CONFLICT-ANGOLA: Humanitarian Crisis Worsening, UN Officials Say

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Aug 23 1999 (IPS) - An estimated five million people in Angola were either in immediate need of international assistance or cut off from the outside world because of renwed fighting, UN officials declared Monday.

In a closed session of the UN Security Council, Under-Secretary- General Sergio Vieira de Mello warned that two million Angolans were “living a precarious existence in need of, or dependent, on aid.”

A further three million people were “entirely inaccessible and their condition is therefore impossible to assess,” he added.

Some of the latter were living in zones controlled by the rebel National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), which controls much of central Angola, while others were in more remote areas, cut off by the conflict.

Although some 70 percent of Angola’s 12.5 million population were in government-held zones, many of them were living in areas besieged by intermittent shelling and humanitarian need, Viero de Mello said.

Catherine Bertini, executive director of the World Food Programme (WFP), added that, in many Angolan cities people displaced from other parts of the country lacked food and shelter and were vulnerable to the outbreak of diseases like polio and meningitis.

“In many ways the conflict resembles a medieval siege, with civilians huddled together in urban centres after fleeing their farms and open terrain,” Bertini told the Security Council. “And, like a medieval siege, food and disease are playing a role in this battle.”

WFP and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) have estimated that Angola’s food output will drop by 11 percent in 1999, following the renewal of full-scale warfare between the government and UNITA late last year.

Every day, an estimated 200 Angolans died from disease brought on by malnutrition, Bertini said.

WFP planes were delivering some 200 tonnes of food and medicine daily but Bertini calculated that the number of Angolans who will need food aid for next year will rise to about 1.1 million, at a cost of 155 million dollars.

Currently, Vieira de Mello said, 600,000 of the two million people who required humanitarian aid were receiving it but the United Nations still lacked access to much of Angola, which hindered the aid effort.

“Access to those in need is mostly through costly air transport, or by road where landmines and ambushes on vehicles are a regular feature,” he said. “Our access is, however, curtailed both by insecurity and by delays in granting us permission to access all areas with humanitarian needs.”

Bertini warned that the lack of access had raised the cost of delivering aid sharply in recent months. The cost of delivering a single ration to one Angolan had risen over the past few months from 8 cents to 19 cents a day, she said.

“Insecurity has rendered most major road corridors off limits to food transport,” she said, adding that air drops of food have also been made risky by the downing – blamed by most officials on UNITA – of several planes.

The effect of the war which, except for a few brief interruptions, has gone on since Angola’s independence in 1975, has been particularly damaging to children, said Carol Bellamy, executive director of the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

In 1997, she noted, 292 children under the age of five died for every 1,000 live births and 42 percent of Angolan children were moderately or severely underweight for their age.

Even those figures, she added, were made “during a rare period of relative peace,” with the situation deteriorating even worse since last December.

“UNICEF’s Child Risk Measure ranks Angola today as the country whose children are at greatest risk of death, malnutrition, abuse and development failure,” Bellamy said, citing results based on studies in all 18 Angolan provinces.

The fighting also had hurt programmes intended to eradicate polio, with the war cutting off millions of children from polio immunisation efforts, Bellamy said.

The Security Council was considering several steps designed to punish UNITA, blamed for breaking a previous peace plan in 1992, for refusing to disarm its troops which led to the renewal of warfare in recent months.

Ambassador Robert Fowler of Canada, head of the UN Sanctions Committee that monitors a wide-ranging embargo against UNITA, last month called for a tightening of sanctions.

Governments must “give teeth to hitherto-ineffective sanctions,” Fowler said.

Among steps he recommended was for greater information-sharing on sanctions-busting among Southern African nations and the involvement of Interpol in determining sanctions violations.

Meanwhile, Vieira de Mello argued, the Council must find ways to allow UN agencies and other humanitarian workers to obtain access to Angola’s war-affected people, after previous Council pleas have fallen on deaf ears.

“The consequences of not taking decisive measures that have a tangible impact will be a continued death toll of hundreds per day and the potential for the continued destabilisation of other countries in the region,” he warned.