IRIN Focus on border trade

Shangombo is about as far west as you can get and still remain inside Zambia. It lies at the end of a long, rutted and dusty gravel road, and is a bit of a disappointment when you finally get there. A clutch of government buildings, a few new houses for officials under construction, and a couple of stores comprise this sleepy border town. Shangombo looks out onto marshland, the Cuando river in the far distance, and Angola. Three decades of civil war across the border has doomed Shangombo to obscurity. Never a bustling entrepot, the only significant cross-border activity has been the flow of refugees escaping intensified fighting last year, when an Angolan government offensive succeeded in routing UNITA rebels along the 1,000 km frontier. But the situation has changed in the last few months and UNITA - reverting to guerrilla tactics - is back in control. Outside Shangombo rebels are said to be camped in the marshes, in what is technically Zambian territory, and the refugee flow has slowed to a trickle of people displaced and lost in the earlier fighting, who have only now managed to navigate their way into Zambia. “The [military] situation is not as good as we would want, in fact it’s bad,” acknowledged Manuel Armando Chibia, deputy consul in the Angolan consulate in Zambia’s western provincial capital of Mongu. “Moxico’s population is very small and the province is very vast. It makes it very difficult to control the border areas.” Historically, Angola’s remote eastern provinces of Moxico and Cuando Cubango have been rebel strongholds. UNITA soldiers share kinship ties with communities across the border in Zambia, and up until Angolan independence in 1975, Lusaka backed Jonas Savimbi’s rebel movement. The unsubstantiated stories in Mongu - 280 km away - are of senior UNITA officers seen shopping for supplies, and the alleged endurance of the unofficial links between UNITA and senior Zambian officials has been repeatedly protested by Luanda. Shangombo is one of the places along the long border where UNITA-mined diamonds are brought into Zambia and traded. It is difficult to get an accurate assessment of the scale of a business which, as a subject of international sanctions and Angola’s extreme annoyance, is necessarily clandestine. But official sources who asked to remain anonymous told IRIN that the trade this year has been modest, with only small, low quality stones available and in most cases no buyers were found. What passes for legitimate trade in Shangombo is mostly barter. Officially, around 20 or 30 Angolan peasants a week cross into the town to grind their corn or sell maize, sometimes swapped for second-hand clothes. Previously, rebels would also come in for medical treatment or to buy drugs. But what is clear from the two-hour bone-rattling journey in a 4x4 from the Zambian settlement of Nangweshi on the western bank of the Zambezi river to Shangombo, is that people do slip across the porous border. And judging by the way they dart into the bush when approached, would prefer to remain undetected. “There are too many spontaneous refugees in the area, and we are afraid because we don’t know what they are carrying - they could be carrying weapons,” Shangombo’s District Administrator Dominic Simuchinga told IRIN. “They are very free, they move from the refugee camps, do some odd jobs, but really we don’t know what they are doing.” He admitted that the local authorities, despite the bolstered presence of the Zambian army along the border, were “intimidated” by UNITA, who in the past have abducted Zambian villagers. “If we say nobody can cross there could be trouble for us,” Simuchinga said flatly. Another government official noted that Zambia was “trying to maintain our neutrality” by avoiding contact with the rebels all together. “We know they [UNITA] come in,” Chibia said. He added that a joint security commission established between the two countries to ease tensions was “working well” and due to meet again in the next few months. “We have no problems with our government counterparts”, but what could not be properly regulated was an “established racket” between some Zambian business people and UNITA which was succeeding in helping supply the rebels, the consul added.