Unita attacks launch new Angolan war

AT 3AM ON 18 December, guerrillas of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (Unita) attacked the village of Nunda in Huambo Province, central Angola. They ran through the village, looting and shooting. Woken from their sleep the villagers scrambled to escape into the dense undergrowth. Three men, one woman and a boy were killed. The woman was Joao Samba's wife, Maria.

"When we heard the shooting we just had time to grab the children and run for it," Joao, 34, a carpenter, said. "I took the two elder ones and my wife tied the baby on her back. The bullet hit her in the back of the head and came out of her forehead. She fell on her face, dead, but the baby was unhurt."

Joao relates this story standing barefoot in a bombed-out factory on the outskirts of government-controlled Huambo city. The factory is home to more than 7,000 newly displaced people who, like Joao, have been forced, empty- handed, from their homes by the resumption of Angola's 30-year civil war. Huambo holds 120,000 newly arrived refugees. In the whole of Angola, more than 780,000 have been registered in the last year. They join the 1.3 million who remain displaced after the last bout of fighting, from 1992 to 1994.

Angola's slide back towards war began in April 1998, as the country was destabilised by a spate of vicious attacks on civilian targets - villages and road traffic. Many survivors identified their assailants as Unita. But some government police and soldiers mounted copy-cat attacks, blaming the raids on Unita. With hindsight it appears this destabilisation was conceived by Unita's machiavellian leader, Jonas Savimbi, as a means of provoking the government into a fully fledged offensive.

The war officially began in the first week of December, when President Jose Eduardo Dos Santos finally responded to this provocation by sending his newly acquired MiG fighter planes to bombard Unita's strongholds in Bailundo and Andulo, 40 miles to the north of Huambo. The bombardment was carefully timed to coincide with the National Congress of the ruling MPLA party, of which Mr Dos Santos is also president. Grossly underestimating Unita's military strength, he confidently expected to annihilate the rebels while reinforcing his position within the party and his 20-year-long presidency. "The government anticipated a quick, tidy clean-up when they went into Andulo and Bailundo," said a senior diplomat in the capital, Luanda. "In fact, they got a serious, bloody spanking."

Once again Mr Savimbi had fooled the world. Both the Angolan government and the United Nations Mission charged with overseeing the implementation of the 1994 peace accords knew that Unita had not complied fully with its commitments to disarm and demobilise its forces. But no one had gauged the true extent to which Mr Savimbi had used the lull provided by the four-year peace process to retrain and re-equip his forces.

When the government's new Ukrainian tanks rolled towards Bailundo and Andulo in December, they came face to face with identical tanks in the hands of Unita.

One UN official based in Luanda said: "Government figures tell of running into their Unita counterparts while on shopping trips to Eastern European arms fairs. At this rate the war could go on for ever."

Within a few weeks of the resumption of fighting proper, Unita had taken control of almost the whole of Angola's countryside, driving the government, and most of the population, back into a handful of cities. The achievements of four years of relative peace have been reversed in a few months. The country is once again partitioned, only this time nobody, not even the UN or aid agencies, has access to the Unita side of the lines.

Troops demobilised by the UN are being forcibly conscripted back into each army. Roads cleared of mines have been planted with new mines.

Angola's first war was to win independence from Portugal. The second, from 1975 to 1991, was an offshoot of the Cold War. The third was because Mr Savimbi refused to accept defeat in the country's first and only democratic presidential elections. But what is this one for?

"We don't know why they are fighting again," Joao Samba says. "We are just ordinary people, trying to stay alive."

The displaced in Huambo are being kept alive only by emergency food aid provided by the World Food Programme. Sixty per cent of the children admitted to Huambo's central hospital have severe malnutrition.

A UN official offers his own bleak explanation of this latest war: "There is no doubt about it," he says. "This time round the war is simply a battle to see which of the two leaders can steal the most, the fastest, and get away with it."