ANGOLA: Humanitarian crisis "dramatic in the extreme"

As the UN Security Council moved this week to tighten sanctions against the UNITA rebel movement in Angola, officials told IRIN on Thursday that the humanitarian crisis in the war-torn nation had become "dramatic in the extreme". "Since the resumption of hostilities late last year, we now have over 800,000 newly displaced people in Angola in absolutely desperate need of assistance," Fernando Costa Freire, spokesman for the UN Humanitarian Coordination Unit (UCAH) in Angola, told IRIN. "In fact, we believe that figure to be closer to one million. It is a figure way higher than the numbers fleeing Kosovo. We have to feed, clothe and house these people and aid can only be sent to them by air and supplies are diminishing," he said. "Angola desperately needs more support from donors now." Most strategic roads in Angola have been cut off by UNITA for months, and ambushes on the few remaining humanitarian routes have increased in the past three weeks. This has forced the WFP to ask donors to provide US $8.8 million in extra funding to maintain the airlifts for hundreds of thousands of displaced people in the country's besieged provincial capitals. Diplomats in the Angolan capital, Luanda, told IRIN they did not see any medium-term end to the fighting in Angola. "Things are moving only in one direction - towards more war. The government would be committing political suicide if it was seen to agree to talks with UNITA at a time it has sought the rebels isolation and vowed to fight them to the end," a diplomat said. "In the meantime, its draft campaign for new soldiers had only a 20 percent success rate and with poor pay and conditions in the army, morale is at an all-time low. It means that they cannot win the war decisively and they have no way out of this situation." In New York on Wednesday, the Security Council decided to send the chairman of its Angola sanctions committee, Robert Fowler, to Southern African this weekend to see what can be done to tighten sanctions against UNITA. Over a three-week period, he will visit South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Botswana, Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola. Officials said he would then set up two investigation teams to probe UNITA's illegal diamond trade and its weapons purchases. Fowler would also have talks with representatives of the giant South African diamond company, De Beers.