975 had helped inspire Pena - he showed little enthusiasm for dialogue and remained lukewarm about the peace accord signed in 1994 but still not fully implemented by Unita.

In her book, Orphan of the Cold War, the former UN special representative to Angola Margaret Anstee remembers Pena as having had "a slightly swashbuckling, almost piratical air about him . . . like his uncle, he certainly had charisma."

The Angolan writer Sousa Jamba remembers an "amiable, approachable character, a soldier's soldier who lacked the pretensions of many of his rank." But Pena could never forget the death of his brother, nor escape his growing marginalisation in a country that since 1994 has stood uneasily between war and peace.

Despatched back to the capital, Luanda, in 1996, Pena took up an apparently senior but effectively toothless post in the national army as part of the peace settlement. Unita, however, retained its own army in its central highlands headquarters, with influence passing to Pena's even more hawkish rivals in the leadership, Generals Gato, Dembo and Bock.

As with many others in Angola, Pena found the transition from the intensity and horror of the battlefield to the more peaceful environment of city life something for which he was psychologically ill-equipped and ultimately unable to complete. He was notorious in Luanda for his drinking and womanising, and cut an increasingly tragic, pathetic figure.

He was admitted to a Johannesburg clinic over the weekend complaining of malaria. His death is likely to ensure his status as a hero to the Ovimbundu people who provide the bulk of Unita's support.

The effect on his uncle and the war they together for so long prosecuted is, however, much less certain as international mediators continue efforts to stall a return to outright hostilities; in Angola, for a man to recover his dignity, power and place only through death, and an ignominious one at that, is somehow no irony at all.

Arlindo Chenda Isaac Pena ("Ben Ben"), guerrilla leader: born Caricoque, Angola 17 November 1955; married; died Johannesburg 19 October 1998.