By Lara Pawson
LUANDA, Angola (Reuters) - Angolan army officials Tuesday denied reports that the military was getting help from Cuba in its civil war against UNITA rebels.
``We have only Angolans here,'' said one army official, dismissing a report in a Portuguese newspaper that up to 200 Cuban advisers including senior military officers were in Luanda.
A second army officer also said there were no Cubans helping in the renewed fighting, which has destroyed a 1994 peace accord and plunged the oil- and diamond-rich southern African country back into conflict.
``In the FAA (Angolan Armed Forces) there are no Cubans,'' the officer told Reuters.
The Lisbon-based Diario de Noticias gave no source for its report, but said Cubans were also reported to be in the central highland town of Malanje, under attack for weeks by UNITA troops.
Cuba backed President Jose Eduardo dos Santos's Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) for some 15 years during the first Angolan civil war, which started before the country's independence from Portugal in 1975.
That involvement ended with a deal in 1989 which saw the Cubans leave Angola in return for South Africa's halting its support for UNITA and granting independence to southern neighbor Namibia.
South Africa's then apartheid government and the United States backed Jonas Savimbi's National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA).
Diplomats in Luanda said it was not inconceivable that there were Cuban mercenaries fighting on behalf of the Angolan government. There are also some Cubans in the presidential security detail.
The Angolan government launched an attack against UNITA's central strongholds of Bailundo and Andulo in December, but underestimated the rebels' strength and its forces were repulsed.
Since then the fighting has spread and UNITA has besieged the major centers of Huambo, Kuito and Malanje in operations that virtually mirror the last time the civil war flared in 1993, when UNITA rejected the results of the 1992 election.
Angolan state-owned media have reported that more than 200 people have been killed in UNITA shelling of Malanje and aid agencies have expressed concern over the fate of the 200,000 refugees that have flooded into the three encircled towns.
The breakdown of the 1994 Lusaka accord and the shooting down of two U.N.-chartered C-130 transport planes led the United Nations to recommend to the Security Council pulling its peacekeepers from Angola and leaving only a rump humanitarian staff.
10:49 01-19-99
Copyright 1999 Reuters Limited