ANGOLA: U.N. Officials Worry as UNITA Edges Away from Peace

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 8 1996 (IPS) - Angola has not known peace since 1960, and is creeping back to a tense, warlike state following new moves by the rebel UNITA front, U.N. diplomats warn.

Two years after Angola’s government and the rebel National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) signed peace accords in Lusaka, Zambia, the United Nations is worried that the peace process has stalled badly, with too many soldiers still armed and deployed.

“Two years? This is beginning to look like a very long time,” concedes Alioune Blondin Beye, the special U.N. envoy to Angola, about the slow progress of the Lusaka process.

Beye has in the past downplayed reports of conflict between the government and UNITA, but he now acknowledges UNITA especially has serious problems coming to terms with peace.

“UNITA signed the accords in a weak position,” Beye says, noting the Lusaka Accords were concluded only following a series of major government victories in the summer of 1994. But now Beye insists that, whether the party is happy with the peace process or not, it must retire more of its troops and turn in more of its weaponry.

So far, UNITA’s scorecard on those subjects has been especially poor. “In Angola, the pattern has been one of grudging compliance with the provisions of the Lusaka Protocol, with protracted delays and last-minute concessions,” U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali noted in a report last week. “This trend cannot continue.”

By Sept 27, the rebel groop had sent 63,189 declared fighters to U.N.-guarded cantonments where they could turn in arms — well in excess of the 62,500 guerrillas UNITA originally claimed to have.

But the United Nations notes that some 25,000 of those troops came without any weapons, while “the overall quality of the weapons and ammunition surrendered remains low,” Boutros-Ghali said. The U.N. Angola Verification Mission (UNAVEM), a 7,000- soldier peacekeeping force, will check the quality and number of the weapons turned in so far by mid-October, Beye said.

There are many indications, however, that the rightist rebels, supported for many years by the United States and South Africa in their battle against Angola’s then-Marxist government, remain well- armed and still can field a substantial fighting force.

“They have a lot of weapons,” one U.N. envoy, speaking on condition of anonymity, says. “Every day, they receive weapons by plane from Zaire.” The Zairean government has repeatedly denied the charges, which the United Nations has been unable to confirm.

Moreover, the U.N. source says, UNITA has not sent as many real soldiers to the U.N. quartering sites as the numbers would indicate.

“Many of the people in the camps were civilians,” he says. “UNITA told them there would be food in the camps.” But when UNAVEM troops checked to see if the self-described soldiers could assemble and disassemble weapons, many did not know how, he adds.

UNITA “failed to confine all its true military to quarters,” Venancio de Moura, Angola’s foreign minister, complained here last month. “It did not surrender its light and heavy materiel.”

In recent months, some 12,000 of the declared soldiers at the UNITA quartering sites have deserted, heading back to their homes. But Beye dismisses the desertions as a minor problem: “They’re not in prison — they’re free to leave.”

Yet, just four years after the last time UNITA broke a peace agreement after it lost an election to President Jose Eduardo dos Santos’s Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), such maneouvres feed an impression that the rebels are still prepared for war.

U.N. peacekeepers, foreign investors and Angolan civilians alike have been hedging their bets, fearing that the two years of relative peace the Lusaka Protocol has brought may not last. The fears of new fighting reached a peak at the end of August, when UNITA rebuffed an offer for its leader, Jonas Savimbi, to accept a post as deputy vice-president to dos Santos.

The offer to Savimbi is the biggest concession by the MPLA, which has been prodded by the United Nations to give UNITA several key Cabinet posts despite the rebels’ 1992 election loss. Luanda was predictably on edge following the UNITA Congress’s sign that it expects more for Savimbi.

The rejection “is in keeping with Mr Savimbi’s habitual lack of coherence,” de Moura argued. “He has always placed his self- interest way ahead of the Angolan nation’s interest.”

The question is whether Savimbi can re-start the war even if he tried. When UNITA renewed full-scale fighting in the winter of 1993, Angola’s civil war — now in its twenty-first year — entered its bloodiest phase, with roughly 1,000 people dying each day.

With his control over key diamond-producing regions and his alleged continuing links to arms suppliers despite a U.N. ban on arming UNITA, Savimbi may well be able to unleash another burst of violence if he is dissatisfied.

Yet with Angola no longer a Cold War hot spot, Washington has dropped UNITA, which now lacks both major allies and control of most of Angola’s key cities. Many diplomats here believe Angolans are so weary of non-stop fighting — even in the last three months, UNAVEM recorded 55 cease-fire violations — that UNITA will not abandon the peace process.

Still, Angola must face several crucial hurdles over the next few months. Boutros-Ghali noted that UNAVEM, currently the largest U.N. force, will end its mission next February, and will begin to be “downsized” in December.

As one U.N. envoy puts it, “This could send the wrong signal…and be another Somalia situation,” where factions ready for war wait for the United Nations’ departure.