LUANDA, Angola — Even in death, Angola’s ancient ruler, José Eduardo dos Santos, is at the center of the political infighting.
The former president died in Barcelona on July 8 at the age of 79, but when and where he will be buried has sparked a cross-border battle that pits the Angolan government and his widow against some of his adult children.
The death of Mr Dos Santos came just weeks before a crucial election. Angola’s ruling party and current president, João Lourenço, along with Mr. dos Santos’ widow, want to take his body home for a state funeral and bury it in a Soviet-style mausoleum — the kind of spectacle that could gain support for a party struggling to stay in power.
But his daughter Welwitschia dos Santos insists on a private funeral and a discreet burial site in Spain, where his children can go. She says she has the support of some of her siblings who, like her, are accused of corruption in Angola and could be arrested if they return. They could also try to settle the return of their father’s body to regain their place in Angola’s political elite.
With both sides battling it out in a Spanish court, it is now up to a judge in Barcelona to decide the feud. The outcome could influence the August elections in Angola, an oil and mineral-rich country on the west coast of southern Africa.
“People are just trying to use the body and all these related things to advance their own personal agendas,” said Augusto Santana, a political analyst in Angola. He added that the incumbent president wants to use the death “for electoral purposes” and negotiate for the children to “drop corruption charges”.
Mr dos Santos, one of Africa’s longest-serving leaders, was a prominent figure in Angola for nearly four decades. At the forefront of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, or MPLA, he emerged victorious from a war of independence against colonial Portugal and then a decades-long civil war.
To his supporters, many of whom have joined Angola’s affluent elite, he has steered the country out of violent turmoil to make it one of the world’s largest oil producers, the coastal capital dotted with skyscrapers.
But to his many adversaries, he was a ruthless dictator who suppressed democracy and oversaw a corruption-choked economy, with most Angolans living on less than $2 a day.
“I find it amazing that people are now pretending that dos Santos was a saint. He wasn’t,” says Adolfo Tembo, 26, who sells roasted peanuts and bananas.
Mr dos Santos had been living in self-imposed exile in Barcelona for three years. According to Welwitschia dos Santos, popularly known as Tchizé, he had said he wanted to be buried there.
He had become increasingly isolated from the party he had ruled for so long. His hand-picked successor, Mr Lourenço, who came to power in 2017, had turned against him, blaming the dos Santos government for Angola’s economic slump and prosecuting his children.
Mr Lourenço and Mr dos Santos tried to get closer last year. Mr dos Santos returned to Angola and was due to appear at the party conference. But then he learned that his son José Filomeno dos Santos would be sentenced to five years in prison for embezzling the state fund. The former president was further outraged by a plan to remove his face from the Angola currency, Tchizé dos Santos said.
“My father was extremely humiliated when he first returned to Angola, something he did against our judgment and advice, convinced of President Joao Lourenço’s desire to achieve a genuine reconciliation,” Ms dos Santos said in a reply. by email to questions from The New York Times.
The visit also disappointed Mr Lourenço. His strategy of scapegoating the dos Santoses as the source of Angola’s corruption backfired, with figures of their day still high in his government. According to Ricardo Soares di Oliveira, professor of international politics of Africa at Oxford University, he alienated voters from his inability to straighten out the economy.
A June poll by the Mudei Civic Movement, a civilian-based election observation group, found that the MPLA was 19 percent behind an opposition coalition with UNITA, the former wartime enemy.
Mr dos Santos was admitted to the intensive care unit of the Teknon clinic, a leading private medical center in Barcelona, on June 24, with heart and breathing difficulties. Three days later, Mrs. dos Santos the Spanish police and accused his caretakers of neglect.
His caretakers were his fourth wife, Ana Paula dos Santos, and his longtime personal physician, João Abraão da Conceição Afonso. The lawyers for the two declined to comment. The Angolan government did not respond to questions, but confirmed that they had hired lawyers for the woman and the doctor.
Tchizé dos Santos accused the woman and the doctor of not taking care of him as his breathing deteriorated, and waited a day to take him to hospital after he collapsed in his bathroom on June 23.
Then, on July 4, four days before her father’s eventual death, Ms. dos Santos’s wife and doctor formally charged with attempted murder. She says she has the support of her siblings.
Jose Filomeno dos Santos, the 44-year-old son of the late president responded to questions by email, but sidestepped a question about where and when he wanted his father to be buried. He said: ‘The state has no constitutional obligation to undertake my father’s funeral. This decision rests with the family.”
He is in Angola, where he is appealing a conviction on corruption charges, and said he was unable to be with his father for the past few days because his passport was seized.
When Mr. dos Santos died, the official cause of death was cardiac arrest. But in response to the daughter’s lawsuit, a judge ordered an autopsy. The preliminary results rule out poisoning, according to: Angola’s state media. The Spanish authorities are waiting for the final result to send their decision.
“If there is nothing, the body should be handed over to the family,” Judge Francisco González Maíllo said in an interview. He is the judge in Barcelona who will have to decide which family members will receive the body.
After the death of Mr dos Santos, Tchizé dos Santos spread the word that her father intended to support the opposition party UNITA.
But a funeral in Angola could pose legal problems for Ms dos Santos and her siblings, several of whom are under criminal investigation. Isabel dos Santos, the eldest daughter, is at risk of arrest if she returns because she… not responded to a subpoena for questioning prosecutors in 2018.
Isabel dos Santos became a billionaire when she acquired interests in Angola’s banking, telecommunications, construction and diamond industries, often through orders signed by her father. They are said to be the richest woman in Africa. When her father finally stepped down in 2017, she headed the state oil company Sonangol. She has been accused of transfer millions from state-owned dollars to her own business empire stretching from Hong Kong to the United States.
In an email to The Times, Tchizé dos Santos rejected reports that she and her siblings were trying to negotiate an amnesty. Isabel dos Santos did not respond to a request for comment.
Angola’s Attorney General Hélder Pitta Grós traveled to Spain as part of a government delegation to handle the transfer of the president’s body, but his spokesman refuted reports that Mr Grós had a mandate to negotiate amnesty with dos Santos’ siblings.
“The Attorney General does not negotiate,” said ÁlvaroJoão, the spokesman.
Angola held a seven-day mourning period for its former leader. Instead of a coffin, a large portrait of Mr. dos Santos was erected in a government square in the capital, with a red carpet facing it, while uniformed soldiers stood guard.
But the battle for the remains of Mr. dos Santos is of no interest to ordinary Angolans.
“Do you know how much my husband and I earn? And do you know whose fault it is for the dire situations that my family and clearly most Angolans are now facing? asked Avenina de Vasco, 37, a street sweeper. “The MPLA and dos Santos have ruled for a very long time. So I don’t care if he’s buried here or in Europe or America.”
Gilberto Net reported from Luanda, Angola, Joseph Baptist from Madrid, Spain and Lynsey Chutel from Johannesburg.