August 24, 1999
An Overview
Three senior United Nations officials urged the UN Security Council this week to step international support for humanitarian operations in Angola and bring fresh initiatives to help end nearly three decades of civil war which has left hundreds of thousands trapped behind the battle lines in a situation growing more desperate by the day.
Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN's Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, told the council on Monday that 2 million people are living a precarious existence, in need of or dependent on aid. "We estimate that another three million people are entirely inaccessible and their condition is therefore impossible to assess," he said. Approximately 1.7 million people are currently internally displaced, having been forced to flee their homes. Currently, he said, 70 percent of the country's population is living in government-held provincial capitals held under siege by the UNITA rebel movement led by Jonas Savimbi. "Intermittent shelling of the provincial capitals has caused the deaths of many hundreds of civilians and regularly prevents the delivery of humanitarian assistance. Vulnerability affects not just the internally displaced," he said. "Now resident host populations are also in need of assistance, as their capacity to cope is weakened through the loss of their means of livelihood, soaring inflation and lack of access to arable land."
In impassioned speeches, Vieira de Mello, World Food Programme (WFP) Executive Director Catherine Bertini and United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) Executive Director Carol Bellamy, each cited growing malnutrition, a high risk of epidemic diseases due to overcrowding in the besieged provincial capitals, a lack of sanitation due to the lack of safe drinking water and the generally weakened state of the population.
In May a polio epidemic in the vicinity of Benguela and Luanda on the west coast resulted in 113 deaths. A meningitis outbreak was confirmed recently in Cuando Cubango in southeast Angola. Figures submitted to the Security Council showed that of the 2 million people known to be in need in Angola, only 600,000 currently receive humanitarian assistance - mainly because of insecurity and a lack of access and because of shortfalls in donor funding. Vieira de Mello said that over 2.25 billion barrels of oil were found in Angola last year alone, nearly double that of Nigeria. Angola was also reported to have produced last year around US $700 million in diamonds, about 10 percent of annual global production. "This mineral wealth and its investment in the pursuit of war is no doubt a factor in discouraging donors to contribute to UN appeals," he said. "There is however, a shocking discrepancy between Angola's potential wealth and the state of the vast majority of its inhabitants. In the 1999 Human Development Report Angola fell four places from 1998 to number 160 out of 174 nations surveyed in the UN human development index. Potentially one of the richest countries in the southern hemisphere, it is now among the 15 poorest countries on earth."
The council was told that, according to government figures, some 200 people are now dying daily in Angola as a result of malnutrition-related ailments, and that the war now limited humanitarian access to only 30 percent of Angolan territory. In the past four months, six national humanitarian workers have been killed in part of a broader pattern of war that has seen the indiscriminate killing of civilians become commonplace, through shelling, vehicle ambushes, infantry attacks and landmines.
A new, low level of despair
WFP Executive Director Catherine Bertini said Angola had now reached a level of despair which existed virtually nowhere else in the world. Besides the hundreds of thousands who had lost their lives in decades of war, another 100,000 had been scarred or mutilated by landmines and other weapons of war. "Many find their way to the teeming slums of Luanda, a capital city overburdened with more than 4 million residents and severe unemployment," she said. "Host communities have been overwhelmed and dependence on outside aid is almost total in some areas, as the remnants of social services are failing. Dramatic rises in urban violence and abandoned street children are symptoms of the growing social disintegration. Seven out of 10 Angolans living in cities fall below the poverty line."
The cost of the humanitarian operation
WFP, as lead agency in Angola, was "struggling" to keep up with humanitarian needs, Bertini said. Because road insecurity had forced it to use costly air transport, WFP was operating three Boeing 727 aircraft carrying an estimated 200 mt of emergency relief in an average of up to 10 flights a day. It was also carrying 3,000 emergency relief staff to 30 destinations around the country every month. Bertini said: "Despite our best efforts and those of our colleagues at UNICEF, other UN partners, and the NGOs, the situation in Angola is rapidly deteriorating and the impact is spreading beyond Angola's borders. We are now working with UNHCR to feed more than 100,000 refugees who have fled to the Democratic Republic of Congo."
The UN's Consolidated Appeal for Angola was recently revised upwards to take account of the greater number requiring assistance, as well as the cost of these air deliveries. The revised figure of US $105.9 million dollars, to cover the priority needs for about 800,000 people, Vieira de Mello noted, "is roughly twice the number of people targeted for assistance in Kosovo. To date, the response to the Angola request for funding is 54 percent".
The plight of children
In her speech, UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy, said the Angolan crisis had left the agency in the "sad position" of having to "revisit chapters of our history that we had hoped had been closed for good". In 1997, before the resurgence of the war last December following the breakdown of the UN-brokered Lusaka protocol peace accords, Angola's under-five mortality rate was 292 per 1,000 live births, while 42 percent of children were moderately or severely underweight for their age. Only 50 percent of children were enrolled in classes, with a high dropout rate after the first grade, especially for girls. At the time these figures were compiled, she said, social spending was on the decline, while the public health system and education had broken down, causing further dependence on external assistance.
Since December last year, the situation had deteriorated rapidly, Bellamy said: "UNICEF's Child Risk measure ranks Angola today as the country whose children are at greatest risk of death, malnutrition, abuse and development failure. "Our analysis points to the conflict as the single greatest determinant of this sad reality," she said, adding that UNICEF's seven field offices in Angola continued to monitor their plight closely. By the end of this month, the agency will have helped immunise 2.7 million children against polio. But she added, in the global goal to wipe out the disease, if one community in Angola failed in the immunisation drive, "we will all fail in this global eradication effort".
Future needs
Bertini of the WFP cited three minimal areas where the UN Security Council could help:
* Access so that WFP, UNICEF and their NGO partners can reach those in need.
* Security for air bridges and other transport so that staff are no longer subject to attack.
* Political commitment by the Angolan government, UNITA, and the international community to negotiate a settlement and provide more resources for emergency aid and recovery.
"It is hard to ask even the most dedicated WFP staff to serve in Angola - even in Luanda they can barely cross the street without an armed escort. Our lorries are exploded by mines, our warehouses ransacked," Bertini said. "Since 1996 we have lost six staff members to violence in Angola. Nevertheless, WFP has stayed and we have persisted, even when the government asked UN agencies to leave the country."
A new deadline for Angola
Vieira de Mello said humanitarian agencies would continue to maintain dialogue with both the government and the rebels. As in other conflicts such dialogue does not confer any legitimacy or international recognition on those with whom it is maintained. Numerous Security Council resolutions, he added, were still without impact for the victims of the conflict in Angola. He sought a "strong reaffirmation of your support" for this approach, possibly even a deadline for measurable progress to be made. With little respect for the safety of civilian populations or humanitarian staff, there is the risk that should security conditions continue to deteriorate and civilians continue to be targeted, humanitarian agencies may be forced to suspend their programmes, he warned. International humanitarian aid should not be taken for granted while war continues unabated.
An impasse
n Angola as in other conflicts, Vieira de Mello said an end to human suffering will not be brought about through humanitarian aid but by political or military measures. A more forceful attempt had to be made to stop hostilities. Since 1992, there had been over 40 resolutions from the Security Council covering the Angolan crisis: "In the same period there have been countless dead, tens of thousands injured, maimed, deprived of basic dignity and well over 2 million internally displaced persons and refugees generated by the conflict. We are, Mr. President, at an impasse." "Aren't there other measures that the Council can adopt in order to bring this war to a halt and to ensure full compliance with its previous decisions?" he asked.
