| Guinea-Bissau War of Independence | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Part of the Portuguese Colonial War and the Cold War | |||||||||
 PAIGC soldiers with a downed Portuguese aircraft, 1974 | |||||||||
| |||||||||
| Belligerents | |||||||||
 PAIGC  Guinea (1970 only)  Cuba |
 Portugal | ||||||||
| Commanders and leaders | |||||||||
|
Amílcar Cabral † Luís Cabral João Bernardo Vieira Domingos Ramos † Pansau Na Isna † Francisco Mendes Osvaldo Vieira Pedro Rodriguez Peralta (POW) |
Arnaldo Schulz António de Spínola Bettencourt Rodrigues | ||||||||
| Strength | |||||||||
| ~10,000[citation needed] | ~32,000[citation needed] | ||||||||
| Casualties and losses | |||||||||
| 6,000 killed[4] |
2,069 killed 3,830 with permanent deficiency (physical or psychological) | ||||||||
|
5,000 civilian deaths[4] 7,447 African former Portuguese Army soldiers executed by PAIGC after the war.[5][6][7] | |||||||||
The Guinea-Bissau War of Independence (Portuguese: Guerra de Independência da Guiné-Bissau), also known as 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, Yugoslavia and Brazil. 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 material and which created significant internal political turmoil in Portugal.[8]
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.[2]
- ^ Katagiri, Noriyuki (2014). Adapting to Win. University of Pennsylvania Press. pp. 148–150. ISBN 9780812246414.
- ^ a b Chabal, Patrick (1981). "National Liberation in Portuguese Guinea, 1956-1974". African Affairs. 80 (318): 75–99. doi:10.1093/oxfordjournals.afraf.a097302. ISSN 0001-9909. JSTOR 721431.
- ^ The New Encyclopaedia Britannica: Macropaedia : Knowledge in depth. Encyclopaedia Britannica. 2003. ISBN 978-0-85229-961-6.
- ^ a b Twentieth Century Atlas – Death Tolls
- ^ Cite error: The named reference
Lloyd-Jones, Stewart p. 22was invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ PAIGC, Jornal Nô Pintcha, 29 November 1980: In a statement in the party newspaper Nô Pintcha (In the Vanguard), a spokesman for the PAIGC revealed that many of the ex-Portuguese indigenous African soldiers that were executed after cessation of hostilities were buried in unmarked collective graves in the woods of Cumerá, Portogole, and Mansabá.
- ^ Munslow, Barry, The 1980 Coup in Guinea-Bissau, Review of African Political Economy, No. 21 (May - Sep., 1981), pp. 109-113
- ^ Elizabeth Buettner (2016). Europe after Empire: Decolonization, Society, and Culture. Cambridge University Press. p. 204. ISBN 978-0-521-11386-1.