As an article by Milorad Lazić shows:
Beginning with Algeria in the 1950s until its demise in the 1990s, Yugoslavia was an ardent supporter of liberation movements and revolutionary governments in Africa and Asia.
Lazić emphasizes four key dynamics that shaped this policy in general over these decades:
First, Yugoslav party and state leadership believed that non-aligned countries were both legally and morally obligated to help each other, although not through formal military alliances. [...] Second, military aid served as an effective means for augmenting Yugoslavia’s and Tito’s prestige
in the world that would facilitate Belgrade’s other foreign policy objectives. [...] Third, military aid—along with elevated prestige—was directly contributing to Yugoslavia’s independence and security. [...] Finally, the economic considerations were present from the beginning of Yugoslavia’s military
engagement in the Global South. Arms transfers allowed Yugoslavia to scrap obsolete weapons; at
the same time, furnishing arms and military equipment also created markets for the Yugoslav
military-industrial complex and advertised the achievements of Yugoslav industries abroad.
With relation to Angola specifically he elaborates:
Belgrade considered Angola one of the strategically most important
countries in Africa. Furthermore, the Yugoslavs believed that the MPLA’s struggle in many ways
resembled the struggle of the Yugoslav Partisans during World War II: just like Tito’s Partisans, the
MPLA was simultaneously fighting foreign oppressors and domestic “reaction.” Even some foreign
observers made this analogy between the Yugoslav liberation struggle and the Angolan decolonization war. British journalist Basil Davidson, who spent some time with the Yugoslav Partisans
during World War II, wrote that the MPLA assumed the same tactics like the Yugoslav Partisans,
while their chief competitor, the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (Frente Nacional de
Libertação de Angola – FNLA), “revealed a striking parallel with other ‘Holdenites’ [after the
FNLA’s leader Roberto Holden], of the Second World War, notably the Serbian monarchists of
occupied Yugoslavia” (Davidson 1972, 222). As one of the leaders of the MPLA stated, “Our
liberation movement is in many respects similar to your peoples’ liberation movement, and that was
certainly one of the reasons why we found friends in the Yugoslav people and its leaders” (NIN,
September 21, 1975).
Since 1961, Yugoslavia was supporting the movement. Yet, before 1968, Yugoslav aid to the MPLA
was chiefly symbolic. The quantity and quality of aid significantly increased from 1968. Until
Angolan independence in November 1975, Yugoslavia donated money, weapons, and military
materials to the MPLA that were worth U.S. $2 million. MPLA officials—including the movement’s
leader and the first president of independent Angola, Agostinho Neto—often visited Yugoslavia to
request money and weapons (Borba, February 22, 1973). Another aspect of aid that was particularly
important for the Angolans was military training in Yugoslav military schools. The MPLA believed
that the Yugoslavs, with their unique guerrilla experience in World War II, were able to provide a
necessary training for their military cadres. In 1970, a high-ranking functionary of the MPLA and the
future Angolan defense minister, Henrique (Iko) Teles Carreira, went on a three-week-long visit to
Yugoslavia to learn about Yugoslav partisan experiences that “could be useful to them and applied to
their situation.” In August 1971, six Angolans arrived for a four-month-long training in the
Yugoslav People’s Army Infantry School in Sarajevo to learn about guerilla and diversionary tactics,
and about Partisan experiences in organizing supply lines behind the frontline.
Yugoslavia furnished the MPLA with light infantry weapons, vehicles, artillery, and anti-aircraft
weapons, but also communication equipment (Čavoški 2019). Moreover, Yugoslavia also sponsored the MPLA’s information bureau in Belgrade that served as an informal embassy and provided
a number of scholarships and stipends for MPLA cadres. Yugoslav aid came at a critical moment for
the MPLA, and according to some Angolan officials, it played an important role in sustaining the movement’s fighting capabilities (Gleijeses 2003, 348–349). Yugoslavia showed its dedication to Neto by supporting the MPLA even when other countries—including the USSR—suspended their aid in 1974 due to the so-called “Eastern Revolt” led by a faction within the movement (Sellstrom
1999, 17). An Angolan official said that, “Until August 1975, the country that helped the MPLA the
most was Yugoslavia” (Gleijeses 2003, 349). The delegation of the MPLA that visited Yugoslavia in
September 1975 said that Yugoslav aid in the critical months of 1975 served as an example to “some
other friends [Cuba and the USSR] of the MPLA who, after that, became more engaged.”
However, despite repeated request for additional aid, the Yugoslav coffers were empty.
