Demonstrations by condemned cliffside neighbourhood banned

Luanda’s provincial government on Friday banned a planned protest vigil and march by residents and supporters of a precarious, cliffside shanty town, whose demolition has already provoked one deadly confrontation with police, LUSA said on Monday.

The report said the march which was banned for “security reasons”, triggered protests from Boavista neighbourhood activists who said they would seek court action against the ban. “In Angola, increasingly, only sectors and issues linked to the interests of the government and the (ruling party) MPLA can demonstrate”, one protest organizer, Filomeno Vieira Lopes, told LUSA. “Whenever one seeks to use democratic freedoms, we return to one-party dictatorship”, he charged.

The demonstrations had been planned as Friday night vigils at Boavista, overlooking Luanda’s port, and on Saturday. An official was quoted by LUSA as saying that 1,132 families had already been transferred since the Boavista resettlement programme began on 1 July.

Last week aid officials in Luanda told IRIN that should the government approach them to help the Boavista residents they would not respond positively. Some said the plight of the people from Boavista was entirely of the government’s own making, and that it was now the government’s responsibility to solve the problem. Others said that feeding the former Boavista residents was not a priority, when the need was so great elsewhere in the country. Already, more than a million Angolans are dependent on emergency food aid, most of them having been forced away from their homes by the civil war.

An IRIN report on the plight of Boavista residents can be found at:
http://www.reliefweb.int/IRIN/sa/countrystories/angola/20010724.phtml