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The renewed fighting has turned into Frankenstein's monster running amuck, largely beyond the control of its original superpower sponsors. The West, which for years backed Savimbi, overtly and covertly, as an anticommunist African democrat, finds itself with little leverage over a rogue warlord whose control of Angola's diamond deposits could enable him to finance his operations indefinitely. Backed by oil revenues of $3 billion a year, the government too has looked determined to fight to the finish. Thus, unless this week's developments lead to a lasting truce, the worst is perhaps still to come. In the countryside, the fighting has disrupted the planting season, and without a harvest in early 1994, says World Food Program spokeswoman Mercedes Sayagues, deprivation could envelop all of Angola. Even Luanda, the capital, has not gone untouched. On its northern outskirts 10,000 refugees have pitched camp, and in Josina Machel hospital, the country's largest, scores of amputees lie in unlighted corridors.
If the outside world averts its gaze, one reason may be, or so relief workers believe, that with the cold war over, Angola no longer has strategic value. Another is that much of the country's misery is confined to small pockets of inaccessible territory. One such pocket is Malanje, 330 km east of Luanda and one of the largest provincial capitals. Despite a population of 250,000, swollen by the arrival of 50,000 refugees during the past year, it remains a ghost town. At a government health office, 100 children, mostly orphans, beg for meals. In a center run by nuns, men scuffle violently over food.
And relentlessly the refugee numbers increase. When two trucks with 200 more evacuees arrive, officials are close to despair. "These are the last we can receive," says Maria de Conceicao Araujo, who heads Malanje's social-welfare effort. "The local people don't have enough to eat." Yet Malanje is more fortunate than other enclaves. Kuito, the besieged capital of Bie province, has not seen one foreign aid delivery since January.
AS IN SOMALIA, SAYS ANA LIRIA Franch, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees representative in Angola, "the country's strong are eating its weak." In Malanje government employees steal and sell medical supplies intended for the hospital. Bandits have been making off with an estimated third of the U.N.'s food aid as soon as it hits the ports. There is profiteering in the refugee camps by local chiefs appointed as middlemen in the food-distribution chain. "Given the hardships of everyday life here, they don't see anything wrong with what they are doing," says a relief official.
Playing politics with food, both sides are blocking aid to rival regions. The U.N., many argue, must also share blame for the aid debacle. After one of its relief planes was hit by UNITA gunfire in Mbanza Congo in July, U.N. special representative Alioune Blondin Beye, arguing that the flights had become too dangerous, ordered a halt to further air deliveries. Levels of food aid to cities like Malanje plummeted. Some U.N. officials claim that Beye would rather spend his time negotiating an overall peace than haggling with the contending factions about which relief flights can land where.