Namibia
Tangeni Amupadhi Just when it seemed as if cross-border attacks on north- eastern Namibia by Angolan gunmen had stopped, the killing has started again. At least three people were killed and close to half a dozen have been injured in the past three weeks in the Kavango region, following a month-long lull in raids and a bombing campaign involving South African- manufactured explosives. Namibian authorities have blamed the attacks on the Angolan rebel movement Unita, although Angolan government soldiers have also been arrested in a few of the cross-border
attacks.
The latest murders bring to more than 45 the number of people killed in Namibia since December, when the Namibian government allowed the Angolan armed forces to launch attacks on Unita positions in southern Angola in an effort to “finish” Unita and end a 25-year-old civil war. More than 90 people have lost a leg or an arm in landmine explosions, according to the Namibian Red Cross Society. Two people were shot dead last Friday on an island on the Kavango river when gunmen claiming to be Namibian security forces, but dressed in Angolan army uniforms, abducted three villagers east of the regional capital Rundu and looted their homes for food and clothes. A school principal died in a separate incident after stepping on a landmine. When attacks on civilians began to increase in December following the Angolan and Namibian governments’ decision to annihilate Unita, Namibian authorities said that starving Unita soldiers had been carrying out the raids in search of food and medical supplies. But the cross-border raids have intensified with the planting of landmines and at least two bombs.
Army and police representatives in Windhoek have since acknowledged that it was difficult to say whether the security would improve because Unita has reverted to a guerrilla campaign. “The premise that the 1998 and 1999 Angolan government
offensive has destroyed Unita’s capacity to wage war has been proven wrong so far,” says Jackie Potgieter of the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria. Potgieter says Unita seems to have overcome structural and moral losses and has now reverted to a guerrilla campaign that the Angolan army was finding more difficult to deal with. He said attacks on Namibia were proof that Unita was still active. “The presence of Angolan forces on Namibian soil has not yet achieved anything. Unita’s capacity to wage conventional
warfare was destroyed in December 1999. But the Unita factor has not been neutralised,” says Potgieter. Namibian security forces say Unita was using explosives it stockpiled while receiving help from apartheid South Africa in the late 1970s and 1980s. The attacks on villages in north-eastern Namibia have led authorities in Windhoek to launch attacks on Unita positions inside Angola. Tourism and many businesses have collapsed as a result of the attacks. And motorists travelling in the Caprivi and Kavango regions are provided with scheduled armed escorts following the killing of more than 10 people, including three French children, on the highway.
Meanwhile, the United Nations World Food Programme said this week that scores of refugees, “penniless, exhausted and starving”, were streaming into Kavango from the Quando Cubango province. The programme’s office in Luanda warned that the number of Angolan refugees could swell to 15E000 from the present 11E000 by the end of August.