Almost 12 years after Angolans last went to the polls, prospects of an election are becoming brighter. Earlier this month, Angola’s Council of the Republic — the highest presidential advisory body — advised President José Eduardo dos Santos to exercise ”judicial influence” on Parliament to approve the legal framework for elections in September 2006.
A statement from the council recommended ”the elections should be preceded by a legal and well-defined framework and the creation of technical, material, and financial conditions, as assurance of a fair and transparent electoral process”.
Just how far Angola needs to travel before it meets those conditions for free and fair elections is examined in a report released this week by Human Rights Watch (HRW). It looks at the state of press freedom and the potential for free political activity. It concludes that while the political climate has liberalised in Luanda, the capital, serious restrictions remain both on the press and on opposition parties in the country’s interior.
”It is encouraging that the Angolan government appears committed to holding elections in 2006,” said Peter Takirambudde, executive director of HRW’s Africa Division.
”For these crucial elections to have credibility, however, the government must lead the way in safeguarding media freedom and free political activity in all parts of Angola.”
In February, when the citizens of Cafunfo, in the diamond fields of north-eastern Angola, took to the streets to protest about the removal of the diesel generators that had provided electricity, the police and security guards opened fire. Fifteen people were reported killed, including a 10-year- old boy and two teenage girls. Police arrested 17 people, three of whom are since believed to have died in detention, while the rest remain in custody without access to family or lawyers.
In contrast, in Luanda in March members of the extra-parliamentary opposition group, Party for the Democratic Support and Progress of Angola (Padepa), were allowed to demonstrate outside the United States embassy in Luanda, asking the US government to put pressure on Dos Santos to set an election date.
Political opposition groups have faced violence and threats simply for trying to organise in the provinces.
Press freedom too displays a marked contrast between Luanda and the interior. The private weekly papers frequently expose corruption and criticise government decisions, yet they reach only a few thousand wealthier Angolans, most of them in the capital.
Editors and journalists operate in fear of harsh libel laws. Felizberto Graça Campos, editor of Seminário Angolense, recently faced five criminal libel suits after an article that named Angola’s richest men: all of them with government or MPLA connections. Campos received a suspended prison sentence on the first count, and the others are still pending. ”If courts were independent this would not have happened,” Campos is quoted as saying in the HRW report. ”Calling someone a millionaire is not defamation.”
The government controls the only daily newspaper, and the only terrestrial television station. Radio, the most accessible medium in Angola, as elsewhere in the continent, is government-controlled in most parts of the country, with private stations broadcasting in only a handful of cities near the coast. The Catholic Church-controlled Rádio Ecclésia, regarded as the best independent news source in Luanda, was in November ordered to halt plans for test broadcasts in the provinces, despite — in theory — holding a licence valid for the whole country.
This mismatch between positive legislation and questionable practice is a recurring theme in HRW’s report. The freedoms promised in the multi-party Constitution that came into force before the 1992 elections were eroded as the country returned to war. The government has operated in a legal vacuum since 1997, when its electoral mandate expired, yet polls would have had little meaning as long as the country was divided between government and Unita military control.
Justin Pearce co-authored the Human Rights Watch report