IRIN Focus on Moxico conflict

Angola's easternmost province, Moxico, is intensely green at this time of year. Nevertheless, people there are close to starvation. In the Muachimbo displaced people's camp outside the provincial capital, Luena, a woman was trying to breast-feed her baby, though her own skeleton was distinctly visible through her skin. They had walked for several days to get there. "We came here with the government," said her husband. "There was too much suffering in the bush." The couple and their baby are in the resettlement section at Muachimbo, where hundreds of other new arrivals have only plastic shelters to keep off the thunderstorms that pound the region several times a week. The camp appears well-organised, and relief organisations are overseeing the construction of more solid shelters. They are urgently needed. At the moment, an average of 100 displaced people are arriving in Luena each day - some voluntarily, but others allegedly the victims of forced removals by the army. Moxico was the birthplace of UNITA, and since the victories by the Angolan Armed Forces (FAA) on the central plateau in 1999, the government has come to regard the eastern province as the most important remaining UNITA stronghold. Since July, the FAA have been sending more soldiers to the area, saying the intention is to destroy the last rebel bases in the province, and to capture UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi. Aid workers say the resultant increase in military activity is the main reason why thousands of people are leaving their homes each month. While people some come to the camps on foot, others arrive in military helicopters and trucks from more distant reaches of a province which extends 500 km to the Zambian border. Some of these areas are under the effective control of UNITA, whose soldiers rely on the villagers for sustenance - either in the form of willing donations of food, or wholesale looting of crops and supplies. "Conditions were terrible - we had no food," said another man who had been flown by helicopter and was now in the resettlement area at Muachimbo. "We decided to put ourselves in the hands of the government." But other testimonies indicate that not everyone was so willing to hand themselves over to the authorities. In the Katepue camp near Luena, women who had been separated from their families have a different story to tell. "The government forces captured me in the fields and brought me here. I came in a helicopter - I didn't want to leave my home," she said. Her family remained behind: "At first they must have thought I was dead, but when they didn't find my body they must have realised I'd been captured," she said. Stories like this indicate that the airlift is taking place for more than simply humanitarian purposes. Since UNITA relies on peasant farmers for its livelihood, the evacuation of the rural population is helping to starve out the rebels. Non-governmental organisation staff are almost unanimous that a scorched earth strategy is being implemented, though no one will talk openly about such a politically sensitive matter. The people who arrive in Luena walk or are driven in army trucks along the town's wide, tree-lined streets to the local office of the social services ministry. The windows there have been bricked up or replaced with corrugated zinc. In a town where all manufactured items have to come in by air, glass is a luxury, and the department is over-stretched where humanitarian needs are concerned as well. As in other parts of Angola, it is NGOs which end up providing for the basic needs of the displaced people who are sent on to the various camps. A man in the Muachimbo camp, who had lived for eight years in UNITA-held territory before leaving a few weeks ago, suggested that the rebels are on the defensive. "UNITA are in a weakened state, they don't have arms," he said. The extent of the FAA's success is, however, questionable. For much of this year, the Angolan government has been saying that it is on the brink of a military victory over UNITA, playing down the need for a negotiated settlement. Hence the fighting talk coming from the east of the country has a definite political purpose, analysts allege. The government believes that Moxico includes rear bases crucial to UNITA's functioning. Yet the last six months have seen UNITA carry out a number of guerrilla-style attacks on towns and villages in the northwest of Angola, more than 1,000 km from Luena, and the importance of the eastern bases to these operations is not clear. Meanwhile, incursions by FAA soldiers across the Zambian border in the past month have further harmed an already delicate relationship between Angola and Zambia. And the FAA's most coveted prize, the capture Jonas Savimbi, seems at the moment no more likely than it did a year ago.