United Nations -- The president of Angola has turned down a U.N. political or military presence, as the Security Council had requested, but wants U.N. relief workers to stay, diplomats said Sunday. President Eduardo dos Santos, in a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, also agreed to human rights monitors and said a special U.N. representative could visit the civil war-wracked country from time to time. But he ignored requests for the special representative to be based in Angola and a small political-military mission to remain in the country when the bulk of the peacekeepers leave, tantamount to a rejection, the envoys said.
The U.N. Security Council, in a January 21 resolution, called for a "continued multidisciplinary presence" of the United Nations in Angola and appealed to the Luanda government to allow a small mission to continue. This would have included some military observers as well as a special representative and his staff. But dos Santos, in a letter transmitted to Annan Friday, did not change earlier positions that called for an end to the U.N. Observer Mission in Angola, known as MONUA.
Annan has already proposed that the 1,000-member peacekeeping mission, which once numbered 7,000 troops and other personnel, end this month. He said the bulk of the operation, including his special representative Issa Diallo, should be out of the country by March 20. But the council hoped a reduced MONUA could continue, even if under another name.
In the interim, officials from the so-called "troika" nations -- the United States, Russia and Portugal, the former colonial power -- have been visiting Angola in hopes of getting the government and the rebel UNITA, an acronym for the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, to stop fighting. The three nations, under a U.N. umbrella, in 1994 negotiated a peace agreement, called the Lusaka Protocol, which temporarily ended decades of civil war. But fighting broke out late last year and continues, with the government maintaining the United Nations had not done its job. The breakdown of the accord is blamed mainly on UNITA, headed by Jonas Savimbi, which refused to hand over land under its control to a national unity government and did not disarm its fighters as called for in the peace accords.
Whitney Schneidman, the U.S. assistant undersecretary of state for African affairs, visited over the weekend and Portugal's Foreign Minister Jaime Gama is expected to make a trip to Luanda shortly, according to his U.N. representative Antonio Monteiro. Schneidman, at the end of his three-day mission Saturday, pledged closer ties between the United States and Angola and said he expected negotiations in the next few months between the Luanda government and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). But he said the government first needed an economic reform program that would include tackling corruption.
Economists say pressure is mounting on the government as it runs short of funds amid a slump in global oil prices and the slide back into civil war. External debt is forecast to rise to $12.7 billion this year. Angola is one of Africa's largest oil producers with large investments from U.S. oil companies.
