by Phyllis Johnson
This month, November, is significant for Angola, as the deadline for rebel forces to disarm and dismantle their command posts.
The leader of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (Unita), Jonas Savimbi, says his forces will meet the agreed UN deadline of 20 November. UN peacekeeping forces are to begin withdrawing next February, under the current mandate.
However, there is still concern in UN circles that the reality on the ground is different and this point highlights the difficulty of peacekeeping missions. They often have to accept what they are told by the parties as they cannot be everywhere at once to check up on a guerrilla army that is experienced at melting into the bush.
The initial concern with Unita’s disarming exercise was the age of both the weapons and the cadres who turned up at assembly points — the former were very old, and the latter very young.
It was obvious that the newer weapons and the more experienced fighters were staying outside the UN assembly places, an insurance plan used by most guerrilla armies during peace processes.
Mid-year this began to change, and newer, heavier weapons were turned in to the UN by older men. Five Unita generals went to Luanda to take up positions in the new national army.
The view expressed by some diplomats in Luanda, however, is that the weapons being turned in are new ones purchased by Unita on the international arms market for this purpose, while they retain the arms they need to return to war.
Unita controls a large portion of the diamond-mining area in north-eastern Angola, bordering on Zaire, and smuggles out diamonds worth millions of dollars each month. This gives them a strong economic card in the political bargaining.
Both the UN and the United States have openly blamed Unita for the delays in implementing the current peace process. The US Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, visiting Luanda last month, said, “Unita must fulfil its pledge to send its remaining generals to Luanda, to provide 26,000 volunteers for the combined armed forces and to assure the free movement of goods and people throughout the country.”
The 20 November deadline, the latest in a series of such deadlines set by the UN, comes just nine days after Angola came of age; the country reached its 21st birthday on 11 November.
In the life of a person or a nation, this is normally a time of celebration, but not so in Angola, which has been at war since the Portuguese navy lowered the flag of Portugal and sailed out of Luanda’s harbour on 11 November, 1975, leaving one government in power in Luanda and another at Huambo, on the interior plateau.
Savimbi relied on diplomatic and military support from Republican administrations and supporters in the United States, and from the increasingly beleaguered apartheid government in Pretoria.
In 1987, at Cuita Cuanavale, in what became known as the “Battle for Africa”, the two sides reached a stand-off. That humiliation for the old South Africa — in the sense that it was not the easy victory anticipated in terms of cost and casualties — was a final catalyst for political change, leading to the demise of Pik Botha, the release of Mandela, elections and a new government in 1994. The rest is history.
But in Angola, history remains much the same as the present, except that each year adds to the misery of a population that lives in poverty, with four-digit inflation, despite the oil revenues of a wealthy state that must be directed to security instead of development.
The population also face that other spectre of modern warfare that haunts the pathways and maize fields of rural Angola: anti-personnel land mines. Angola has the most amputees and landmine casualties per capita in the world, between 50,000 and 70,000; and there are estimated to be over one million landmines still buried in Angolan soil.
A peace agreement in 1991 led to UN-supervised elections in 1992, which the army of international observers declared a fair reflection of the will of the Angolan electorate, and which confirmed President Jose Eduardo dos Santos in office.
Despite some elected Unita members taking their seats in the assembly, Unita returned to the bush and the country returned to armed conflict. And yet another peace process started, culminating in the Lusaka Accord two years ago, in November 1994.
The point noted by diplomats in Luanda, that seems to have escaped the world press, is that the four-year electoral mandate expires this month. They also note the trend in many countries at war where voters are persuaded that only the rebel force can choose to bring peace or return to war, a point that has some logic.
The Unita leader has proved once again that he is a master player of the waiting game. Over the past 21 years, he has negotiated and delayed, agreed and stalled, waiting for more favourable conditions or waiting for deadlines to expire. Rearranging his allies according to current political realities and swopping South African military support for the arms-purchasing power of the diamond mines.
He has seen four UN secretary-generals come and go, and has waited out Democratic administrations in the United States in favour of Republican ones, though he failed this month when President Clinton, a Democratic, was re-elected to the White House. (SARDC)
