Angola to mark 25 years of independence and war
By Colin McClelland
LUANDA (Reuters): Angola marks 25 years of independence on Saturday with little to celebrate.
It remains bogged down in Africa's longest-running civil war which has killed around a million people and uprooted millions more from their homes.
The once elegant capital of Luanda has been transformed into a teeming slum as displaced peasants escaping the war seek protection in a city which cannot provide most of them with basic services.
And there is no end in sight to the conflict, which has its roots in the colonial period and Cold War and is now fueled by the country's abundant natural riches -- oil and diamonds.
In the early 1960s, the enemy was the colonial power Portugal and the Salazar dictatorship in Lisbon.
The Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) was formed in 1956, the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) a year later. Jonas Savimbi launched the upstart National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) in 1961.
When Portugal's military deposed Salazar in 1974 and granted autonomy to its overseas colonies in 1975, the MPLA controlled Luanda.
The MPLA declared a Marxist state and began fighting off claims by the FNLA and UNITA for power.
Angola became a Cold War proxy battle between the superpowers. White-ruled South Africa, paranoid about the "red threat" in its region, joined American support for UNITA while the MPLA called in Cuban troops.
With the end of the Cold War, the U.S. cut UNITA funding and the state renounced Marxism and began to transform its economy to adapt to burgeoning oil wealth.
Along the way there was an election and some failed peace agreements.
Angola 25 years into statehood is a bleak place.
Life expectancy is less than 40 years. Mortality rates for mothers and children under five are among the world's highest at 1,850 per 100,000 and 292 per 1,000, respectively.
Half the children under five suffer stunted growth from poor nutrition. Only about a third of the population has access to water that is fit to drink.
"The MPLA government has treated the people worse than the colonial regime," Rafael Marques, an Angolan journalist who has been imprisoned for criticizing the authorities, told Reuters.
"In the past 25 years we have seen political systems imposed without the consent or participation of the people".
Colonialism was bad, socialism worse and so-called democracy brought more tragedy, he said, with its "nomenclature privatization". The rulers own the oil economy.
"We saw the Cubans leave and the Americans and the West arrive but with the same mentality: 'We are here to help you because you can't help yourselves and we know what is best'."
Part of that help comes via the United Nations and its appeal for US$258 million in aid this past year. The appeal for 2001 is expected to exceed $200 million as well.
Most of it goes to the UN's World Food Program, which helps feed about half of the some three million people displaced by the war and corralled into crowded relief camps.
"It's a problem with any emergency that becomes structural and persists for years," a western diplomat said.
Even UN officials acknowledge that humanitarian aid on a huge scale is hard to justify in a country that produces 750,000 barrels of oil a day, second only to Nigeria in sub-Saharan Africa.
"What on earth are we doing with humanitarian aid in this country?" one UN official said. "We're taking away the responsibility of this government and its oil revenues."
Angola has hedged its oil supply in long-term loans repayable in crude. While specifics are secret, the terms don't necessarily hinge on today's $30-plus a barrel prices.
But the point remains: oil money has paid for AK-47s instead of schools, and for jet fighters instead of hospitals.
Analysts say huge multi-national oil companies, which in Angola include Exxon-Mobil, Chevron-Texaco, BP and ElfTotalFina, encourage military spending because it protects their interests from rebel attacks.
And it requires big-ticket expenditures that can best be financed from oil revenue, the UN official said.
Oil companies may soon have to see themselves as part of a solution to a war neither side can win, analysts said.
"Conflict oil is becoming an issue and companies will have to more effectively push for peace than they have been," said Charlie Weeks, an analyst at London-based Control Risks.
Not everything is bad for the government of Jose Eduardo dos Santos.
An agreement with the International Monetary Fund to help boost the economy has been extended for six months to June.
Dos Santos recently re-shuffled his cabinet in a move which analysts said showed he was serious about economic reforms, squashing corruption and creating transparency in government oil accounts. But there is a long way to go.
"It would be wrong to say nothing has changed," the diplomat said. "Superficially the country is still at war but the dynamics of the conflict are in the government's favor."
Having stripped UNITA of its capacity to wage conventional war, Luanda is locked in a guerrilla campaign it can never totally win, analysts said.
But UNITA still controls key diamond-mining areas and analysts and the UN say it is skillfully evading sanctions and selling gems to fund its war effort.
The key for the government may lie in social spending, according to a diplomat from another Western country.
"That's how you win a war: get the population on your side."
Anthony Bloomberg, UNICEF resident representative, noted that cases of malnourished children had declined rapidly in the past 12 months.
Bloomberg's assessment applies to Angola at large: "In the long term the situation is still very grim, but we have to be optimistic because there are some programs underway."
This, at least, may give Angolans reason to hope that the next 25 years will be better than the last.