Angolans are press-ganged into a conflict that began before they were born and where greed has overtaken ideology. Chris McGreal reports
This is not a good year for the self-styled “Joao the Survivor” to turn 21. A few weeks before his birthday the Angolan army called up men born in 1978 to throw into the resurgent war against Unita rebels.
The sons of the wealthy quickly bought exit visas and tickets to Portugal or South Africa. Some of the poor reported for duty. Joao entered a nether world in hiding.
The army predicted it would net 30 000 recruits in the call-up. It ended up with less than a quarter of that number, so it has been press-ganging youths into a war that has already claimed half-a-million lives and has never been more unpopular.
Joao lives in a room at the back of his mother’s third-floor flat in Luanda. Trusted neighbours know about him. Others are told he is abroad. Joao would like to be, but it costs money for young men to buy their way out of Angola.
He is clear about why he does not want to fight. “This war started before I was born. Then there was a reason to fight. Now the poor die and the politicians and generals get rich buying weapons, and the war just goes on forever. This is not a war to fight,” he said.
Well over half of Angola’s 11-million citizens were born after independence 24 years ago, which ushered in the civil war. They have known nothing but conflict interspersed with rickety peace treaties between the MPLA government and Jonas Savimbi’s Unita rebels. The accords temporarily halted the killing but never lifted the threat of more death.
But whereas there was a sharp ideological edge to the conflict through the cold war years, many in the capital Luanda now see last December’s return to full-scale fighting as a quest for power and money driven by oil and diamonds.
The government has mortgaged oil sales to raise about 1-billion to buy arms. Unita funds its war with the estimated 500-million a year it earns from diamond mines in northern Angola, selling the gems illicitly despite international sanctions against the rebels.
The price is being paid by millions of Angolans. Unita controls about two-thirds of the country, confining the MPLA to the cities in much of the country. Cuito, Huambo and Malanje – cities brought to the edge of destruction a few years ago – are again besieged and bombarded.
Unita is driving the populations of whole villages into these urban enclaves to force the government to divert limited resources simply to feed hundreds of thousands of displaced people.
The Catholic church in Malanje says the population has swelled by about 150 000, and Unita regularly shells the city. The main intent is terror, as refugees who stagger into the cities with their arms hacked off can testify.
The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) says it has only two weeks of emergency food supplies left in Huambo, after which refugees face starvation. Angola’s Aid Minister, Albino Malungo, describes the situation in the cities as “very grim”.
The UN agrees. The WFP chief in Luanda, Francesco Strippoli, says the war is a “forgotten emergency” and warns that the country is “on the edge of a human tragedy”.
But not all are suffering. Angola’s defence minister has admitted to Parliament that senior army officers and government officials are profiting from large commissions on weapons purchases, largely from Belarus. Lower down the line of command, soldiers are selling fuel, weapons and even uniforms to Unita.
One of the government’s most vocal critics in Luanda, Rafael Marques de Morais of the Open Society Foundation, says profiteering is an open secret. “The increased military budget and concentration of resources in the hands of the army is subject to corruption, commissions and overcharges,” he said.
“There are generals and senior politicians making hundreds of millions of dollars out of this war, while their soldiers don’t have sufficient supplies or proper field hospitals for the wounded. The minister of defence admitted it in Parliament two months ago.”
Angolense, a newspaper sympathetic to the MPLA, recently exposed 200-million in commissions paid to senior military officers for weapons deals. The paper said it had been warned by one of the officers not to print the names of those taking kickbacks – which it took as a death threat.
The governor of Malanje province, who rules no more than the besieged regional capital, was claiming salaries and supplies for 11 000 militamen to defend the city. On closer inspection it was discovered he had no more than 1 000 men registered and could produce only a few hundred when asked to.
The graft has further sapped footsoldiers’ morale after a series of defeats. Senior military officers paint a bleak picture of the war. The army chief of staff, Lieutenant- General Jos Ribeiro Neco, admitted to Parliament last month that Unita has the upper hand and the Angolan army is largely on the defensive.
The government blamed the disaster of its latest military offensive on poor intelligence, after predicting that Savimbi’s guerrillas would finally be routed.
But military officials said there was no intelligence failure. They say they warned the government they were ill-prepared for the offensive but were pressured into launching it for political reasons.
The Angolan army is fighting on its own for the first time. Until 10 years ago, it relied heavily on the Cuban army and Soviet advisers. After the war flared up again in 1992, Luanda hired South African mercenaries.
No longer. Now the government’s defence is run by Angolan generals who face a rejuvenated Unita. Savimbi’s army has evolved from a guerrilla force into one that relies more heavily on conventional weapons. It bought tanks and heavy artillery from Ukraine while supposedly disarming under the 1994 peace accord.
To add to Angola’s woes, the economy is ailing under low oil prices and a large foreign debt. In April the government revealed it had spent its entire foreign exchange reserves.
Angola won short-term relief with a 300- million loan from a Swiss bank and by selling oil drilling licences for 600-million. But the World Bank has frozen new loans until the country imposes market reforms and opens its oil and diamond accounts to scrutiny.
Luandans, who have seen the currency fall to more than two million kwanzas to the dollar, wryly note the latest government project to improve their lot – “Urban 2000”. The MPLA is sprucing up Luanda for the millennium.
President Jos Eduardo dos Santos’s own foundation, funded with gifts of tens of millions of dollars from oil companies, is laying new pavements and planting trees along streets lined with foreign embassies. Meanwhile, the capital’s hospitals lack money for drugs, and most homes do not have running water.
There are no significant peace initiatives to end the fighting, a reflection of the widespread despair and helplessness at the return once again to war. Unita demands negotiations before halting its assaults. The government says there is no point in talking because Savimbi has blatantly failed to abide by earlier peace treaties.
But there is no prospect of either side winning an outright military victory.
Joao has no idea how long he will have to remain in hiding. “If this war goes on another 25 years I might be an old man before I get out of here.”