Angolans endured a bloody civil war and extreme poverty as for nearly 40 years power rested solely in the hands of autocratic President Jose Eduardo dos Santos. Today, Angola has been at peace only since 2002, and is still deeply scarred by a conflict that became a vicious proxy battleground in the Cold War rivalry of the United States and the Soviet Union. "In some ways he is the father figure of the nation, widely seen -- rightly or wrongly -- as the man who ended the war," Soren Kirk Jensen, an Angola specialist at the London-based Chatham House think tank, told AFP.
