The Angolan government has evicted thousands of people from their homes in poor parts of the capital, Luanda, over the past few years with little more than the shirts on their backs, two human rights groups said on Tuesday.
New York-based Human Rights Watch and Angola’s SOS Habitat, releasing a report entitled They Pushed Down the Houses: Forced Evictions and Insecurity of Tenure for Luanda’s Urban Poor, said about 20 000 people had been affected by 18 mass evictions carried out between 2002 and 2006.
Many had been left homeless and destitute by the evictions, the effects of which Peter Takirambude, Africa director at Human Rights Watch, likened to the displacement of Angolans during the country’s 27-year civil war.
This year marks the fifth anniversary of the end of that war that killed an estimated 500 000 people and left basic infrastructure in tatters.
”Millions of Angolans were displaced during the civil war, but since then the government has forcibly evicted thousands more from their homes in the capital,” said Takirambude.
More than 3 000 homes and many small cultivated land plots had been seized, according to the report.
In many cases, the two groups claimed, the government failed to ascertain people’s rights to land before evicting them, provided little or no notice beforehand and offered no form of compensation or assistance towards resettlement or legal redress.
The Angolan government has said evictions in Luanda target people trespassing on land and that, where it involves state land, it is needed for public development projects.
Luanda has seen a massive influx of rural migrants in recent years. Most of the city’s four million people have no formal title to their house or land, according to the report. — Sapa-dpa