supply lines
Unita’s
smuggling
Chris Gordon
The United Nations, having faced up to the failure of its peacekeeping operation in Angola, has launched a new bid to shorten the war by targeting the sanctions-busting arms, oil and diamond trade that is keeping Unita in business.
After 16 intensive days in Southern Africa, Robert Fowler, Canadian ambassador to the UN and head of the UN sanctions committee, has laid the groundwork for two expert panels to start looking into Unita’s sanctions-busting supply lines.
The inquiry – it is the first time the diamond trade has been subject to any sanctions – will focus fresh attention on the war in Angola. It may lay the groundwork for a future peace settlement and shorten the war if the UN is successful in tracking down the methods of the smuggling of arms, oil and diamonds.
The UN may even succeed in delinking the arms-for-diamonds trade that is funding three civil wars in Africa and creating enormous misery.
The failure of successive UN sanctions, first imposed on Unita in 1993 when supplies of arms and other war matriel were embargoed, is widely known and has surprised no one. But it has surprised many that the UN has at last shown the willingness to act on this international scandal, whose details have been exposed repeatedly in the Mail & Guardian.
Fowler’s report makes the UN’s reasons clear. The UN has grasped that minimising Unita’s capacity to make war and hampering its operational ability are crucial to stability in Central Africa. Fowler’s report to the UN cites the destabilising effects of Unita’s war on surrounding countries,whether military, political or economic. Senior politicians in the region describe Angola as a life and death issue for them.
A web of war binds together the fates of Angola and the two Congos, where Angola has committed its army to areas Unita operates in, and has found common cause with opposition or rebel movements. The political and military alliances on both sides of these wars stretch across the continent, as do the arms traffickers and diamond dealers who keep the rebels in business.
Unravelling even a part of this web will lessen the capacity to continue these wars. But can it be done?
Fowler believes the political will exists to tighten the sanctions against Unita internationally, and that the only way forward is to bring in expertise.
Inside Angola, as war intensifies slowly, conditions are worsening fast. The government has launched a small-scale counter-offensive aimed at reversing the army’s losses of smaller towns – and control of part of the strategic road between Kuito and Huambo.
Fierce fighting is reported around Huambo at present and Malange in the north is still coming under heavy artillery fire. The town, crowded with refugees from Unita attacks on villages, has been pounded intermittently since January, for up to two weeks at a time.
But it is the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Angola that is focusing the attention of the UN. Secretary General Kofi Annan made it plain to the secuity council a few days ago that humanitarian aid to the 1,2-million displaced people in Angola – one-tenth of the population – could come to a full stop.
There is no money for continuing the expensive airlift of food and other necessities so, as Annan pointed out, “the entire humanitarian effort will stop and hundreds of thousands of Angolans will face severe malnutrition, disease and death”.
UN member states have not contributed enough funding for the relief effort. One diplomat in Luanda described it as “Angola fatigue” – a luxury affordable only to the safe and comfortable, and certainly not available to the majority of Angolans.
The UN’s message is clear: after such an investment of money and time it is not going to let go of Angola.
Fowler’s 14 recommendations range from making sanctions violations illegal to air surveillance of flights into Unita territory. It will be a slow tourniquet, a package of measures to squeeze Unita.
One panel of four experts will investigate diamonds, oil and Unita’s other economic activities. The second, comprising six people, will investigate arms supplies. The UN has been asked to agree to the placing of civilian monitors on the ground in Angola and countries thought to be involved in sanctions-breaking activities. Experts in the various fields will be commisioned to report to the panels.
Unita’s response, in a document submitted to the UN during Fowler’s visit to Angola, was to claim the sanctions are unjust and excessive, and accuse Canada of genocide against the “Eskimos”.