WFP relieved that camps won't be closed

The World Food Programme (WFP) has welcomed news that the Angolan government will not close the quartering and reception areas where former rebel soldiers and their families have been camped. An announcement in late September that the quartering areas of former UNITA rebels would be closed by 15 October had caused concern among aid agencies. WFP said at the time that the closure of the camps would have resulted in a "large movement of people towards their areas of origin without pre-planning shelter, food and agricultural programmes", which was "a major cause for concern to WFP". More than 400,000 former rebels and their families have been housed in the camps since the 4 April ceasefire which ended decades of civil war in Angola. They have been completely dependent on aid to survive. A communiqué following a meeting on Monday of the Joint Commission - headed by UN Special Envoy Ibrahim Gambari - which is overseeing the finalisation of the outstanding issues of the Lusaka Protocol, said the government would not close the camps by 15 October and would focus on re-integrating the former rebels into society. WFP spokesman in Luanda, Marcelo Spina-Hering, told IRIN that the news was a relief to humanitarian agencies as they had feared their jobs would have been immeasurably complicated by the camp closures. "It means that all those people, the ex-soldiers and their families will have more time to be prepared, and the government itself would have more time to prepare for them to go home in a more organised way. Otherwise they would just move in all different directions without any kind of support," he said. Such a dispersion of people would have complicated humanitarian efforts. Instead of agencies reaching the needy in the 42 quartering and reception areas "it could have turned into hundreds of areas". "That would have made our work just totally insane, it makes much more sense to postpone because the government was supposed to give them the means to resettle. The hard work continues, but at least it's not getting worse," said Spina-Hering. An under-funded WFP was already struggling to stretch its resources to cope with the humanitarian situation in Angola, where 1.8 million people are expected to be in need of assistance by December.