children are growing up in war’
Once agian the battered town of Kuito is suffering the consequences of Angola’s never- ending civil war, writes Mercedes Sayagues
Ahmed Mohammed is very angry. He is staring at a handful of new steel nails he just bought at the market. “These are my nails and I paid 500 000 kwanzas [$0,60] to buy them back,” he says bitterly.
Mohammed is the Ethiopian manager of the American charity Care in Kuito, in Angola’s central highlands. In mid-December, government soldiers stormed its tented warehouse. After a three-day looting frenzy, only the metal frames of the tents are left. The still-locked padlocks dangle limply from it.
When civilians tried to join in the looting, soldiers shot at them. So people pounced on two Care staff houses and stripped them bare of furniture, doors, window frames, electrical wiring and toilets. Then the warehouses of the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) and Handicap International were looted. From the offices of Mdcins sans Frontires the mob carted away filing cabinets containing health data.
Mohammed ticks off his losses: 25 cars and motorcycles; seven 4×4 cars stripped for spare parts; agricultural and carpentry tool kits; seeds, building materials, wheelbarrows, medical equipment; the furnishings of Care’s office in Menongue, temporarily stored in Kuito; and 200 tons of food.
Of Care’s three Casspirs, South African-made anti-landmine vehicles, each worth $200 000, one was vandalised on the spot. Another lies in a ditch on the road to the battle front. The third served to round up Kuito’s youth for conscription into the army. While cruising in town, it crashed into a 4×4 the military had confiscated from Handicap International – four people died.
Last week, a soldier drove the battered Casspir into the Care compound. He jumped out, threw the keys on the ground, and said: “Here it is. This belonged to Unita,” in reference to its South African origin.
Angola is at war again, and once again it revolves around Kuito.
Soon after Unita rebel leader Jonas Savimbi rejected his defeat in the 1992 elections, his troops laid siege to Kuito: nine months of constant shelling, starvation and disease. About 30 000 people died. Half of the charming colonial town was razed to the ground by government bombing with MiGs. Unita’s incessant pounding destroyed the other half.
When I flew into Kuito with the first aid flight in September 1993, 50 000 survivors huddled in an area of less than one square kilometre, among the bombed-out buildings. The stench of dried blood, rotting corpses, filth and decay hung among the ruins. Half of the wounded had gangrene. Amputations were carried out without anesthetics by nurses, between lulls in the fighting. It was horrific.
It was also senseless. Kuito voted solidly for Unita in the 1992 elections. It lies in the heartland of Unita’s ethnic support base, the Ovimbundu. Savimbi went to school here.
In early December 1998, Unita attacked the municipios of Catabola, Camacupa and Cunhinga, 30km to 70km away. Some 100 000 terrified people fled to Kuito. Six days later, Unita was firing long-range artillery on to Kuito.
The shelling lasted 23 days. About 150 people died. Road and air transport stopped. Only the phones linked Kuito to the world. Hunger set in. People ate green fruit and smoked avocado leaves. The government airdropped food, blood supplies, antibiotics and bandages – for the troops defending Kuito.
They put up a fierce resistance. Unable to take the underground fuel depot in Kunje, Unita ran out of fuel and retreated.
The destruction caused was not as severe as in 1993. The real damage was to people’s morale. Just when the city was picking up its economic life, restoring its links to the countryside and the coast, recovering a semblance of normalcy, war erupts. Again.
Today, Kuito is a ghost town. Its economic agents, its middle class, fled to Luanda and Lobito. There were panic scenes at the airport when the last flights landed. People swarmed over the planes, desperate mothers tried to get their children on board. Nobody wanted to live through a siege again.
But they did. As shells rained down, the wounded piled up. Displaced peasants huddled in abandoned schools, in the shell of the archbishop’s palace, anywhere with a roof, or half a roof.
