The UN Security Council unanimously voted Friday to end the UN peacekeeping mission in Angola which would enable the world body to leave the country after a decade of ill-fated attempts to end its civil war.

The Council decision, which goes into effect automatically, ends the mandate of the UN Observer Mission in Angola (MONUA), whose 650 soldiers have in recent months been sidelined by the resumption of fighting between the Angolan government and rebel National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA).

After the Angolan government decided that MONUA had no role to play in Angola anymore, UN officials planned to reduce the size of the force and key contingents from Portugal, Russia and Namibia were expected to depart by the weekend.

All UN forces were scheduled to leave Angola within six months, with a token force of some 260 troops to remain to liquidate the mission’s assets, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in a report released here.

The 15-nation Security Council approved the continuation of MONUA’s human-rights work for the duration of the “liquidation period”, while Annan negotiated with President Jose Eduardo dos Santos’s government on ways to maintain a small diplomatic presence that would try to mediate between the warring parties.

But the fact remained that the Angolan government had all but given up on the United Nations.

Gen. Higino Carneiro, Angola’s vice minister of territorial administration, warned Friday that UNITA’s actions had ended the fragile five-year peace process and rendered MONUA useless.

“(UNITA leader Jonas) Savimbi is trying to seize power at all costs,” Carneiro told the Security Council.

In a letter to Annan earlier this month, dos Santos said that the conditions allowing MONUA to work in Angola “had ceased to exist”, but added that the government would still deal with UN humanitarian and human-rights agencies.

Dos Santos also expressed his government’s willingness to consider the appointment of a UN special envoy to Angola – but only if that envoy was posted in New York, not Luanda.

Savimbi, by contrast, delivered a letter to Annan saying that the United Nations could remain as a useful witness and mediator between the warring parties. But UNITA has been blamed by many nations for an unexplained series of attacks on UN personnel, including the downing two months ago of two UN planes in which 13 people died.

The Council voiced its doubts over UNITA in the Friday vote, and noted “the loss under suspicious circumstances of other commercial aircraft in UNITA-controlled areas” and called on the rebels especially to aid an investigation into the downings.

Now the United Nations appeared to be at a loss in deciding what to do about Angola.

A series of peacekeeping missions have failed to establish a lasting cease fire, and an earlier peace plan collapsed in 1992 after UNITA refused to acknowledge its loss in UN-supervised elections.

A 1994 peace plan signed in Lusaka, Zambia, re-established the fragile truce but, by last year, both sides had geared up for full-scale war. The government, which enjoys most of Angola’s oil wealth, and UNITA, which controls the country’s diamond zones, have been able to maintain well-armed forces, even though UNITA is under a UN embargo and was supposed to have disarmed all its fighters by last year.

UNITA had tried to advance into the oil-rich Soyo enclave in recent weeks, while government troops reportedly made “substantial gains” in the country’s central highlands, Annan said.

Both sides accused each other of using outside parties for assistance, with Luanda claiming Zambian involvement in arming UNITA and the rebels countering that troops from the Democratic Republic of the Congo were fighting with the government.

Zambian officials again denied any links with UNITA on Friday, but Annan told the Council that “the presence of Congolese troops, who are reportedly undergoing training with the Angolan Armed Forces, has been confirmed in the Lubango and Matala areas.”

The UN retreat from Angola came 24 hours after a UN peacekeeping mission in Macedonia was vetoed by China – apparently because of an unrelated dispute between the two countries over Taiwan – and at a time of general decline for UN peacekeeping work.

Following the departure of UN soldiers from Bosnia-Hercegovina, the Angola mission had been the world body’s single largest peacekeeping effort for several years.

But despite fielding thousands of soldiers, a police-retraining mission and a large demining project, the United Nations was unable to erase the distrust between Luanda and UNITA or to compel the rebels to turn in their arms and retire their troops.

Instead, UNITA undermined UN disarmament efforts by turning in largely unusable weapons and retiring only elderly or young soldiers, while keeping some 30,000 troops ready for eventual combat.

By the end of 1998. as the number of government-UNITA skirmishes steadily climbed, it was obvious that the Lusaka accords – like the previous plan for national elections – had failed.

UN officials now worried that, as with the previous failure, when some 5,000 Angolans reportedly died from war and famine each day, the country may return to brutality and chaos – this time without any outside monitoring.