guinea-bissau war of independence

The Guinea-Bissau War of Independence (), or the Bissau-Guinean War of Independence, was an armed independence conflict that took place in Portuguese Guinea from 1963 to 1974. It was fought between Portugal and the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (''Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde,'' PAIGC), an armed independence movement backed by Cuba, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia. The war is commonly referred to as "Portugal's Vietnam" because it was a protracted guerrilla war which had extremely high costs in men and materiel and which created significant internal political turmoil in Portugal.

After the assassination of PAIGC leader Amílcar Cabral in January 1973, the military conflict reached a stalemate: Portuguese forces were largely confined to major cities and various fortified bases and were patently unable to dislodge PAIGC from the so-called liberated zones. In September 1973, the PAIGC-dominated People's National Assembly unilaterally declared the independence of a new Republic of Guinea-Bissau; the declaration was recognised by several foreign countries. After the Carnation Revolution, the new Portuguese government agreed to grant independence to Guinea-Bissau in September 1974 and to Cape Verde a year later. PAIGC thus became the first sub- Saharan African liberation movement to achieve independence – if only indirectly – through armed struggle.

Background

Portuguese colonialism

Portuguese Guinea (as well as the nearby Portuguese Cape Verde archipelago) had been claimed as a Portuguese territory since 1446 and was a major trading post for commodities and African slaves during the 18th century. However, the mainland was not fully "pacified" until the late 1930s, by which time the Portuguese regime of António de Oliveira Salazar was preoccupied with the development of its Angolan and Mozambican colonies. There were various changes to the colonies' legal status and governance structures during this period and in subsequent decades, but they were primarily "cosmetic" in effect.

In the phrase of Patrick Chabal, Guinea was "the smallest and most backward of the Portuguese colonies", partly due to its inhospitable climate and apparent dearth of natural and mineral resources. There were few European settlers in Guinea, and the footprint even of the Portuguese administration was minimal and "crude", remaining centralised under the governor. Portugal invested little in the colony and made only minor gestures towards promoting its economic and social development. Nonetheless, a colonial economy existed on the Guinean mainland, controlled primarily by the Companhia União Fabril and consisting primarily of cash crop exports; traditional Guinean economies were disrupted both by the imperative to cultivate export crops and by Portuguese taxation. Moreover, Portugal was attached even to its most "dispensable" colony, viewing its maintenance as integral to Portugal's hold on other more economically important colonies, particularly Angola and Mozambique.

Formation of PAIGC

The revolutionary insurgency which ultimately launched the war was led by the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde ( Portuguese: ''Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde,'' PAIGC), a liberation movement founded in 1956 by Rafael Barbosa and nationalist intellectual Amílcar Cabral. From the outset, its main objectives were the unity of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde and their independence from Portuguese rule. In its first three years, PAIGC was preoccupied with mostly fruitless exercises in constitutional-legal agitation, concentrated in Bissau and other major cities and sometimes involving collaboration with local trade unions. However, on 3 August 1959, PAIGC was involved in organising a major dockworkers' strike at the Port of Bissau. The Portuguese authorities broke up the strike by force, leading to what became known as the Pidjiguiti massacre, in which at least fifty people were killed and several hundreds wounded.

The massacre led PAIGC to rethink its policies: in the aftermath, it reiterated its commitment to national liberation, but with a new emphasis on the political mobilisation of the rural peasantry. Cabral ordered the party to go underground and its political cadres to organise in exile in Conakry, the capital of the newly independent Republic of Guinea on the southern border of Portuguese Guinea. Between 1960 and 1963, PAIGC was "totally transformed" as it prepared for armed struggle against the Portuguese regime. Scores of cadres were trained in Conakry and sent to the Guinean countryside to mobilise the population, while the political leadership launched a diplomatic offensive that secured the full cooperation of the government in Conakry, the "tacit support" of the Senegalese government, and contacts with several other liberation movements and left-wing political parties.

On April 18, 1961 PAIGC together with FRELIMO of Mozambique, MPLA of Angola and MLSTP of São Tomé and Príncipe formed the Conference of Nationalist Organizations of the Portuguese Colonies (CONCP) during a conference in Morocco. The main goal of the organization was cooperation among the different national liberation movements in the Portuguese Empire. Also in 1961 PAIGC commenced sabotage operations in Guinea-Bissau. At the start of hostilities the Portuguese had only two infantry companies in Guinea Bissau and these concentrated in the main towns, giving the insurgents free rein in the countryside. The PAIGC blew up bridges, cut telegraph lines, destroyed sections of the highways, established arms caches and hideouts, and destroyed Fula villages and minor administrative posts. In late 1962 the Portuguese launched an offensive and evicted the PAIGC cadres that had not integrated with the local population. Open hostilities broke out in January 1963.

Belligerents and forces

Liberation/PAIGC forces

Guinea-Bissau's liberation movement was led and dominated by PAIGC, which was led by Cabral until his assassination in January 1973. By the early 1970s, PAIGC had the support of a majority of the Guinean population, but its combat strength was estimated at no more than 7,000. However, the movement was "well trained, well led, and well equipped", and its guerrilla c