The bombing raids continued for a month, as rebels of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola attempted to seize Kuito from the east and push to the sea, cutting the country in half. Last week, a NEWSWEEK reporter dropped into Kuito in a small plane, which descended from 25,000-feet in a tight spiral over the runway to avoid the rebel guns. The once elegant square was in ruins, and the town had swelled with 100,000 nervous refugees. After fleeing the UNITA advance, they now wandered the streets, nursed their wounds or camped in bombed-out buildings. Waiting for the next barrage, says Benguela, ““you just resign yourself to death.''
Kuito is the new front line in a civil war that dates to Angola’s independence from Portugal in 1975. Five years ago a peace accord silenced most of the fighting between the rebels and the ruling National Movement for the Liberation of Angola. But last fall, UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi reneged on a promise to abandon his last occupied territories. Soon fighting raged anew. Hundreds and perhaps thousands of civilians have been killed and as many as 3 million (a quarter of the population) have been displaced. Now all that stands between many refugees and starvation is the United Nations’ World Food Program, which is preparing to feed more than 1 million Angolans as the war spreads. Late last week Savimbi’s men were marching out of the central highlands and advancing toward the town of Soyo in the oil-rich north, bombing and press-ganging civilians along the way. Says Abel E. Chivukuvuku, a UNITA dissident who serves as a member of parliament, both sides are embracing ““the strategy of maximum annihilation.''
This is a familiar fighting style for Angola, scene of perhaps the most ferocious proxy battle of the cold war. From the outset, the United States and apartheid-era South Africa supported Savimbi, while Cuba and the Soviet Union backed the MPLA. Even after the end of the cold war, Savimbi agreed to talk peace only after suffering near defeat on the battlefield in 1994. Under the deal known as the Lusaka Protocol, UNITA was to hand over the last towns under its control to the government starting last summer.
Instead Savimbi went on the offensive with forces rejuvenated by five years of relative peace. They took back areas they had previously ceded, and diplomatic observers believe they are responsible for shooting down two United Nations planes in recent months–just to show they could do it. On Dec. 5, the government forces counterattacked against Savimbi’s outpost at Bailundo (map). Though the assault failed, it marked a return to full-scale war. This week the United Nations is expected to decide to withdraw all but a handful of its 1,000 troops, who were in Angola to monitor a peace that no longer exists.
In the capital city of Luanda, the government is mobilizing. It has imposed draft registration on all males 18 to 26, and thousands of young men stand in line to sign up, reluctantly. Most say they are complying only out of fear; without registration receipts, they could face expulsion from school, jobs or worse. Antonio Prado, 20, remembers when his older brother was drafted in 1993, during the last major outbreak in fighting. ““They came to our house one night and took him . . . We still haven’t seen him.''
Who’s to blame for the war’s revival? Most Angolans believe Savimbi never intended to honor the deals he made in Lusaka. The government also accuses the U.N. and the ““troika’’ (the United States, Russia and Portugal) responsible under the peace protocol for overseeing rebel disarmament. Western diplomats respond that the MPLA also ignored evidence that Savimbi was re-arming, hoping that eventually he would agree to join the government, as the plan envisioned.
That never happened. Instead, both sides spent the quiet years after 1994 building up their armories. UNITA used revenue from its diamond mines to buy tanks, heavy weapons and anti-aircraft batteries from former Eastern-bloc countries, despite an international embargo. The MPLA, meanwhile, went shopping on the open market, but neither army gained a clear advantage in firepower. The likely result: a stalemate that Angolan observers believe could last three to five years, with battles more devastating than any they have seen before. ““We have to wait till both sides are exhausted,’’ says a Western diplomat in Luanda.
It’ll be a rough wait. With more than half-a-dozen African countries including Angola fighting in neighboring Congo’s civil war, diplomats fear the chaos could spread. Aid agencies promise they’ll stay even if the U.N. peace monitors withdraw, but they, too, believe this round of civil war could be the worst. Mercedes Diaz de Velasquez of the World Food Program says that during the last peak in fighting, from 1992 to 1994, 30,000 people died in a seven-month siege of Kuito, most from hunger. She can remember walking over piles of the dead and dying, and now Kuito is under siege again. ““Is there Ethiopia-style hunger?’’ says another aid worker. ““Not yet. Can it be? Definitely.''
