Angola: Hearing the people's voice
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Development. Copyright © 2000 The Society for International Development. SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), 1011-6370 (200009) 43:3; 94–98; 014222.
SID On-line Dialogue
Angola: Hearing the people’s voice STEVE KIBBLE
ABSTRACT Steve Kibble looks at how the emergent peace movement in Angola faces severe problems of repression, human rights abuses, attacks on press freedom and profound internal divisions inside Angola as it seeks an end to the 30-year conflict in the country. He argues that political and economic reform is needed to break the cycle of instability stemming from previously broken agreements. He suggests that international support is needed to ensure a lasting and genuine peace. KEYWORDS churches; exclusion; identity; immediate negotiations; NGOs; peace; repression
‘The people are tired of war, they won’t put up with a return to fighting’. . . Bepe rolls his eyes at my innocence and delivers a response that Angolans repeat over and over again: But the people don’t make the war. (Maier, 1996: 35)
People facing conflict President Jose Eduardo dos Santos of Angola announced on 31 January 2000 that presidential and parliamentary elections would take place in 2001 – no doubt hoping to be a successful war leader by then. Elections can, though, provide a focus for the plethora of Angolan civil organizations – churches, independent media, NGOs – to press the case for a multi-faceted peace sustained by justice and open government. The 30-year war in Angola has led to the death of a million and a half people since 1975 (Vines, 1998). Problems of identity and exclusion, as well as the profitability of running a war economy, have bedevilled attempts at bringing sustained peace. How does the emerging Angolan civil society help bring about needed peace when the entire recent history of their country has been one of internal repression and war aided by external, mostly malign, intervention? On the face of it, civil society seems unlikely to succeed where elite negotiations and UN interventions have been so spectacularly unsuccessful, but there are some hopeful signs.
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Kibble: Angola There are several reasons why the war has proved so difficult to end. Angola is worth fighting for, having natural resources especially of oil and diamonds – not that the majority of the population has seen any benefit from these. Control of these profitable resources has enabled the major Angolan protagonists to resist what sporadic international pressure there has been to end armed conflict. Four other specific post-colonial factors add to the persistence of conflict. The Angolan government can use oil, its most valuable asset, to maintain its (largely urban-based) client networks and finance the cost of the war. Even when it lost control of the diamond fields in the mid-1990s to the rebels of the National Union for the Total Liberation of Angola (UNITA), under Jonas Savimbi, it was still able to buy arms on a large scale. Equally, UNITA used diamond sales for its i
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