Angola Demobilization More Trickle Than Flow

Past bombed-out buildings and burned-out cars, near grim skull-and-crossbones signs for a roadside minefield, a dusty cluster of military tents here holds the hopes for lasting peace in Africa’s longest civil war.

But Angola has dashed such hopes before. And despite a shaky 14 1/2-month cease-fire after two decades of death and devastation, it may be doing it again.

Jonas Savimbi, the mercurial leader of the rebel UNITA forces, has promised to deliver 16,500 soldiers and their weapons--or about a third of his army--by Thursday to the demobilization camp here and at three other sites run by the United Nations.

But only 1,600 men have surrendered since mid-November, and many arrived barefoot and in rags, looking suspiciously like village youths and peasant farmers. On Friday, none arrived at all.

“We are ready,” said Molly Kamara, the U.N. administrator at Vila Nova, surveying scores of empty tents. “But it is going very slowly.”

The Thursday deadline is critical because the U.N. Security Council will vote that day on whether to renew the mandate of what is the United Nations’ largest peacekeeping force now that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has taken over military operations in the battered remnants of the Yugoslav federation.

The 6,625-member force of blue berets--as the U.N. troops are known--military observers and others was sent to Angola last year to verify implementation of a peace accord signed in November 1994 by the government of President Jose Eduardo dos Santos and Savimbi’s UNITA, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola.

An extension of several months is likely for the $1-million-a-day effort. But the U.N. special representative in Angola, Alioune Blondin Beye, warned that “the international community rightly has become impatient after months of stalling and broken promises.”

The last serious fighting ended Dec. 21, when the government, under heavy pressure from Washington and other Western powers, halted a surprise offensive against UNITA positions in the north. But the two armies remain fully armed, and officials fear that the fragile truce could quickly collapse.

“The current situation cannot last,” Beye said at U.N. headquarters outside Luanda, the capital. “So either they change by peaceful means, going by their agreement, or they return to confrontation.”

In the past, Beye has often called the peace process “irreversible” and was publicly upbeat. No longer.

“When the soldiers are disarmed, then we can call this irreversible,” he said in frustration. “In Angola, there are always doubts. We are never sure of anything. That’s why the conflict has lasted so many years.”

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Diplomats say both the government and the UNITA forces accuse each other of duplicity and that hard-liners on both sides may be secretly preparing for another round of war rather than submit to the power-sharing arrangement envisioned in the 1994 accord.

“What we are seeing is the legacy of two decades of fighting and killing,” U.S. Ambassador Donald Steinberg said. “There is tremendous mistrust on both sides.”

Michel Dufour, head of an International Committee of the Red Cross delegation, noted that UNITA has surrendered mostly assault rifles and small arms, not the mortars, tanks and artillery believed hidden in the bush.

“So far, the weapons being handed in are not credible,” Dufour said. To be sure, Angola has come a long way in the last year. Before the cease-fire, the United Nations estimated, 1,000 people were dying every day from war-related injuries, starvation and disease.

One of the largest and most expensive relief efforts in history was mounted to feed and shelter about 3 million internal refugees--nearly one-third the country’s population. About 1.1 million people are still provided with food.

Most humanitarian supplies now move by truck convoy, not planes, as dynamited bridges are repaired and major roads are cleared of countless land mines. In some areas, farmers rush in behind the mine-removal crews to plant seeds.

But life has hardly returned to normal. Many cities and towns are in ruins after bombings, sieges and house-to-house combat. Roving bands of soldiers and police have turned to banditry.

Angola first went to war in 1961, when liberation groups tried to oust the Portuguese colonial rulers. When independence was finally granted in 1975, full-scale war erupted among the competing forces.

The country soon was a Cold War battleground. Washington sent covert aid, and South Africa invaded, to prop up the nominally pro-West UNITA. The then-Marxist government was backed by Cuban troops and aid from the Soviet Bloc.

A peace pact led to U.N.-supervised elections in 1992. Although both sides agreed to demobilize and disarm their armies, neither did. And when Savimbi lost the election, he alleged fraud and ordered his troops back to war.

The agonizing conflict, once arguably about ideology, now revolves around Savimbi’s personality cult and a freewheeling fight for control of some of the world’s richest diamond fields.

Needless to say, no such riches have reached the gaunt and bedraggled men who waited for medical checkups Friday at the camp at Vila Nova, about 25 miles from the war-devastated city of Huambo.

More telling, perhaps, none of those interviewed could explain what the war was about. Gregorio Sebastiao, 22, simply shrugged when he was asked. “I’ve got no idea,” he said.