Refugees returning, but little aid available

"This is my motherland," said Pedro Mtondo, 27. "When I went to Zambia I went because of the war and now that I see my country is okay I want to come back - so I can do something so they can have a better life here."

Mtondo lives in a field of grass huts on the edge of Cazombo - a tiny administrative centre at the easternmost reaches of Angola. He is one of the thousands of Angolans, once exiled by the civil war, who have taken the first opportunity to come home.

It's a movement that neither the local authorities nor the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) had time to prepare for.

Assistant High Commissioner Kamel Morjane recently headed a UNHCR delegation to Angola, during which he announced a plan to repatriate an estimated 470,000 Angolan refugees, beginning in January 2003. But he also said that between 8,000 and 10,000 former refugees were believed to have returned to Angola since the signing of a ceasefire between the Angolan government and the UNITA rebels on 4 April.

The people arriving in Cazombo - most of them from the Mahewa refugee camp in western Zambia - fall into this category.

Morjane added that a total of 80,000 were expected to return "spontaneously" before the UNHCR's repatriation plan begins. Asked whether there were plans to assist these returnees, Morjane said: "They will go back to their places of origin and certainly it will be difficult to organise [help for them], especially when there is nobody there yet to organise it - neither from the government side, neither the humanitarian agencies and certainly not UNHCR."

When IRIN visited Cazombo, 1,000 had already arrived, and at least a further 2,000 were said to be at the border awaiting transport to the town.

There's singing and dancing in Cazombo's one and only street whenever an army truck pulls in, carrying newly-returned refugees from the border. A single 25 kg sack of maize, provided by the government, is shared out among 60 people or more. They receive temporary shelter in a disused building before moving out to the site where they are to build houses.

Talking to the people who have been there for a while reveals that the joy of being back in Angola is soon tempered by the realities of life in Cazombo.

One elderly woman told how she had received a two kg food ration when she arrived in Angola in March, and nothing since then. She gathers firewood which she sells to local residents, scraping together perhaps 10 kwanzas (US 25 cents) a day to buy food. But in the town's one market, sweet potatoes are the only supplies in evidence.

Pinto Kakoma is one of the more fortunate of the refugees in that he was educated by missionaries in Zambia. He is fluent in English, and communicates in the local languages which are spoken on both sides of the border. But he has yet to learn Portuguese which is essential for getting a job in Angola.

"I am very worried about the situation here," Kakoma said. "We would appreciate it if the NGOs could help us develop this place, and help us with food until we are able to go to the fields and start cultivating ourselves."

But most people returning from Zambia to Cazombo lack not only seeds and tools, but land as well. Few of them are originally from the area, but for the moment, they have no alternative but to stay in Cazombo. Though the road from Zambia is clear, broken bridges still cut off the town from the rest of Angola. The remoteness of the area means that the situation of the new arrivals has received little attention either from NGOs or from central government.

One man explained how he had arrived with his pregnant wife and young child, only to find there was no food. They wandered far from the town to try and forage in the bush. While trying to cross a river, his wife and child drowned.

Officials are talking about a "spontaneous" return. But it was prompted not only by a longing to be on home soil, but also by recent cutbacks in rations to refugees in the camps in Zambia.

"We left Mahewa to come here because there was no food there," one woman told IRIN. "When we first went there, we got enough food. But later we suffered as the food we received was not enough. We thought let's go back to our country which could be better."