POLITICS-ANGOLA: Millions Displaced And Forgotten

By Mercedes Sayagues Reprint | | Print |

Mercedes Sayagues

LUANDA, Sep 25 1999 (IPS) - On the outskirts of Angola’s besieged provincial capitals, squalid camps are springing up to house hundreds of thousands of displaced peasants.

In one camp in Huambo, 15,000 people live in crowded tents, covered in the dry season’s reddish dust, among the ruins of an abandoned soap factory.

From the hills around Kuito, straw and mud settlements overlook the ruins of a once prosperous colonial city. In Malanje, 10,000 families are building basic grass and straw shelters sprawled along the road to Luanda, 20 kms out of town.

One million people are displaced by fighting in Angola’s war- ravaged hinterland. Many fled when rebels of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) attacked their villages.

Others were told by the government to clear out disputed areas, whether for their own protection, or to deprive UNITA of food, information, recruits, wives and porters.

Much of the hinterland is a no-go area, where the state can neither rule nor protect its citizens from marauders. The safe perimeter around provincial capitals hovers between 20-40 kms.

Provincial towns, emptied of their residents who fled to the coast, have filled up with starving peasants. They are thin, ragged and shell-shocked. And they have never been as destitute, never before in Angola’s 25-year-old civil war, Africa’s second longest after Sudan’s.

“They have nothing left, only what they are wearing,” says Jenny McMahon, a nutritionist with the Red Cross in Huambo, located in Angola’s central highlands. “Everything has been looted.”

When people flee their villages, their homes are stripped bare. Doors, window frames, mats and cooking pots, and the crops in the fields are looted by armed men from both warring sides and by the waves of hungry, displaced people.

During the 1993-94 war, some cassava could be found in the fields around the towns. Not now. The displaced are wholly dependent on food aid flown in by relief agencies. Having missed the short planting season in February, they will need food aid until the next harvest in March next year.

The needs of the estimated three million people in UNITA- controlled areas, where no NGOs work and there is no access, are not known.

This month, the World Food Programme (WFP) plans to distribute 13,000 tonnes of food to 900,00 people across the country. In Huambo, the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) is giving food, seeds and tools to 85,000 families, both displaced and residents.

For locals are not better off than the displaced. They are selling the roofs of their houses to buy food at high prices in the market. “The roof is the last asset they have,” says McMahon.

“For the first time, the coping mechanisms are lost,” says Marjorie Martin, head of the ICRC.

In Malange, 350 kms east of Luanda, the Angolan NGO Adra had successfully resettled communities of people who fled the war in 1992 and 1994. They planted large areas, the rains were good, and the cassava, beans and maize were growing beautifully.

But the war restarted last December. Malange was shelled almost daily since January. Waves of people from the countryside arrived. The last food distribution took place in mid-May.

No more food aid got into the city until the end of July. Like a swarm of locusts, the hungry took everything they found in the fields. Now the resettled are as hungry as the displaced.

Domingos Lourenco looks desolately at 130 hectares he and his fellow villagers planted, which is now empty.

“It is so frustrating to see our work undone again and again,” says Adra’s representative in Malange, Roque Goncalves. “When we do our end of year balance, it feels like we have achieved nothing.”

Francesco Strippoli, director of the WFP and of the UN humanitarian effort, speaks of “the sense of despair in continuing operating without seeing light at the end of the tunnel.”

Briefing the UN Security Council on Aug. 23 , four heads of UN agencies pleaded for countrywide access for humanitarian aid. But this entails talking to UNITA, and the government is adamant it will not.

“There is no way the Angolan government will start new negotiations with somebody who did not abide by previous agreements,” said Deputy Minister for External Affairs, Georges Rebelo Chicoty, in Luanda last week.

Savimbi, on the other hand, in a recent radio interview with the BBC, downplayed the humanitarian catastrophe looming in Angola. “Humanitarian priorities are not high on anybody’s agenda,” says a senior aid official.

The Red Cross has kept nutritional records in Huambo since 1984. At 30 percent, malnutrition has never been so bad, not even in drought years, not even in the lean season, not even under UNITA’s bloody occupation of Huambo in 1993-94, not in any previous phase of Angola’s civil war.

The ICRC has supplied seeds and tools to the displaced. One km down from the dusty, crowded camp, people are growing vegetables by a stream. That will help a bit, but it is no long-term solution for Huambo’s 200,000 displaced peasants.

In Malange, swollen by 150,000 displaced people, Medecins Sans Frontieres estimate that 50,000 children are malnourished, and a quarter of these suffer severe malnutrition.

At a food distribution camp in Malange, six ‘sobas’ or traditional chiefs, oversee the distribution of food aid to their people. They stand with dignity in front of the crowd. In the khaki coloured jackets and caps with a shiny badge provided by the government, they look a bit like railway conductors.

According to the eldest among them, soba Banda Ngunza, 63, late last year, after an attack by UNITA that left many dead, among them four sobas, they were told by the government to leave their villages in the municipio of Kiwabo Nzoya, 100 kms east of Malange towardas the diamond-rich Lundas.

“We lived well in our village. We had everything. We didn’t need food aid. Now we are poor,” says Ngunza.

Why does the war continue? “Too many diamonds. Everybody wants them,” he answers.

And what does the soba and the 66 families under his rule want? “We are tired. We want the war to stop and to go back to our village.”