SOUTHERN AFRICA: IRIN-SA Weekly Round-up 23 covering the period 5-11 June 1999

ANGOLA: New UN sanctions initiative unveiled The United Nations this week unveiled a new initiative aimed at tightening sanctions against the UNITA rebel movement involving a system of certificates of origin for all diamonds produced in Southern Africa to curtail UNITA’s main source of income. The measures were announced in New York by Robert Fowler, chairman of the UN sanctions committee for Angola, in a report to the Security Council. Fowler reported that illicit diamond trading by UNITA had netted the movement an estimated US $200 million in 1998 alone out of a total income since 1992 estimated at US $3-4 billion. The new sanctions plan also recommends tighter monitoring of the diamond trade, a system of UN customs monitors in the region, and new legislation in Southern African nations to outlaw trade with UNITA. In Washington, a State Department spokesman told IRIN the United States was “fully supportive” of the Fowler plan. Annan says humanitarian effort threatened UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, meanwhile, warned that the humanitarian relief effort in Angola could break down unless donors released funds immediately to provide relief for over one million people displaced by fighting. “The extremely precarious security situation now requires the distribution of most humanitarian aid by air, an effort threatened by lack of funding,” he said in a statement in New York on Monday. “If funds are not immediately made available for air transportation, the entire humanitarian effort will stop and hundreds of thousands of Angolans will face severe malnutrition, disease and death.” Fernando Costa Freire, spokesman for the UN Humanitarian Coordination Unit(UCAH) in Luanda, told IRIN that a combination of intensified fighting in Angola and a lack of funding was “seriously threatening” humanitarian relief. Out of a population of 11 million, over 1.6 million people were displaced after fleeing their homes. This figure included an estimated 800,000 who had fled since the resumption of the war last December. Concern for the city of Malanje In one example, Freire cited growing concern for the besieged government-held city of Malanje where shelling by UNITA rebels had made it impossible to conduct a humanitarian assessment mission and had also brought emergency food deliveries to a stop. Malanje, some 450 km east of Luanda, has been the scene of sporadic shelling for nearly four months during which the city has been crammed with tens of thousands of internally displaced people. Many faced starvation because remaining emergency supplies were being rationed among the weakest and most needy. New accord with Zambia Zambia and Angola signed an agreement this week “to forget all past disputes” and put behind them a growing deterioration in relations over Angolan charges of Zambian assistance to UNITA. A senior Zambian government official told IRIN the agreement was signed in Mbabane, Swaziland, on Tuesday night. “This is a major breakthrough and we hope it will now bring an end to months of accusations and acrimony,” the official said. ZIMBABWE: Maize shortage forecast Zimbabwe will have to import at least 458,000 mt of maize to meet the country’s basic consumption requirements until the next harvest in April 2000, according to figures published in the June report of USAID’s Food Early Warning System (FEWS). It said the country currently had a total grain deficit of about 1 million mt, excluding wheat. “The total grain harvest of 1.7 million mt and carryover stocks estimated at about 50,000 mt, is not adequate to meet domestic human consumption requirements of 1.8 million mt, 460,000 mt for livestock feed and reconstitute the Strategic Grain Reserve (SGR) of 500,000 mt,” the FEWS report said. It said the government would probably “easily” be able to meet the shortfall. But John Clemmow, an analyst at Investec Securities, told IRIN he did not know where the government would find the funds this time to import maize. Denmark suspends airport loan talks The Danish government this week suspended talks on a loan to upgrade domestic airports in Zimbabwe because of the country’s continued military intervention in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). “For as long as Zimbabwe is in the DRC, we will not take a decision on the promised aid meant to upgrade and renovate all domestic airports in the country,” said the Danish ambassador, Erik Fill. The proposed US $25 million loan had been earmarked for improvements at the airports in Victoria Falls, Hwanga, Kariba and Masvingo. Declining health care Community and civic groups in Zimbabwe, led by the country’s labour movement, at the weekend criticised the government’s declining spending on health care. The Working Group on Community Health, said health funding had decreased from 3.1 percent in 1990 to 2.2 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 1996. “Health funding has been undermined by debt, corruption and misplaced priorities in government spending,” said Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU). According to UNDP, infant, child and maternal mortality rates had worsened due to the combined effects of growing poverty, a decline in the quality of health care and the HIV/AIDS epidemic. MOZAMBIQUE: Donors concerned at government reporting The Norwegian Aid Programme (NORAD) said this week it was dissatisfied with the Mozambican government’s reporting procedures on foreign aid. A NORAD spokeswoman told IRIN its was concerned at funds provided for budget support. Last week, following a meeting in Maputo between donors and the government, NORAD’s general director Tove Strand said that NORAD was not “satisfied” with the governments internal audits. Strand added that she was “optimistic” that the government would address the situation. Mozambique is the largest recipient of Norwegian aid in Africa. In 1998 this amounted to an estimated US $50 million. Last year, 77 percent of Mozambique’s capital expenditure came from international aid. Toxic waste dispute Environmental and community activists have successfully halted a project to burn obsolete pesticides at a cement factory in Matola, 15 km from the Mozambican capital of Maputo. News reports this week said the colonial-era factory in Matola, had a poor pollution and worker safety record. Environmentalists opposing the project said that toxic waste incineration was contested in developed countries because, even under proper safety conditions, cancer-causing compounds are released into the air, the underground water table and into the food chain. MALAWI: The second democratic election As Malawians prepared to go to the polls on Tuesday, 15 June in the country’s second democratic election, police said this week they were investigating claims that an independent candidate had been threatened at gunpoint. The candidate, Patricia Chipungu, told news agencies that a candidate from President Bakili Muluzi’s ruling United Democratic Front (UDF) had warned her to withdraw from the parliamentary race. The Organisation of African Unity (OAU) and other international bodies have sent observers to monitor the elections. Other news reports this week cited fears of violence over a threat by traditional leaders and opposition supports to disrupt polling in northern districts unless the Electoral Commission rescinded a decision not to reopen registration centres in the area. SOUTHERN AFRICA: High regional unemployment The lack of education, a low skills base, declining gross domestic product (GDP) and ongoing regional conflicts have left only about one in five people in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region employed, according to a recent international report. The report, ‘Labour Markets in Southern Africa’, by the Oslo-based Fafo Institute for Applied Social Science, said: “This gives an unemployment rate of nearly 80 percent in the SADC countries.” According to researcher Liv Torres only 20 percent of the region’s economically active population are employed, with only 40 percent of these in formal employment. Policing a DRC peace plan Any future peace deal in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) would require the deployment of thousands of peacekeepers to monitor the ceasefire and withdrawal of foreign forces - a daunting undertaking given the size of the country and complexity of the conflict. Security analysts told IRIN this week it is a commitment which at the moment has had few takers. “I just become overwhelmed with the problem of trying to think through a plan,” Mark Malign of the Pretoria-based Institute of Security Studies told IRIN on Thursday. “There are so many actors and so many interests at stake, it might not even be peacekeepable.” South Africa, as the regional superpower, has often been cited as the natural lead nation in any multinational or UN peacekeeping mission for the DRC. However, South African officials said it was a “mammoth task” which would have to be studied “very, very carefully”. In another special report on 10 June, regional security analysts said this week that an “international arms bazaar” of former east Bloc military equipment was helping fuel the conflicts in Angola, DRC and elsewhere in the region. One of the countries high on the list is Bulgaria.