Return to War Engulfs Angolans in Suffering

The trip back home was supposed to be quick. Two trucks packed with refugees set out early one morning last week for the fields south of this remote provincial capital.

Most of the 150 or so passengers were desperate to collect food left behind when they fled their homes during recent fighting between rebels and government troops. Food, almost always in short supply, has been particularly hard to come by after two U.N. cargo planes were shot down several weeks ago and humanitarian relief programs were disrupted across the country.

The rumors began last weekend. Something had gone dreadfully wrong with the convoy. A man whose wife went with the group could bear it no longer. He traced the route on a wobbly bicycle, riding 55 miles down a lonely, pothole-ridden road. He found his wife dead in a ditch; nearly two dozen other bodies were strewn across the road. The trucks had been stripped and set afire.

“Almost everyone is unaccounted for, and we have no idea where they are,” said Antonio M. Malomalo, a provincial official who oversees the 60,000 refugees now in Saurimo. “When something like this happens, everyone in the area starts fleeing. We are getting more refugees coming into town every day.”

No one knows for certain who is responsible for the attack.

Malomalo said it was rebel soldiers, but U.N. monitors said it could have been government forces or bandits. Yet there is no mystery in the underlying truth of the terror: Angola is back at war, and ordinary people are the biggest losers.

Four years after the world rejoiced at a peace treaty that was supposed to end one of Africa’s longest civil conflicts, the Angolan government and the rebel UNITA movement are bent once again on destroying each other, both sides now openly acknowledge.

“We have reached a very bad stretch,” a Western diplomat said in Luanda, the capital. “Neither side with weapons is interested in dialogue or the pursuit of a negotiating process.”

This time no one is blaming Cold War rivalries, which fueled fighting in the 1970s and 1980s, or Portuguese colonialism, which incited unrest in the ‘60s, or even ethnic hatred, the bane of many African conflicts. This is a home-grown battle to the finish between the ruling Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola and UNITA, the Portuguese acronym for the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, which lost elections in 1992 but is determined to control the country nonetheless.

“The Angolan people are mixed up in a new war, even more violent and destructive than all that have gone before,” the government wrote in a formal war resolution debated this week in the legislature, local media reported.

The new fighting began in earnest only last month, but the human suffering is already monumental at makeshift refugee camps springing up across the country, from Saurimo in the north to Menongue in the south. The U.N. World Food Program, the main provider of emergency food assistance here, has made an urgent appeal for 20 tons of extra provisions to help feed an estimated 500,000 new refugees.

Even with the recent attacks on U.N. aircraft, the situation on the ground has become so dangerous that more than three-quarters of the emergency rations have to be transported by air.

“We have no choice; the situation is totally insecure,” said Maria Flynn of the World Food Program in Luanda. “If one side is not fighting with the other, there are bandits on the roads, land mines--even huge swamps when it rains.”

Children Dying of Malnutrition, Malaria

Here in the northeastern province of Lunda Sul, one of the country’s richest diamond mining regions, children are dying of malnutrition and malaria. Angolan officials make impassioned pleas to international visitors for greater food and medical assistance, but the government’s priorities become clear even during a short stay here.

The road from the airport into town is grooved with fresh tracks from tanks and other heavy military equipment; trucks loaded with soldiers pass through the town center, an otherwise deserted area without electricity or running water. Sources say the government is preparing the airstrip, already littered with the wreckage of previous battles, as a staging ground for a new offensive into the diamond areas of Lunda Sul and neighboring Lunda Norte, traditional UNITA strongholds.

“They have been flying in fuel on government planes,” one source said. “They are getting everything in place.”

Meanwhile, ordinary people do not know where to turn. Most are coming to refugee camps like those here in Saurimo, believing that they will be safer behind government lines than on an open battlefield. But they come empty-handed, at the mercy of war-weary strangers and a small community of international relief organizations, which are finding their work increasingly difficult and dangerous.

“You risk your life here every day,” said David Roe, a British pilot for the World Food Program.

An epidemic of mange, a skin disease common among animals in the developed world, is spreading uncontrollably through some refugee camps because the only available water is collected from murky puddles of days-old rainfall.

Hungry children with stomachs that have given up grumbling and whose clothing hangs like shrouds over their shriveled frames pass the day scratching infected sores. The mange never stops itching, health workers say, even when the flies are momentarily swept away.

“The problem is that they can’t get themselves clean,” said Fiona Gannon of the Irish charity GOAL, which operates a clinic at a camp on the outskirts of town. “There is no fresh water for drinking, let alone hygiene.”

Young Males Rounded Up for Military Service

Women in the camps spend their days searching for firewood, building materials and edible wild plants. A desperate pregnant woman dined one day this week on a small bowl of crushed leaves. When the first delivery of corn, oil, salt and other basic foodstuffs in nearly two months arrived from the World Food Program this week, a raucous crowd rushed to a dusty corner of the camp.

“I don’t even remember when I got here,” said one hungry, disoriented woman waiting in line with a bowl. “It is hard to remember things anymore.”

The only men seen in the camps are the elderly and infirm. Most young male refugees are rounded up and forced into military service almost immediately upon arriving here, witnesses said. Authorities surround the camps at nightfall, block access roads and methodically search the grass-and-mud huts for able-bodied men and teenage boys.

Caimbo Zanguilo, 28, has been left behind. A tiny, sickly-looking man in shredded plaid pants and black rain boots, he has been able to feed his wife and three children by finding odd agricultural jobs around town. Some people have farm tools donated by the Lutheran World Federation that allow them to help nearby farmers plant and harvest crops. This week, the Lutherans also began drilling the camp’s first well.

“I’ve earned enough to feed one of us each day but never enough for all five of us,” Zanguilo said. “We are very, very hungry.”

Zanguilo’s 5-year-old son, Muhumeno, clings to the torn pieces of his father’s trousers as the crowd presses around him while food is unloaded from a flatbed truck. The boy’s arms and hands are covered with mange. He is so small that he looks like a child half his age, a testimony to a life in search of food. In the pecking order of eating, aid workers say, children are usually at the bottom.

The boy walked with his family from Muconda, a town about 150 miles away. They left with nothing, Zanguilo said, just running as fast as they could as fighting approached and then overtook their neighborhood. The journey lasted more than a week; no one can remember precisely how long. Days are hard to track here. Dozens lay dead along the route, Zanguilo said, including his grandfather.

“He was so hungry,” he said. “With the walking and hunger, he just couldn’t do it anymore.”

One Man’s Dream of Peace and a Better Life

Death has become so commonplace in Angola that the pain of losing a loved one does not register on some faces. Zanguilo, however, remembers his grandfather well.

He told the story of sitting with his grandparents in their home in Muconda dreaming about peace. His grandfather would reminisce about the days before bullets and mortar became the routine of daily life. Zanguilo, in his 28 years, has never known such a time, but he said he would hold on to his grandfather’s every word.

“I grew up in war, and there is still war out there,” he said, pointing somewhere in the distance. “I can only hope for the day we have peace and a better life. What else is there for me to do?”