A story of UNITA terror

Camped last week at the police headquarters in Luena, the provincial capital of Angola’s eastern Moxico region, a small group of displaced people were waiting to be assisted by the local government. They had braved a two-week journey through the bush to escape UNITA rebels who had appeared in their villages around Muconda, some 300 km northeast in Lunda Sul, and had allegedly set about killing, raping, burning homes and forcibly conscripting young men. “They didn’t explain anything, they just killed,” Chief Silver Jatao Kapamba told IRIN through an interpreter. “A lot of people died, maybe 50 or 60.” The group of 75 displaced at the police headquarters was almost exclusively women and young children. One child died on the journey to Luena as they lived off the land and dodged UNITA patrols. According to Kapamba their ordeal began when a 150-strong UNITA unit arrived in Muconda from Luau, a town on the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo and now under government control. He said that he heard some of the rebels speaking KiSwahili and Lingala, and guessed that among them were Rwandans and Congolese. The commanders, however, were Angolans. After announcing their presence by killing and raping, they began taking people off for interrogation and selectively shooting those in the villages identified as government sympathisers. There was no attempt at politicisation. “We just saw them moving up and down, killing people at night or on operations,” Kapamba said. After two days of terror, he escaped and met up with others in the bush fleeing south. His group now joins the more than 92,000 displaced in Moxico - most of them crammed into Luena - their plight symptomatic of the suffering endured by civilians in Angola’s unending civil war.