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Portugal Confronts Colonial Past

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By BARRY HATTON, The Associated Press

Published: December 16, 2007

LISBON, Portugal - The heads of enemy soldiers impaled on roadside trees. Hundreds of prisoners tortured, killed and dumped in mass graves. Napalm dropped on jungles where guerrillas sheltered, and grass-hut villages torched with cigarette lighters.

These gruesome acts were carried out in Portugal's name two generations ago during its colonial wars in Africa. But for most Portuguese, the events aren't history - they're news.

A groundbreaking series aired by public broadcaster Radiotelevisao Portuguesa is confronting Portugal with unsettling aspects of its recent history that for decades have been shrouded in silence.

The series has become a top-rated prime-time program and the most-watched documentary in years, regularly drawing more than a million viewers in a country of 10.6 million.

"People had spoken very little about what happened," said Joaquim Furtado, the Portuguese journalist who created the series. "The effect, I think, has been positive. People won't be able to see things in simplistic terms now."

Portugal's wars against independence fighters in its 500-year-old African empire erupted in 1961 in Angola. In surprise attacks, rebels butchered Portuguese settlers, including women and children, on remote Angolan plantations.

In revenge, Portuguese militias and troops carried out a vicious campaign of repression, despite pressure from the United States and United Nations to pull out of Africa.

Filmmaker Furtado, a well-known journalist with an almost 40-year career, spent more than six years digging up hundreds of hours of film footage and masses of photographs, some never seen in public. He also gathered firsthand accounts from war veterans on both sides, many of whom hadn't spoken out before.

For Africans, the Portuguese atrocities have long been a matter of historical fact. But in Portugal, it has taken this documentary to explode the nation's myths about its colonial rule, which ended in 1974.

Antonio Salazar's dictatorship, established in the 1930s, kept Portugal in the dark about what was happening thousands of miles away on another continent.

His censors killed unfavorable newspaper articles, and state media encouraged the war effort with reports of heroic deeds against insurgents classified as bloodthirsty "terrorists."

Within a year, the Angolan rebellion subsided. But parallel wars broke out in Mozambique and another Portuguese African colony, Guinea-Bissau.

Salazar, mindful that the African colonies enriched his nation and lent it a Cold War stature beyond its size, waged a propaganda battle that included the unremitting government slogan "Angola e nossa!" (Angola is ours!), which was even broadcast over loudspeakers at packed beaches.

Salazar, a flinty and unbending leader, changed the designation of the colonies to "overseas territories" and depicted their peoples as Portuguese who were treated as equals and were eager to remain under Lisbon's wing.

Ask Portuguese nowadays about their colonial administration and they will insist it was benign, so radio phone-in shows and Internet blogs are abuzz over the newly revealed facts.

Luis Quintais, an anthropologist at Portugal's Coimbra University who has written a book about the African conflicts, says they have "been immersed in a huge silence," while Portuguese history is rendered as the chronicle of a small, gentle country bullied by bigger European powers.

"We think of our colonization as having been soft, or mild, compared to other countries. But it wasn't, it was just the same," Quintais said. "We like to portray ourselves as victims, not victimizers."

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