Tourist-Conscious Namibia Worried Over Border Raids

The soldiers appeared on the road out of nowhere and began shooting. The oncoming minibus swerved left, then right. The driver stopped and ran for his life.

Theodora Chizabulyo, 16, was seated next to her aunt, Noreen Kwala, who pushed her and two school friends to the floor. The woman then crept on top of them.

“Don’t cry,” whispered Kwala. “Keep quiet and pretend to be dead.”

Theodora felt the sting of hot lead in her back. She held her breath. The men grabbed everything. Theodora’s school bag. Her spare clothes. The snacks for the road.

“When it was over, I tried to wake my aunt up,” Theodora said from the intensive-care unit at the hospital here. “But she wouldn’t. I didn’t cry. I told her I wouldn’t cry.”

Kwala was dead. Three other passengers on the commuter bus also died. The students on the floor suffered multiple gunshot wounds but survived.

Violent ambushes of travelers have been a tragic way of life for nearly three decades across the Okavango River in warring Angola. But this attack took place in Namibia, one of Africa’s youngest democracies and nearly throughout the 1990s an oasis of peace and stability on a turbulent continent.

More than a dozen people were killed last month on or near Namibia’s Trans-Caprivi Highway, a busy 350-mile route that traces the Angolan and Zambian borders. The road links this riverfront trading town with the Caprivi Strip region’s capital, Katima Mulilo. Just before Christmas, a Namibian police facility along the road was shelled from across the river; one officer was killed and three others were wounded.

While there have been isolated incidents of banditry here in the past, authorities say the threat has never been so widespread or deadly. Tensions are so high that Namibian police mistakenly killed a 6-year-old Angolan refugee when they opened fire recently on a group of suspected bandits.

“These are terrible times,” said Serpahine Nekaro, the head nurse at Rundu Hospital, where civilian and military casualties of the violence have become a new mainstay of the emergency ward. “We never know from day to day what might come in.”

There are conflicting reports about who is responsible for the terror, but there is little doubt that the culprits come from Angola--raising fears that Namibia will be sucked deeper into that nation’s long and intractable civil war.

Namibian authorities blame the violence on Angolan rebels, who are hungry for both food and revenge since being cut off from their supply routes here and elsewhere by Angolan government forces in December. Others suspect the Angolan army, which has been afforded new access to Namibian soil and its relative riches.

In a sharp break from past neutrality, the Namibian government agreed in December to allow Angolan troops to use its territory to attack rebels of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, known by its Portuguese acronym, UNITA.

The rebel group, led by Jonas Savimbi, has been locked in a struggle for power with the Angolan government since Namibia’s neighbor gained independence from Portugal in 1975. For many years, UNITA was backed by the United States and apartheid-era South Africa because of its fierce anti-communism; since the end of the Cold War and the 1994 advent of black-majority rule in South Africa, however, the rebels have lost their powerful friends and are the target of a U.N.-imposed embargo.

“The UNITA bandits must know we have experience in fighting the racist South African Boers who were with UNITA in this country when we were fighting for our independence,” Namibian President Sam Nujoma told a recent gathering of worried businesspeople here. “The UNITA bandits certainly will feel the pinch and consequences of their own making.”

Hillside residents in Rundu--including guests at some of the city’s dozen tourist lodges--watched in frozen silence in December as UNITA was routed from the Angolan village of Calais, less than a mile away, in a barrage of gunfire and shelling previously unheard of at the border here.

The rebels have been on the run--and the Caprivi road has been a deathtrap--ever since.

On Jan. 3, a family of French tourists bound for Rundu in a rented camper was ambushed on the same stretch of highway where Theodora was attacked. Claude and Brigitte Bidoin survived, but their three children were killed. The camper was stripped clean of food and supplies; even the shoes were pulled off the feet of the boy and two girls.

“She asked many times about her children, but we just couldn’t tell her--it would have been too much of a shock,” said Dr. Yuri Yangazov, the surgeon in Rundu who tended to the Bidoins. “It was something we’ve never experienced here.”

The killings, widely publicized in Europe, dealt a severe blow to the image of the country’s tourism industry, which government officials have sought to develop as a pillar of the economy.

