Outsiders Leaving, Rebels Fight On : Angola Pact Fails to Halt Civil War’s Grim Harvest

Land mines are planted like maize and beans in the verdant, densely populated hills here, and the war’s harvest of mutilados --mutilated ones--swings on crutches through the city streets.

Hegino Lungi, 11, was one of several dozen people recently fitted with new legs by Red Cross workers who have given artificial limbs to 1,400 people in the last year. Lungi’s right leg had disappeared in a flash of light when he stepped on a mine behind his home.

Persistent traffic at the orthopedic clinic in central Angola is proof that the 13-year-old war between the Soviet-armed Angolan government and the American-aided rebels still rages despite the peace accord signed last month by Angola, Cuba and South Africa.

In recent months, even as the peace talks were recording success, a food warehouse, a factory and a hotel in Huambo were bombed. And airplanes still must spiral sharply upward from the airport here, trailing flares to fool the enemy’s heat-seeking missiles.

Angolans have welcomed the U.S.-mediated pact that promises to rid their country eventually of its competing international warriors--South Africa and Cuba--and at the same time to clear the way for independence in neighboring Namibia.

But no one knows how the departure of the South Africans and Cubans will affect the military balance in Angola’s civil war. Most military analysts think it will remain a war that neither side is able to win outright.

“Obviously, the rebels are not going to topple the government,” a senior European diplomat in Luanda, the capital, said recently. “But the government is not going to stomp out the rebels, either. I can’t see any break in the stalemate. They’re going to go on fighting.”

The guerrillas of Jonas Savimbi’s National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), fueled by President Bush’s promise of continued U.S. support, want to negotiate for a coalition government of national reconciliation in which they would share power with the ruling party.

Won’t Talk With Savimbi

But Angola’s president, Jose Eduardo dos Santos, refuses to talk with Savimbi. He has in mind a plan of “national harmonization” under which he is offering UNITA soldiers clemency if they surrender.

“We don’t talk about reconciliation with UNITA. That will never happen,” Defense Minister Pedro Tonha said recently. “Clemency and harmonization will solve our country’s problem.”

The clemency offer takes effect next month, and Angolan leaders hope that the guerrillas, demoralized by the loss of South African military support and more than a decade of fighting in the bush, will give themselves up.

But Western diplomats think the clemency offer will be ignored by UNITA’s high command and most of its 38,000 soldiers and 25,000 backup forces.

They say it will take more drastic action to end the war, such as U.S. pressure on Savimbi to leave Angola or Soviet pressure on the government to negotiate with the rebel leader. Neither seems likely now.

“There isn’t going to be any powwow between Dos Santos and Savimbi for years to come,” a U.N. official in Luanda said recently.

The civil war, one of Africa’s bloodiest, began in 1975, just days after Portugal granted independence to the oil- and diamond-rich country on Africa’s southwestern coast. The Marxist People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola, with the help of Cuban troops, seized power.

Savimbi, the highly educated and charismatic leader of a rival independence movement, launched a guerrilla war against the new government with the support of the United States and South Africa, which rules the territory of Namibia on Angola’s southern border.

Under the peace accord signed last month, South Africa agreed to halt its support for Savimbi as of April 1. Cuba agreed to gradually pull its 50,000 troops out of Angola, completing the withdrawal by July, 1991.

Even though the United States and the Soviet Union supported the talks, both still have a hand in Angola’s civil war, a fact that some European diplomats in Luanda say is now the biggest obstacle to peace in Angola.

The United States gives $15 million a year to Savimbi, an amount that analysts say will help make up for the loss of South Africa’s 2,000 troops, logistical assistance and millions of dollars in equipment. The Soviets spend much more, an estimated $1.5 billion a year, supporting Angola’s army.

President Dos Santos has asked the United States to stop supporting UNITA and to establish diplomatic relations with his government.

“UNITA is an internal problem that we Angolans will resolve,” Dos Santos told American journalists in Luanda recently. “It is foreign interference that must end.”

Savimbi has substantial support among conservatives in Congress, and senior State Department officials have said the United States will not abandon UNITA as long as the Soviets are providing arms to Angola.

Since 1975, the war has claimed more than 60,000 lives and displaced about 1 million of Angola’s 8 million people. It has arrested the development of a country with some of Africa’s richest mineral reserves and made it one of the continent’s least-developed nations.

“This is a war without sense,” Dos Santos said. “We have to maintain and equip an army. There’s hunger. There’s a lack of houses. There are refugees and displaced people. Our financial resources are not great enough.”

The Angolan government currently controls most major cities in the country. UNITA controls a sparsely populated region of Angola once known as the “terrace at the end of the world,” but its members move freely throughout much of the area that neither side controls.

Huambo, Angola’s second-largest city, is 300 miles southeast of the seaside capital, ringed by blue mountains and fertile farmland on the country’s cool central plateau.

The Portuguese colonizers thought this place so full of promise and beauty that they called it Nova Lisboa (New Lisbon). It is the home of Savimbi’s Ovimbundu tribe, which accounts for 30% of Angola’s population, and it was Savimbi’s headquarters before the government drove him out in 1975.

Huambo’s province has been battered by the war. The Benguela Railroad, which brings food and medicine from the coast, has been paralyzed for six months. An administrative office, workshop and several locomotives were destroyed in UNITA attacks here in June, halting trains from the coast 150 miles away for the first time in the railroad’s 40-year history.

About 10,000 children have been orphaned and thousands of families driven from their homes. Land mines have killed or injured thousands, and relief groups run orthopedic centers on both sides of the front. The center operated by the International Committee of the Red Cross here made 180 artificial limbs five years ago and seven times that many last year.

Hegino Lungi, a thin boy under 4 feet tall, stepped on a mine two years ago while walking to an outdoor toilet. All he remembers, he said, was that “it was a big explosion” that brought his parents running.

Lungi and others in the government-controlled areas blame UNITA for planting the mines. But relief officials say the landscape is littered with mines planted by both sides.

Relief officials say this region, once a food exporter, is perennially threatened by famine because of the war. And most of Angola’s peasants support whichever side is giving them food, relief officials say.

“They are more worried about daily survival than politics,” a Western relief official in Luanda said.

The government said that in October, UNITA attacked a food warehouse and destroyed 120 tons of food. Other UNITA assaults have involved a local brewery, a clothing factory and a railway yard.

“UNITA flees direct confrontation and attacks our rear,” Poulo Jimi, a local official with the ruling party, complained to journalists on a recent government-sponsored tour of Huambo. “We have a responsibility to provide basic necessities for people, but UNITA doesn’t have to provide services. It’s easier to destroy than to build.”

Nevertheless, Jimi and others here say they believe that when Cuba’s forces move north of Huambo, as they are required to do by Nov. 1, the government will be able to turn back UNITA’s attackers.