The response from the United Nations and the government in Angola, where ”hundreds of thousands” of people risk dying of hunger, is ”scandalously insufficient,” the relief agency Doctors without Borders (MSF) said on Tuesday.
”Up to now, the Angolan government and the United Nations have shown an unacceptable inertia in their response to the urgent humanitarian needs of at least 600 000 Angolans,” MSF said in a statement received in Harare.
While visiting Angola, MSF’s president Morten Rostrup said ”thousands of Angolans have already died of hunger” and ”every day” his group finds ”appalling rates of malnutrition and mortality in new regions of the country,” according to the statement.
”Since the start of April, we have relayed this information to the United Nations, to the Angolan government, and to various humanitarian organisations, but the mobilisation is scandalously
slow and insufficient,” Rostrup said.
He said he was ”frustrated by this indifference to a desperate situation.”
”It’s with total awareness that thousands of Angolans are left to be decimated by hunger,” he said.
”We have abandoned Angolans in the past, let’s not abandon them today when peace gives us a chance to help them,” he said.
The army and the rebel National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) signed a ceasefire on April 4 in Luanda, ending 27 years of civil war that left at least 500 000 dead and displaced more than four million people who fled the violence. – Sapa-AFP