They are still there. In the ruins of Kuito’s sports and cinema complex I find the family of a man with a wooden leg and the improbable name of Isaias o Profeta (the Prophet). Isaias (30) stepped on a landmine in 1987, on the way to the fields in Catabola.
When Unita attacked Catabola, the family ran for their lives. Two sisters, one very sick with tuberculosis, seven children and Isaias, limping more than 40km. Three days of eating only fruit and sleeping in the bush.
This is the second time the family has lost everything. The first was in 1993, when Unita conquered their municipality and they fled to Kuito.
Now they sleep on pieces of cardboard, without a blanket.
The baby needed warm clothes. So Isaias walked to Kunje to gather firewood to sell at the market. His wooden prosthesis snapped out of place, his crutches are bent.
The displaced in Kuito tell similar stories, with similar looks of incomprehension, of dumb stupor: war, again? “This is our life: to run from here to there and then run again and lose everything,” says Bento Caluquembe. In 1983, he fled from Cuemba to Camacupa. In 1994, to Kuito. In 1996, back to Camacupa. In 1999 he is back in Kuito and owns only the tattered shirt he is wearing.
Like Mohammed, peasants count their losses: the hoe, knife and machete; pots and blankets; clothes and identity cards; meagre savings, a few crumpled old kwanzas they did not have time to get from their hiding place. Unita took any food they had stored and slashed the maize.
The World Food Programme (WFP) is feeding 76 000 displaced in Kuito and 550 000 across the country. “We must brace for worse to come,” says the humanitarian co-ordinator in Kuito, Elena Mazarro.
Many of these peasants endured Unita rule in 1993/94. They don’t wish to repeat the experience. But they will not tell me outright. I know they did because there is a slight hesitation, averted eyes, when I ask where they were in 1993.
I know why they are evasive – for fear of being branded as Unita supporters. Just as they are afraid when Unita arrives in their village, because from 1996 to 1998 it was under government control. In either case, they are the losers.
Fatima Cuimba is not afraid to speak out. She and her seven children, the oldest aged 19, fled from Camacupa in early December. There is no going back. “We already suffered too much. Unita took our food and our sons and now they shoot us. I am not going to lose everything for the third time,” says Cuimba.
She has found shelter under the graceful stairs of the bishop’s pink colonial palace, now an empty shell with gaping holes in its roof.
Felisberto Gomes (35) is a driver with an aid group and the father of four small children. In 1993, a rocket landed on his house. It is still there, amid a pile of rubble.
A backyard annex was not too badly damaged, so the family moved into it. Last year, Gomez brought building materials from Lobito, 500km away, to repair the roof, doors and windows. The job took seven months and $1 000 scrimped from his $250 monthly salary.
“It is so demoralising. We rebuilt our homes and war starts again. I was born in war, I have only known war and my children are growing up in war,” says Gomes.
It must be this continuity and hopelessness of war that explains the national pastime of looting. Why did peasants strip bare the school newly rebuilt and equipped by Africare in Xipeta, 30km from Kuito?
If you don’t know if you shall be here tomorrow and your children will attend this school, why should you preserve it? If you know your country’s oil and diamonds pay for the war, why not take your own spoils of war? Besides, another NGO will rebuild it in the next intermission of peace, and you may get a temporary job.
The economy is pitifully small. One neatly typed sheet glued on the outside wall of a shop informs the taxpayers of Bie province of payment dates. At the bottom: “If any other person or business considers they should pay taxes, they are comprised in this notice.” The list has 37 names: a handful of bars, shops, guest houses and builders.
Today, adults amble about pointlessly. The children are listless and unusually quiet. There is nothing left of the vibrancy, the stubborn spirit of resistance that pulled Kuito’s people through the 1993 siege and into reconstruction.
It is a cold, rainy Sunday evening and the 8.30 news is on. The first lady, Ana Paula dos Santos, looking trim after her recent liposuction, tummy tuck and face lift, visits an aid project near Luanda. To show off her new figure, she wears tight black trousers. She giggles girlishly and leaves her sentences unfinished.
