‘If you run away, I’ll kill you’

Seventeen-year-old Tina twisted the strap of her handbag as she told how she was assaulted by soldiers in Cabinda.

‘They said, ‘If you run away, I’ll kill you.’ They took me to the barracks, sent me to a room there. The commandant pushed me on to the bed and started beating me. He started beating me on the chest, with his pistol, and said, ‘Today I’m going to fuck you.’ He put his fingers inside me and said, ‘Your vagina is good for nothing, it’s rotten and it stinks.’

‘Then he said, ‘Today I’ll send 15 soldiers to have fun.’ He called me ‘woman from Flec’, and sent someone to fetch a panga. He said: ‘It’s been a long time since I killed anyone.’”

Flec is the Front for the Liberation of the Cabinda Enclave. For the past six months the Angolan Armed Forces (FAA) have been waging an intensified campaign against this rag-tag rebel movement, which has spent more than 25 years fighting for the independence of the tiny northern territory. Cabinda produces about 60% of Angola’s petroleum revenues.

Tina’s story is one of many concerning abuses that continue to take place as the army seeks to flush out Flec supporters from among the civilian population. She does not speak explicitly of having been raped, but a doctor who examined Tina was in no doubt about what had happened.

Human rights activists say Tina’s parish priest raised the matter with the provincial authorities and the soldier who instigated the incident was publicly stripped of his rank — though it is not known whether he was later readmitted to the armed forces.

André Bazi (35) described how his two teenage daughters were killed in cold blood by one of the soldiers who had been occupying their village in the north of Cabinda.

‘They were living among us — they stayed for a week, eating in our homes. My daughters cooked for them, served them really well.”

Bazi thought his daughters would be safe when they set out on foot to a neighbouring village, but eyewitnesses told him how his daughters were killed as they tried to escape another apparent attempt at rape.

‘He shot the younger girl — she fell — he shot again, three shots. The older tried to run away — they caught her, and again killed her with three shots.”

Others have been arbitrarily detained and sometimes tortured. Ivo Macaia (44) a despatch clerk with ChevronTexaco, told how he was arrested at home and taken to a military barracks. Three days later, he realised he was starting to suffer from malaria. He says he received only cursory treatment at a military hospital before being flown by helicopter to another military base outside Cabinda town.

‘On the first day they put me in a hole, I slept in a hole, with lots of insects and scorpions that stung me, with the rain coming in and my clothes getting wet.”

He says he was removed from the hole to cells for three days, where he was accused of collaborating with Flec. He was then put back in the hole for another two weeks before being taken back to the town, first to a military and then to a civilian court. He was finally released on January 20 after seven weeks in detention.

Pedro Nzau Paulo (42), a peasant farmer, can show the scars on his wrists and legs where he was tied up. He said he was arrested by soldiers while working in his fields.

‘They asked me things about Flec that I couldn’t respond to because I was never a soldier — so they tied me up, beat me, tortured me terribly. This has caused me to lose my strength, I can’t lift anything, not even 10kg. They started to cut my ear. They beat me till I passed out. Then when I came round I saw the troops again.”

There was worse torture to come. ‘Then they tied me up and hung me by my testicles — I must have a medical examination, because my sexual organs are damaged.”

Many other detainees report having been accused of involvement with Flec. Few will admit to being actively involved in the movement, yet many have been active in pro-independence politics at some point, and there is widespread sympathy for Flec’s objectives.

‘If I am a Flec collaborator, then the whole population of Cabinda are collaborators,” said João Gime (46) an accountant with ChevronTexaco who was arrested at about the same time as his colleague Macaia.

After being released, Gime and Macaia got a rowdy welcome during Sunday mass at the Catholic mission church: a lofty pink building on the beachfront, with a view of the oil rigs that produce about 700 000 barrels of crude each day. In his sermon, parish priest Father Jorge Kongo made his own position clear: ‘The Angolan government has to recognise that Flec is the only representative of the people of Caaa …”

‘Cabinda!” roared the congregation, on cue.

The testimonies heard by the Mail & Guardian last week are consistent with the allegations made in a report published in December by an Angolan NGO, the Coalition for Reconciliation, Transparency and Citizenship. That report detailed 20 pages of accounts of torture, rape, summary execution, extra-legal detention and forced displacement in Cabinda. While a few abuses were attributed to Flec guerrillas, the vast majority were identified as the work of the FAA.

Despite repeated attempts to obtain reaction from government and military officials, no one was available who was authorised to comment. Diplomats who have tried to raise the issue with the FAA say that the war in Cabinda is regarded as an operational matter and not discussed outside of military ranks.

Last year President José Eduardo dos Santos said that he favoured a peaceful solution in Cabinda.