Dateline ACT

Angola 04/02

Angola's former rebels face an uncertain peace

Lucusse, Angola July 16, 2002
by Paul Jeffrey

The war is finally over for the more than 1,300 soldiers who have carved a new home out of the bush near the eastern Angolan village of Lucusse. Yet peace remains an uncertain concept. While the fighting is probably over, what happens next is anyone’s guess.

Action by Churches Together (ACT), the international alliance of churches and church agencies responding to emergencies, is working to ensure a better future for the former fighters and their families, thus helping to lay the foundation for a lasting peace in Angola.

The soldiers who have set up a demobilization camp here fought for Unita, the rebel army long headed by Jonas Savimbi, who was killed in February. During the preceding months the counterinsurgency campaign of the Angolan Armed Forces (FAA) had forcibly displaced tens of thousands of civilians, burning fields and houses as it closed the circle tighter around Savimbi. By tracking Savimbi’s satellite phone the FAA finally hunted him down just a few kilometers from here.

Within hours of the demise of its leader, Unita collapsed and it's remaining generals hammered out a cease-fire with the FAA. By early July, some 84,160 UNITA troops, along with 256,900 family members, had moved into 36 demobilization camps - so called quartering areas - around the country. While some 5,000 of these former combatants are to be absorbed into the country’s military starting this month; the remainder will supposedly return to civilian life.

The number claiming to be ex-Unita combatants who showed up at the quartering areas surpassed the 55,000 soldiers that Unita generals had predicted; the aid promised former combatants appearing to be an irresistible deal in a country where hunger afflicts most families.

Yet life in the camps has been far from easy. Many of the soldiers and their families showed up weak and hungry, having marched for weeks. Malnutrition and sickness is common. And assistance to the camps has been slow materializing. Initially, the government promised to provide food to the demobilized soldiers while the United Nation’s World Food Program (WFP) would assume responsibility for feeding their families. Yet the corruption-plagued Angolan government quickly claimed it ran through what it had allotted, and the WFP, caught between the world’s many humanitarian crises and the slowness of international donors to respond to appeals to help Angola, has been valiantly struggling to catch up.

Unita, before a crippling U.N. embargo of its bank accounts and diamond sales, was well equipped with tanks and Stinger missles. To date its demobilizing soldiers have turned in only 26,698 light weapons, along with a few grenade launchers and mortars. There’s enough concern that some of those weapons are still around that WFP flights into Luena, the nearest big airport to here, still conclude with a dizzying corkscrew descent over the city to avoid possible missile attacks from the outlying bush.

The Catholic Church’s Radio Ecclesia has reported that some former Unita fighters still in the bush have become bandits in order to survive. Many observers believe that if the demobilized Unita soldiers and their families don’t get help soon, post-war Angola will turn out to be far from peaceful.

ACT's Lutheran World Federation (LWF) partner is working to help Unita families get a new start. On July 13, a caravan of LWF/ACT vehicles brought the first load of assistance to the families here, several of whom have had almost nothing to eat for two weeks.

The 140-kilometer road to Lucusse is a testament to the war’s ferocity. Marked by craters and littered with twisted ruins of more than 90 tanks, armored personnel carriers and heavy trucks, as well as two crashed helicopters, the road was only opened on July 2 after a team from the Mine Awareness Group (MAG), financed by Finchurch Aid/ACT and coordinated by LWF/ACT, swept the roadbed for unexploded mines. MAG has yet to certify the road as safe for normal traffic, and only vehicles carrying emergency humanitarian aid are allowed.

On July 9, a truck carrying emergency food into the demobilization camp at Ndele in Bie province struck an anti-tank mine, injuring two people. U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator Erick de Mul has ordered the road closed until further demining can be carried out. In addition to the danger of landmines, he points out that broken bridges and roads in a bad state of repair make humanitarian operations in the country "a logistical nightmare."

LWF/ACT’s assistance to the demobilized soldiers and their families here consists of food, kitchen kits, blankets, soap, medical supplies and soccer balls. LWF/ACT will also help construct new wells, and will work with Unita’s health workers in designing preventative health campaigns. Vocational training is planned, and camp leaders have asked for assistance with seeds and farming tools.

LWF/ACT is providing similar assistance in four other demobilization camps in the eastern part of the country.

"The reintegration of these people into Angolan society isn’t going to be easy, but the alternative is a continuing disaster," said Moises Gourgel, the director of LWF/ACT’s Luena office. "If the international community doesn’t come to their assistance now, things will go bad. Discontent will grow, prostitution and delinquency will become bigger problems, and society will end up paying the price."

The soldiers and their families are slated to remain in the camps until April of next year, but Gourgel said the return to civilian life will be complicated. "Many of these people haven’t decided what they want to do or where they want to go. Most aren’t from this province, and they haven’t seen their families in years. Some may go home and find their families have moved out, displaced by the war."

Among the soldiers here is Pedro Pedrito, a 29-year old former captain who hasn’t had contact with his family in Huambo since he joined Unita a decade ago. Asked whether he wants a transfer into the government military or to return to civilian life, he answers the way most Unita troops respond: he’ll follow orders. "Whichever they decide for me, I’m ready and willing," he said.

Yet when pressed for his personal preference, Pedrito finally admits he’d prefer to be a civilian. He’d like training in computers.

Despite all the difficulties in the camp, Pedrito is confident that this time - as contrasted with two short lived cease-fires periods during the 1990s - peace will endure in Angola.

"This time around, things are different because the peace was agreed to by the two militaries. The politicians had nothing to do with it. Those who fought with weapons in their hands are the ones who have made peace," Pedrito declared. "We’re done with war in Angola."