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It is usual to state who has won a war. In this case the implication of the reference to SWAPO winning the elections is given as the result. This suggests that SWAPO won the war. They did not. They lost the military war. The victory of SWAPO in the elections had little to do with the war. SWAPO could have contested, and may have won, any one of the elections held during the war. An analogy would be Sinn Fein losing the uprising in Belfast, but winning the parliamentary elections of 1918. JohnC ( talk) 06:22, 9 August 2009 (UTC)
To write about how Namibia acquired independence without mentioning the war in Angola in which a combined force of SWAPO, MPLA, and Cuban Army volunteers defeated South Africa, as well as the freedom struggle in South Africa and the world anti-apartheid movement, is to present it so out of context as to be utterly worthless. Mmclic ( talk) 21:06, 7 November 2010 (UTC) Marc Lichtman
Who attacked who?? Different areas of wikipedia give different accounts of if SWAPO attacked the South African forces, or if it was vice versa. This should be researched and clarified.
We've managed to tippy toe around this issue for the six years or so this article's been discussed by the wiki community, but given the recent edit conflict I feel obligated to finally bring it up.
How do we define "Namibian War of Independence" and why is it separate from the South African Border War article? In promoting the separate justification for this article in the past, I've taken the view of Leopold Scholtz, Willem Steenkamp, and a number of other SADF scholars and classified the whole conflict into two distinct phases: the large, semi-conventional raids and battles fought in Angola, not only against SWAPO but also FAPLA and the Cubans with their tanks and MiGs; and the low-level insurgency in Namibia/SWA itself.
As far as I'm concerned, this article should cover only the Namibian COIN phase of the war and focus on things like Koevoet, the internal security campaigns undertaken by the SADF and SWATF, and the sabotage/farm attacks by SWAPO, since these were the only times security forces clashed solely with Namibian fighters and Angola was not involved. It makes more sense to call this a Namibian war as well, since this was the part of hostilities that took place in Namibia itself.
The mainstream Border War article should focus on the fighting in Angola, in which the heaviest casualties were often inflicted by FAPLA/Cubans as opposed to SWAPO and which gradually escalated into a separate Angolan conflict between the SADF and FAPLA after Ops Askari in 1985 (see Operation Alpha Centauri, Moduler, Hooper, and Packer, etc). It was ultimately this that resulted in the Tripartite Accord, not the SWAPO guerrilla war.
But if that's not the general consensus, we should look at merging both South African Border War and "Namibian War of Independence" instead of calling them separate but "closely intertwined" conflicts.
Thanks, -- Katangais (talk) 03:27, 30 December 2015 (UTC)
Gbooks hits has "Namibian War" (103); "Namibian War of Independence" (20); "War in Namibia" (19). Gscholar has "War in Namibia" (576); "Namibian War" (363); "Namibian War of Independence" (146). Note that some colonial wars are included in the hits.-- Zoupan 03:05, 13 September 2016 (UTC)