LISBON, Portugal, May 10 1999 Sapa-AP
Angola's UNITA rebels lashed out Monday at the United Nations Security Council for its recent efforts to tighten international embargoes aimed at pressuring the insurgents into peace talks with the government.
The UNITA leadership blasted the U.N. move as "an outrage and a swindle."
"The UNITA leadership deeply regrets the fact that the U.N. Security Council is unable to comprehend the underlying causes of the Angolan conflict," said the rebel statement faxed to The Associated Press bureau in Lisbon, Portugal.
Angola's civil war resumed in December, shattering a U.N.-brokered 1994 peace pact which had cost the world body dlrs 1.5 billion to implement.
Seeking to push the rebels into compliance with the accord, the council had imposed an arms embargo on UNITA, frozen its foreign assets, prohibited its leaders from foreign travel and banned it from selling diamonds - the rebels' main source of revenue which allowed it to rearm.
However, many nations have flouted the embargoes, and the council voted Friday to appoint two investigative panels to try to enforce the measures more strictly.
UNITA - a Portuguese acronym for the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola - complains that the government restarted the civil war when it attacked rebel strongholds in December.
Civil war first erupted in the Southwest African nation in 1975 after it was granted independence from Portugal.