A ceasefire has been declared in Angola, but who will take Unita into the future?
For more than a year employees of Angola’s moribund state shipping company, Angonave, kept a round-the-clock vigil outside the company’s headquarters as they remained on strike. Their placards, describing the government as ?fascist” and accusing the president of stealing billions of dollars, had become a landmark in the city.
As of last Friday that landmark is no more. A group of government supporters ransacked the site, ripped up the placards and made off with the few personal belongings that the demonstrators kept at the site. This happened on a national holiday, as thousands of Angolans celebrated the previous day’s signing of the ceasefire that officially ended the 26-year war between the government and the Unita rebels.
The celebration was organised by the National Spontaneous Movement ? the government’s rent-a-crowd ? and a remarkable number of T-shirts bore the image of President José Eduardo dos Santos. But Angolans of many other political persuasions donned white shirts, ribbons or
armbands and joined the rally ? not to mention those who cared little for politics but wanted to express their relief that 40 years of war finally appeared to be over.
Yet it was a group that strayed from the march that attacked the Angonave strikers ? peculiar behaviour for a peace rally. But then the agreement is a peculiar kind of peace. A fortnight of talks between soldiers behind closed doors in Luena, a sleepy provincial town 1 500km from the capital, gave rise to a purely technical plan to demobilise some 50 000 Unita troops.
Last weekend a group of civil society leaders sought a meeting with representatives of the Unita and the Angolan armed forces to seek clarification on what went on in Luena. Unita arrived, the army delegation did not.
?It’s a process of constructing confidence between soldiers and civil society,” said Filomeno Vieira Lopes, an economist and one of the meeting?s organisers. ?We don’t have a common understanding in terms of peace.”
Just about every independent commentator agrees that by the time Jonas Savimbi died, Unita had been routed from its eastern stronghold. Why then will neither the government nor Unita admit this?
In Unita’s case it’s a question of pride. The day before the ceasefire was signed, Unita’s secretary general Paulo Lukamba Gato warned that ?the war could have continued”. For the government’s part, its reticence to declare victory makes political sense.
United Nations special representative Ibrahim Gambari said he had delivered a message from UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to Dos Santos ?congratulating him on the way in which the war has been ended in a dignified manner with no vanquished and no victors, with the victory belonging to the people of Angola”.
The government has scrupulously avoided the kind of triumphalism that its supporters dished out to the Angonave strikers, and its sudden change of role from hawk to dove is already earning it political points. Even the independent weekly newspaper Angolense ? not normally a fan of the president ? speculated that Dos Santos might be in line for a Nobel Peace Prize.
Rural Angolans who have spent decades in areas controlled by Unita are also now starting to greet the
government as a saviour. ?If there were elections in Angola now I would vote for the government as they are looking after me now,” said Eduardo Paulo (43). Paulo comes from Unita’s old stronghold of Bié province and had been with Unita since 1979.
His current home ? a few square metres of plastic sheeting in the Macanheca refugee camp ? and his daily food rations come not from the government but from international donor organisations. But to someone who has exchanged near-starvation in a Unita-controlled area for survival in a government-controlled area, the choice is obvious.
A few weeks ago Unita civilians were upbeat about the possibility of uniting the party under a civilian leadership. A number of prominent Unita figures have declared their support for Gato as interim leader.
But who will take the party into the future? Gato, the soldier, appears hesitant to distance himself from Savimbi’s almost universally discredited legacy. Isaias Samakuva, head of the external mission, remains in Paris ? until the UN Security Council lifts sanctions against Unita officials abroad he may not travel.
Abel Chivukuvuku, the parliamentarian widely tipped as a potential future leader, has been keeping a low profile since Savimbi died. Some have asked whether this urbane politician is the right man to win back Unita’s core support in rural central-south Angola.
Meanwhile, Eugenio Manuvakola, the MP who broke with Savimbi in 1998 to found, with the government’s blessing, the Unita-Renovada faction, has been putting in his claim too.
?I am the president of Unita,” he declared to journalists at the press conference he called on Tuesday, saying that he was prepared to negotiate with Gato but would not recognise his leadership.
Yet the potential for a strong opposition party in Angola is stronger than ever, amid signs that the government cannot continue basking too long in the feel-good effects of the peace deal.
At last Friday’s rally, a group of noisy youths chanted a slogan translating into ?Savimbi’s penis got left behind in the bush”. Yet once they started talking about what the next step should be for Angola, they said the government should be building more schools.
The government has said it will help the 50 000 Unita soldiers and their 300 000 dependants, but the millions of Angolans who have been waiting years for homes, education or jobs will not be happy if they find themselves queue-jumped by the former rebel fighters.