Angola

The Angolan government is going ahead with its plan to hold elections in 2006, the country’s first ballot since 1992, despite opposition party calls for the vote to be held next year. A Cabinet meeting has agreed on administrative measures to prepare for the general and presidential elections.

Angolan police plan to resume a crackdown on suspected diamond and other traffickers that has led to the expulsion of about 120 000 Congolese and 35 000 West Africans, a senior police official said. ”I am satisfied with the results of the first stage … in the coming weeks, the results will be even better,” a police official said.

The Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) interior minister has told Angola that its mass expulsions of tens of thousands of Congolese is causing mayhem and appealed for cooperation. Angolan authorities have rounded up more than 60 000 foreigners, most of them from the DRC, over the past four months.

Angola’s ruling party on Thursday unveiled 14 preconditions for upcoming presidential and general elections, saying these had to be fulfilled before any ballot was held in the war-scarred country. ”We have to first fulfil these conditions and then prepare for the elections,” a party spokesperson said.

The Angolan Red Cross and the national delegation of the International Committee of the Red Cross have spent almost two years helping reunite families separated by 27 years of civil conflict, bringing 836 children back together with parents, aunts, uncles and siblings.

The Angolan army has arrested about 700 people, including 334 foreigners, in an operation aimed at curbing illegal diamond trafficking in the central province of Bie, state radio said on Wednesday. Of the foreigners arrested, 234, mainly from the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo, have been deported.

Leaders from the 14 nations of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) again rallied behind Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe on Thursday, after a two-day summit that ended with few concrete decisions.