Dateline ACT

Angola: 05/02

Returning to the ruins: Angola's displaced emerge from the shadows of war

Kimasinque, Angola. July 21, 2002
by Paul Jeffrey

Feliciana Alfonso came home to find only ashes.

After three years of living in crowded, miserable conditions with hundreds of other displaced persons in the village of Mazzami, Alfonso walked for four days through the jungle with her husband and six children, coming back to this village in the northern Angolan province of Uige.

Although Alfonso grew up here, her arrival in early July was no joyful homecoming. Where her home once stood, only one small portion of a mud wall remains erect. A few of the poles that framed the dwelling stand charred and crumbling. Her fields have been burned and are now choked with weeds.

Alfonso set about clearing space to plant the few cassava plants she salvaged from her temporary home in Mazzami. She’s waiting now for the rains to begin in September. In the meantime, she has little food and not much hope. Her children are still hungry and wear only rags, yet the Kikongo-speaking Alfonso, 25, says she is content to be home. "If we are going to die of starvation, I’d rather die at home than somewhere else," she says.

After three decades of civil war, as many as one-third of Angola’s 13 million people are internally displaced. While many of the displaced fled their homes for safer areas as their villages were caught in fighting between government forces and UNITA rebels, others were violently pushed out. Alfonso’s family was forced to leave by UNITA, which rampaged through the area burning houses and fields. Yet UNITA had no patent on brutality. In the last year of the war, hundreds of thousands of Angolans were forcibly displaced by the government as it viciously pursued a military victory over UNITA.

With an end to the war following the death of rebel leader Jonas Savimbi in February, relief workers have gained access to half a million people who–like Alfonso, trapped behind UNITA lines in Mazzami–were inaccessible because of the fighting. What the world has discovered is a humanitarian crisis of unforeseen and immense proportions. Among the previously unreached families, levels of malnutrition and sickness are startling even to aid workers jaded by sub-Saharan Africa’s chronic crises.

Faced with the crisis in Angola, Action by Churches Together (ACT), the international alliance of churches and church agencies responding to emergencies, is working to help displaced families return home and enjoy the life in peace they have long awaited.

In this northern province of Uige, one ACT member, the Evangelical Reformed Church of Angola (IERA/ACT), is beginning to assist 10,000 displaced families.

Half of the people IERA/ACT will assist, like Feliciana Alfonso, have just emerged from the bush, and the church organization is providing them with soap, blankets, clothing, buckets, and other critical non-food items. The United Nation’s World Food Program provides the displaced here with emergency food.

Many of the displaced families are considered too debilitated by their ordeal to return to their home communities before the rains begin in September, and IERA/ACT and other aid agencies will accompany them for several months as they recover their strength.

The other 5,000 families IERA/ACT will assist in Uige are those who have been displaced for some time yet were within reach of food assistance and other aid programs during the closing months of the war. Many of them will return home in coming weeks, or have already begun to return home, and IERA/ACT will provide them with seeds and agricultural tools to help them restart their subsistence farming.

"The displaced are tired of waiting," said Victor Balanquete, a relief official with IERA/ACT. "They’ve been waiting so long for peace that they’re not going to sit around any longer waiting for the government or the U.N. or some nongovernmental organizations to tell them it’s now acceptable for them to return home. They want to get on with life, get on with enjoying the peace which we have finally achieved."

IERA/ACT is also going to assist almost 12,000 people living in a UNITA demobilization camp at Uamba. IERA/ACT workers made an initial assessment visit to the Uamba camp on July 17 and will provide principally non-food items such as soap, blankets, kitchen kits, buckets and agricultural tools. All assistance the church organization provides to the demobilized families is coordinated with local government officials, the U.N. and other aid groups in order to avoid duplication or gaps in assistance.

Leaders in the UNITA camp also asked the church to provide assistance with the reintegration of the former combatants into civilian life. "They asked us to help with vocational training so that the soldiers can have more possibilities to survive in civilian life. And they asked us to provide training for reconciliation, to help overcome the polarization of our society into 'us' and 'them'," Balanquete said.

The long war left many victims, and IERA/ACT is rehabilitating a war-torn building in the provincial capital of Uige to expand its work with street children, many of them war orphans. It is also hoping to rehabilitate–for a second time–a group of buildings in nearby Kikaya. During the last period of quasi-peace in Angola in the late 1990s, IERA/ACT rehabilitated several war-wrecked buildings in the village to use as a vocational training center, health clinic, warehouse, and offices for the church’s relief program. Yet after fighting resumed in late 1998, the center was sacked by marauding UNITA forces.

Despite losing the Kikaya facility, IERA/ACT with support from the ACT alliance and the United Nations assisted more than 10,000 families during the last two years of the war. Now that peace appears to have arrived at last in Angola, the church organization is committed to expanding its assistance to Angolans left in misery by the conflict.