Could international aid be keeping Angola’s 25-year civil war going, asks Mercedes Sayagues in Malange
Long lines of peasants, trucks loaded with maize bags: the Red Cross food aid distribution in the outskirts of Huambo is well organised. As it was last year. And the year before. As it has been for the past 20 years, since the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)began working in Angola’s central highlands.
By now, Angolan peasants know how to queue, how to hold on to their ration cards and, probably, how to manipulate the aid system that sustains them every time their country erupts into war, again.
”Twenty years of work and the people are worse off than ever,” sighs an aid official.
But aid workers don’t have time to dwell on the moral and political complexities of their work. The emergency is here, among the skeletal children and their destitute families, in the bloody mess of bone and tissue in the stumps of landmine victims, in the prosthetic legs the ICRC keeps manufacturing, stubbornly, under shelling and under siege, in Kuito and Huambo.
But could it be that aid, in its worthy goal of saving lives, is also feeding Angola’s 25-year-old civil war, Africa’s longest-running war after Sudan’s? ”It’s a good theoretical question,” says Carlos Batallas, head of the ICRC delegation in Huambo. ”But look at these people: it’s a matter of life or death. Our mandate is to save lives, not to solve the problem.”
This month, the United Nations World Food Programme plans to feed nearly one million people in Angola. The ICRC gives food, seeds and tools to 85 000 families in Huambo.
Without this aid, many of these people would die. During the months when no relief planes could land in Malange, Kuito and Huambo, pounded by Unita’s long-range artillery, many thousands died of starvation and disease.
But aid also relieves the government of its responsibility towards its people. The Angolan government can afford to buy more weapons because aid keeps Angolan people alive.
It could be argued that Luanda would not spend any more on poor Angolans. It would let them die: out of sight, out of mind. But it would continue with arms purchases that rake in juicy commissions for the generals and the nomenklatura – an elite of 500, according to Richard Cornwall of the Institute for Strategic Studies in Pretoria.
So the aid agencies throw in more aid, save many lives and sustain the war.
During Unita’s two mock demobilisations, in 1991/92 and in 1995/97, food and other aid given to soldiers in the quartering areas and when they went home was a boon to Unita.
After a $1-million-a-day peacekeeping operation, Unita emerged in better fighting fettle than ever before. After 20 years of humanitarian aid in the central highlands, its people are poorer than ever.
That the UN turned a blind eye to so many violations of the Lusaka accords and so many human rights abuses undermined the peace process. The Angolan people pay.
One could argue that, since it shares responsibility for the failure of the Lusaka accords, the UN should keep pouring aid into Angola. But consider this: most of the expensive demining done between 1995 and 1998 is lost owing to remining. Should donors keep funding mine clearance?
Food aid for Malange appears in Luanda’s markets. Police and soldiers steal food aid from peasants. But can you ignore children too weak to stand on their own, pure bones sticking under wrinkled skin. You want the food planes to keep landing.
Donor countries show similar contradictions. A Belgian charity sends doctors to Angola while dealers in Antwerp buy Unita’s illegal diamonds.
Tightening sanctions against Unita in a $1-million operation is the latest fad in the UN. Why not sanction the government’s massive arms purchases? And isn’t the looting of Angola’s oil revenue while people starve equally criminal?
One corporate security analyst estimates that President Jos Eduardo dos Santos rakes in a cool $350-million a year. Diamond sales will earn Unita a paltry $200-million this year, says De Beers, compared to peak earnings of $760- million in 1996.
This week in Luanda, the Angolan Reflection Group for Peace is calling for an immediate ceasefire to allow the delivery of humanitarian aid countrywide.
Says its leader, Pastor Daniel Ntoni- Nzinga: ”We don’t want humanitarian corridors if the guns are not silent. Otherwise, humanitarian aid feeds the war.”
Aid will feed soldiers, it will end in the markets, it will sustain the civilian population while allowing both armies to keep shelling towns, murdering villagers, looting their meagre assets and stealing the food in the fields.
In Huambo, the ICRC is handing out soap to 15 000 displaced families camped out, ironically, in the ruins of a soap factory from Portuguese times.
By a nearby stream, the displaced cultivate small vegetable patches with tools and seeds from the Red Cross. I watch with a couple of aid workers from a bridge. If they could breath life into the budding plants to make them grow overnight like in a cartoon, they would.
”If the crops grow, there will be less need for food aid in the next months,” says one wistfully.
If soldiers don’t loot the gardens; if there is no shelling; if the rains are good. If there is peace, maybe one million displaced people will go home and grow their own food. If the kleptocracy in Luanda and bellicose Unita gave a damn for their own people, aid workers need not be here.
But this is a taboo subject. The ICRC is mandated to be neutral. The UN is bound by the rules of non-intervention in government affairs. Many NGOs don’t dare upset the status quo or their work permits may be revoked.
Emergencies are good for NGOs: they are assured of jobs and funding while Angola collapses.