Peace brings its own problems, agencies

There's two-way traffic around Kuito at the moment. On the road leading south from the central Angolan town, a long column of people, bundles on their heads and hoes over their shoulders, are heading away from the town. They are internally displaced persons (IDPs) who, prompted by the end of the war, have abandoned the IDP camp to return to their villages.

But at the IDP reception centre under the eucalyptus trees just outside Kuito, people are still streaming in.

"We were in the bush and were suffering a lot - when we saw the others coming here we decided to follow," said a woman newly arrived at the centre. "We couldn't come here before because we were under the control of UNITA troops."

The end of the war has increased the number of people within the reach of humanitarian agencies by between two million to three million in a matter of months. It has also created a situation where those people are more widely scattered, and with a greater range of needs, than ever before.

"The only thing we can do is to try to apply the flexibility that is needed to try to react as quickly as we can - and that is not easy," says the UN's Humanitarian Coordinator Erick de Mul. "But we can be fairly satisfied with the number and the type of ears and eyes we have on the ground to bring information to the centre so we can try to formulate some kind of response."

The map of the humanitarian trouble spots in Angola reflects concentrations of people in need, scattered throughout the vast country.

One NGO official said their head office in Europe was urging the Angola team to move into new areas - yet they could not pin down one single area where the scale of the problem appeared large enough to justify a new intervention. TV crews looking for emaciated children have traveled hundreds of kilometres and come away disappointed not to have found the images that signify "famine" in the minds of viewers.

The areas of most serious need are suspected to be those where the humanitarian agencies have yet to carry out assessments. Mussende, in the interior of Kwanza Sul province, was one of those places which became notorious during the last year of the war, on the basis of the stories told by those who left it. Mussende remains inaccessible, due to poor transport infrastructure.

Cases like this are what give credibility to De Mul's description of the humanitarian operation in Angola as "a logistical nightmare".

"At the moment too little is being done on the maintenance and repair of roads and bridges," De Mul says.

De Mul realises that the government is faced with "a huge task" in repairing transport infrastructure devastated by 27 years of civil war. It would be "a considerable period of time before ... we can move around more or less comfortably and at a reasonable speed".

Apart from the repair and maintenance of roads, aid agencies face a hostile environment due to the number of landmines planted during the civil war. A recent incident, in which a lorry carrying World Food Programme rations detonated an old anti-tank mine, was a reminder of the physical dangers of humanitarian operations in Angola.

The incident has resulted in the road from Kuito to Ndele, in central Bié province, being temporarily closed while mine clearance teams conduct an inspection. The road is the only way to get food supplies to UNITA soldiers and their families at the Ndele quartering area.

There has been a succession of appeals for donor aid for Angola - most recently by UN Under Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Kenzo Oshima, who described the situation in Angola as "dire".

Oshima said up to three million people, including those in Family Reception Areas (FRA), newly accessible locations and IDP camps would require some form of assistance in the months ahead.

A 4 July European Union resolution on Angola, noted that 50 percent of people lived on less than US $1 a day and that between one and two million Angolans depended entirely on international aid for survival.

A recent Medecins Sans Frontieres study in Chitete, in Huambo province, found that the mortality rate was four times higher than normal, with malnutrition the leading cause of death. While the full extent of the impact of HIV/AIDS is still being assessed.

Some assistance is now starting to come in, but as De Mul explains, in the meantime the UN and humanitarian partner organisations are making do as best they can with the limited resources at their disposal.

"Basically everybody, all the people that need attention are getting less than they really require because the goods are not there, the items are not there so it is a matter of trying to make do with what we have. You keep splitting it up as much as you can, trying to reach as many people as possible but knowing there is not enough. That is the only way we can do it," said De Mul.

He admits that the sudden evolution of the peace process in Angola, following the death of Jonas Savimbi, took the humanitarian community by surprise.

"There is no way that anybody could plan for it. All of a sudden the country opens up - and you discover that the number of people in need of some assistance is huge," he said.