General elections were held in Angola on 29 and 30 September 1992 to elect a President and National Assembly, the first time free and multi-party elections had been held in the country. They followed the signing of the Bicesse Accord on 31 May 1991 in an attempt to end the 17-year-long civil war. Voter turnout was 91.3% for the parliamentary election and 91.2% for the presidential election. The ruling People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) won both elections; however eight opposition parties, in particular the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), rejected the results as rigged. An official observer wrote that there was little UN supervision, that 500,000 UNITA voters were disenfranchised and that there were 100 clandestine polling stations. UNITA sent negotiators to the capital, but at the same time prepared measures to resume the civil war. As a consequence, hostilities erupted in Luanda and immediately spread to other parts of the country. Several thousand to tens of thousands of UNITA members or supporters were killed nationwide by MPLA forces in a few days, in what is known as the Halloween Massacre. Background Angola was a colony of Portugal for more than 400 years from the 15th century. Demands for independence picked up momentum during the early 1950s, with the principal protagonists including the MPLA, founded in 1956, the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA), which appeared in 1961, and the UNITA, founded in 1966. After many years of conflict that weakened all of the insurgent parties, Angola gained independence on 11 November 1975, after the Carnation Revolution in Portugal, which overthrew the Portuguese regime headed by Marcelo Caetano. A fight for dominance broke out immediately between the three nationalist movements. The events prompted a mass exodus of Portuguese citizens, creating up to 300,000 destitute Portuguese refugees—the retornados. The new Portuguese government attempted to mediate an understanding between the three competing movements, which they initially agreed to, but later failed and resulted in a devastating civil war which lasted several decades, claiming millions of lives and producing many refugees until ending in 2002. During the civil war, the MPLA gained control of the capital Luanda and much of the rest of the country. With the support of the United States, Zaire and South Africa intervened militarily in favour of the FNLA and UNITA, with the intention of taking Luanda before the declaration