It is quite surreal to watch the news with a backdrop of bombed-out buildings. Isaias o Profeta and his family are camped across the street. In the background, we hear bombing in Cunhinga, 40km away, as the government advances towards Unita’s headquarters in Andulo.
A twisted logic reigns in Angola. A Care staff member tells Ahmed Mohammed, to assuage his rage, that the looted food helped the famished of Kuito because it was sold in the market. So the food meant to be free for the poor is stolen and sold at exorbitant prices to them by soldiers, and it is OK.
A sociologist freshly returned after 10 years studying in France tells me, over lobster at a seaside restaurant in Luanda, that Angola cannot have democracy until a bourgeoisie is born.
We were arguing over the MPLA MPs who imported duty-free minibuses and are crowding the market, squeezing out small operators. My argument goes that MPs are housed and fed for free by the government and got a free Audi and a Christmas bonus of $25 000 in 1997. They should concentrate on legislating. Give cheap loans to other entrepreneurs to buy minibuses. Create more jobs. Share the pie. These MPs want to join the ruling kleptocracy. “You don’t understand,” he says. “They have to get rich before they can legislate.”
My friend is not getting rich. He has three kids and works for a modest salary with a national NGO. I am the one eating lobster, not him. He is too proud to accept that I pay for his meal, but he thinks it is OK if the state pays for the businesses of MPs.
A leading Unita intellectual, whom I respect and whose analysis I enjoy, tells me that the Lusaka peace agreement and the United Nations’s Alioune Blondin Beye failed because they neglected the role of African chiefs. Because Savimbi and Jos Eduardo dos Santos didn’t sign in Lusaka – their lieutenants did – the treaty is flawed. To offer one of two vice-presidencies to Savimbi derides his stature as African chief. Thus, he went back to war (which the intellectual does not approve of). When will the two chiefs agree on “how to make the Angolan nation a viable, modern state”?
He then asks me my views on the “Angolan dossier”. I am silent for a moment, searching. Then I blurt that, to build a modern nation, you need to respect basic human rights and to have a strong civil society. The real failure of Lusaka and Beye, I say, is that no space was allowed for the people and institutions of civil society who might have opposed the belligerent ambitions of rival leaders. He looks surprised.
At a squalid camp for displaced peasants, a man explains that he and others walk 15km to collect firewood to sell in the market. On the way, they pass a police post. When they return with the load, the policeman seizes one-third of the bundles each one carries.
I ask his views. “The policeman is poor just like me and he has not been paid his salary in the last months, so it is all right,” he answers.
“Is it right for the policeman to get more firewood than any of you without working, just by being there? Why doesn’t he quit his job and go collect firewood with you?” I pursue.
He thinks hard. Finally he flashes a toothless smile. “But if the policeman comes with us, who would represent the government at the checkpoint?”
I understand. He has never known a state that did not exploit him and his family and his neighbours and his village. The Portuguese, Unita, the MPLA, it is all the same. The state is there to abuse him, to take half of his firewood but give nothing in exchange.
For its eighth congress last December, the MPLA handed out T-shirts. On the front, a dove against its red, black and gold flag. On the back: “Firmly on the track towards the 21st century.”
Nonsense. The majority of Angolans, the peasants, live wretched lives in medieval conditions: in rags, illiterate, unprotected against smallpox and polio. A hoe and a catana is all their technology. When they meet 20th-century technology, chances are it is a rocket or a landmine.
They are toothless and voiceless, with no say over their fate. When Unita attacks, they die. Under government rule, they endure abject poverty. The only time Angolans proudly exercised their right to choose, in the 1992 elections, they plunged right back into the unending cycle of war and misery.
You call this the 21st century? Looks more like feudal times to me.
Whatever the outcome of the war between Unita and the MPLA, both should be indicted for their callous neglect of the Angolan people.