Global Policy Forum

By Claire Pickard-Cambridge

The United Nations (UN) made fatal errors in Angola and its involvement in the country has been a "disaster", according to a hard-hitting report by the international monitoring body, Human Rights Watch.

The report, titled Angola Unravels: The Rise and Fall of the Lusaka Peace Process, is the result of a five-year study following the Lusaka Accords in November 1994. The report has harsh words for the Angolan government and the rebel group Unita, which it says committed widespread and systematic human rights violations.

The publication of the report today coincides with a growing humanitarian crisis and the planned appointment of a new 30-man UN mission in Angola. Peter Takirambudde, the executive director for Africa at Human Rights Watch, says that during the Lusaka peace process the UN spent $1,5bn, "most of it down the drain". The problem was the UN turned a blind eye to breaches of the peace accords, which eroded confidence in the peace process and created a vicious cycle of steadily worsening rights abuses.

"Unless the UN learns from this fatal mistake, its new mission in Angola will also be at risk and so will similar missions in countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sierra Leone," he says.

The report concludes that the UN should have deployed peacekeepers promptly and they should have been proactive - reporting ceasefire and embargo violations, and gross human rights abuses. The UN should have placed an initial arms embargo on both sides and an embargo on Unita's use of diamonds once it became evident that the rebels were using this resource to rearm.

The report calls for tighter international sanctions against Unita and says government should crack down on diamond and fuel smuggling by Unita. Unita's export of diamonds in the past five years has netted it $1.72bn, most of which was spent on weaponry. The report says government leaders must be held accountable for actions that may constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity. Unita has also committed systematic abuses during the Lusaka peace process.

The report calls on the government to permit the urgent creation of humanitarian aid corridors; to provide the UN's sanctions committee with a list of registered aircraft in Angola and a list of authorised signatures and stamps for certificates of origin for diamonds legally exported from Angola.It calls on the UN to demand that member states submit all information on past weapons exports to Angola to the UN Register on Conventional Weapons. It also calls on the Southern African Development Community and the Organisation of African Unity to assist UN bids to prevent Unita sanction-busting.