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Dos Santos\u00a0died in a clinic in Barcelona on July 8 at the age of 79. His funeral was taking place days after an election that appeared to have returned his MPLA party to power but whose results have been disputed by the opposition.<\/p>\n
Dos Santos and his family dominated\u00a0Angolan politics\u00a0for the 38 years that he ruled until 2017. His once Marxist party, the People\u2019s Movement for the Liberation of\u00a0Angola\u00a0(MPLA), in power for nearly five decades,\u00a0looks certain to have won\u00a0Wednesday\u2019s poll.<\/p>\n
His rule was marked by a 27-year on-off civil war against U.S.-backed rebels from the National Union for the Total Independence of\u00a0Angola\u00a0(UNITA), who he defeated in 2002. The country also enjoyed an oil-fuelled boom, but more than half the population of more than 30 million live in poverty.<\/p>\n
\u201cToday we pay tribute to the former president for the contribution he made to the nation as the Architect of Peace,\u201d Social Affairs Minister Carolina Cerqueira said, using the honorific title dos Santos earned for ending a conflict that killed half a million people.<\/p>\n
Heads of state and senior ministers from around the continent, as well as the president of\u00a0Angola\u2019s former colonial ruler Portugal, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, attended.<\/p>\n
The presence of foreign VIPs enabled authorities to seek to head off possible protests over the disputed provisional results, which gave the MPLA and President\u00a0Joao Louren\u00e7o\u00a0a 51% majority while UNITA, now the main opposition group, got 44.5%.<\/p>\n
The national police force said that due to the state funeral, citizens intending to organise activities should \u201ccontain themselves out of respect for the former head of state,\u201d according to a statement reported by the Lusa news agency on Saturday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dos Santos\u00a0died in a clinic in Barcelona on July 8 at the age of 79. His funeral was taking place days after an election that appeared to have returned his MPLA party to power but whose results have been disputed by the opposition. Dos Santos and his family dominated\u00a0Angolan politics\u00a0for the 38 years that he […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":182300,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":{"facebook_10221280388112155_325455220908133":"","twitter_917774835383787521_917774835383787521":""},"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/wardoon.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182299"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/wardoon.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/wardoon.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wardoon.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wardoon.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182299"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/wardoon.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182299\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":182301,"href":"http:\/\/wardoon.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182299\/revisions\/182301"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wardoon.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/182300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/wardoon.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wardoon.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wardoon.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}