LUSAKA : A Chance for Peace

After 19 years of war, and nearly a year of tortuous negotiations, leaders of Angola’s government and rebel forces are tentatively scheduled to sign a U.N.-brokered peace treaty Sunday in Lusaka, the capital of Zambia. If all goes as planned, a cease-fire will take effect two days later, ending Africa’s longest civil war.

The plan calls for power-sharing between the government of President Jose Eduardo dos Santos and the rebel UNITA movement led by Jonas Savimbi. The two armies helped dislodge Portuguese colonialists in 1975 and then turned on each other in what became first a Cold War proxy fight, then a brutal power struggle.