‘Propaganda’ by Media Is Blamed

Acting Foreign Minister Tuliameni Kalomoh, angered by the negative fallout, blames the country’s misfortunes on “a barrage of all manner of vitriolic propaganda” by the news media. He has accused local journalists of siding with UNITA and presenting a false image of a country “up in flames.”

Two lodges in Rundu closed last month, and most others are empty except for the occasional government or military delegation. Although the remainder of Namibia is peaceful, tour companies in the nation’s capital, Windhoek, report a drop in bookings as well.

“I don’t blame tourists for not wanting to come; it will take years to win back the people’s confidence,” said Hallie van Niekerk, who owns the Kavango River Lodge in Rundu, where reservations through April have been canceled. “This is absolute stupidity to bring the war to our country.”

Concerns that Namibia might be pulled into its neighbor’s conflict come against a backdrop of unprecedented military activity by the Namibians over the past year, including reports of the first direct clashes between Namibian troops and UNITA rebels in the Caprivi region, east of here.

Namibia is already sending troops to Congo, where another civil conflict has drawn half a dozen armies from around the region and where five Namibian soldiers were killed in recent fighting. Last year, Namibian authorities declared a state of emergency in Caprivi because of clashes between security forces and separatists that began after a local insurrection was launched there in August. Thousands of terrified residents fled into neighboring Botswana.

Some Rundu businesspeople believe that the Angolan government, which has a long and friendly relationship with Namibia’s ruling South-West Africa People’s Organization, is secretly behind the recent violence. The Angolans, they argue, hope to incite Namibians into a more active military role against UNITA. The Angolans deny such a plot, but some analysts, diplomats and human rights groups in Windhoek have voiced similar suspicions.

“There is almost a kind of martial law going on,” said Theunis Keulder, who heads the Namibia Institute for Democracy in Windhoek. “The army and special field forces can do whatever they want. It is shocking.”

President: ‘We Have Combat Experience’

Tough-talking politicians have done little to calm nerves. On his recent tour of the Kavango and Caprivi regions, President Nujoma told residents that Namibian soldiers have been authorized to cross into Angola to hunt down suspected UNITA bandits. Asked if Namibian forces will join Angolan government troops in battle, Nujoma said Angola has not asked for such assistance.

“Don’t worry about the war spreading into Namibia,” Nujoma told The Times. “We have combat experience.”

The buzz of war here has not been so great since Namibia’s bloody struggle for independence from apartheid-era South Africa was won a decade ago. Most tourists in the Kavango region, of which Rundu is the capital, have been replaced by soldiers. Troops patrol the riverfront singing liberation songs. Armed convoys escort motorists on the Caprivi highway. Residents say young Namibian men are signing up to fight.

The U.S. government recently ordered American aid workers and Peace Corps volunteers out of Kavango. U.S. personnel in Caprivi were evacuated last year during the separatist unrest there. Both regions have been declared “no-go” zones for U.S. visitors.

“It is not a question of safe or not safe,” said Namibian Defense Force spokesman Lt. Joseph Shikongo. “This is a war area.”

Border Town Residents Have Ties With Angola

For the people of Rundu, anxiety about the violence is complicated by the town’s close business and family ties to Angolans living in nearby villages controlled until recently by UNITA. The Kavango ethnic group straddles the Okavango River, which is an international border only because of colonial-era demarcations between Portuguese Angola and German-controlled Namibia.

Until the recent troubles, people crossed back and forth without passports; it is not uncommon for a Kavango man to have a wife and children on both sides. Namibian authorities here recently paraded 100 or so prisoners before television cameras, insisting that they were UNITA rebels. But local residents doubted the claim, saying many of the faces belonged to regular visitors to Rundu.

“There is a lot of stealing, smuggling and selling going on across the border,” said Richo Mungenga of the Namibian Chamber of Commerce and Industry. “We tell people not to do it, but poverty is so widespread that people are desperate.”

Nujoma warned businesspeople here that their troubles will only get worse if trading continues with UNITA.

“We must unite to ensure peace and stability prevail in our country,” Nujoma said. “We defeated the racist South African regime because we were united. A united people will always emerge victorious.”

The president’s schedule here also included a visit to the hospital. Theodora was there, barely able to move beneath a bloodstained blanket. And doctors were preparing for a truckload of freshly wounded Angolan soldiers.