Focus on demobilisation delays

As the elderly Russian transport plane touched down at Mavinga, a remote town in Angola's southeastern Cuando Cubango Province, the soldiers arrived - some wearing the camouflage fatigues of the Angolan Armed Forces (FAA), others the dark green Mao-style tunics of UNITA. Together they worked to unload the plane's cargo, most of it sacks of beans and maize meant for the quartering centres some 40-km away, where former rebel UNITA soldiers and their families have been gathering under a peace accord signed on 4 April. The scene at the airport, with old enemies working side by side, ought to augur well for the next stage of the peace process - the formal integration of 5,000 UNITA troops into the FAA, and the demobilisation of the remaining 80,000 currently in the quartering areas. But a week ago, an Angolan government spokesman announced that the integration process, originally scheduled for completion on 20 July, was being postponed indefinitely. It had come to the government's attention that not all UNITA troops were quartered - something which people in Cuando Cubango had known all along. Speaking in the Matungo quartering centre on 19 July, Colonel Alberto Jango seemed unaware that 20 July was a deadline, and said the demobilisation process was still to begin. "The date of 20 July is stipulated as the date for the process to start and we think that from tomorrow, we will receive new orders to start the process of selection." In the nearby Capembe quartering area, Brigadier Jose Liahuka David admitted that UNITA troops remained at large in the area from which Capembe was meant to have received personnel. "In the peace accord it was agreed that the government would give help with transport to the troops who were far away," he said. "At the moment we have lots of troops who are far away, and because of lack of transport they have not arrived at the quartering area." Pressed to give a number, he replied: "The last figure I have from a colleague who was in Rivungo (on the Zambian border) was 6,000 and something troops." But a senior FAA officer in Mavinga denied that there were any plans to offer transport to the soldiers, and the accord signed by the FAA and UNITA said nothing about the transporting of soldiers to the quartering areas. Cuando Cubango was nicknamed "o fim do mundo" (the end of the world) by Portuguese settlers, and it occupies a similarly marginal position in the minds of Angola's current rulers. It was in this province that former UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi established Jamba as the capital of his de facto state in the 1970s. The FAA captured Mavinga only in 2001, and the surrounding areas continued to be disputed right up until the peace accord of April 2002. Like anywhere in rural Angola, people are suffering from hunger here after spending years being forcibly moved from one place to another. It is only in the last fortnight that World Food Programme rations have been distributed in Mavinga itself. In the queue for food, a woman told how she had left Mavinga when the government took back control of the town. "We were on the run all the time with UNITA, then we were caught by the government," she said. But she also spoke of previously having been "caught by UNITA" at her home in Moxico province, in the east of the country, and brought to Mavinga. Most of the people now living in Mavinga and in the nearby quartering areas originate from elsewhere. After independence, when the government chased UNITA from the central highlands, the rebels withdrew to the southeast, taking many of its members with them. Then after the failed elections of 1992, UNITA regained control of large parts of the country. In the years that followed, they were once again forced back to the southeast as the government took control once again. The population of Mavinga is currently around 7,000, many of them brought in by the FAA from the bush in the last days of the conflict. Those people who remained with UNITA until the end are now in the quartering areas of Matungo and Capembe, a total of about 60,000. In common with many such quartering areas around Angola, Matungo and Capembe have had problems with food supply. In the last two months the therapeutic feeding centre run by MSF in Mavinga has received more than 260 severely malnourished children, most of them originating from the quartering centres. But unlike the other quartering areas, some people have cattle and goats which have been a source of food. Stories told by residents suggest that there were pockets of territory in this region that were beyond the reach of the FAA's operations, and that some people managed to farm before receiving instructions to go to the quartering centres. They brought some of their livestock, but had to abandon their crops. "We lived in Rivungo - there was food there," said one woman who had brought her child for medical attention in Mavinga. "We had to leave it behind and there was nothing to eat in the quartering area." Asked why she had abandoned her home, she replied: "We wanted peace - we received orders from above to go to the quartering area." Once the demobilisation process is eventually completed, the Joint Military Commission which has been overseeing the process will be disbanded, and responsibility for those remaining in the quartering areas will pass to the government's newly-established Commission for the Social and Productive Reintegration of the Demobilised and Displaced. Some diplomats fear that the government will expect donors to shoulder the burden of rehabilitating at least 200,000 people - former soldiers and their relatives - into civilian life. That certainly seems to be the perception in the camps themselves. "I think the international community will have to find some means to help these people learn new professions so they can start earning some money and live at peace," said Elias Chamissa, a schoolteacher who had been with UNITA since the 1970s. The other option is that the civilians left in the quartering areas will not go back to their home towns which they may have left 20 years ago or more, and that the quartering areas will become permanent settlements, whether by default or by design. Such settlements would in effect be the fiefdoms of UNITA commanders. Politically, they could become UNITA's answer to the ruling MPLA's tight hold on the towns and IDP camps. "When the soldiers, have gone it will be up to these people to choose whether they want to remain here or go to where they have come from," Chamissa said. "There will be people of course who just remain here."