Frontline Angola: Killing machine turns on children

THE DEATH pages are usually the only part of the daily Jornal do Angola worth reading. They are the only part of the government mouthpiece which tells the truth. They offer an honest glimpse of the civil war which is once again ripping this country apart. In the news pages, war deaths are denied or distorted for propaganda purposes. In the death pages, blurry black and white mugshots of earnest young men, alongside terse phrases like "in violent circumstances" or "victim of sudden death" tell the simple, awful truth.

On 16 April there were an unusually high number of "victims of sudden death" - six on the one page. The gruesome manner of their deaths was, unfortunately, not at all unusual in these days of atrocities. What makes them memorable was the fact that all of them worked for humanitarian aid organisations, and were killed in the line of duty.

Dr Antonio Ferreira, Ernesto Queto, Walter Reais, Father Narciso Xavier, Father Manuel Gabriel and Jose Antonio were travelling together on 15 April in a Land Rover belonging to the Save the Children Fund. Dr Ferreira and Mr Queto worked for the Save the Children Fund. All six were based in the government-controlled town of Gabela, 200 miles south of the capital, Luanda, where they worked with the homeless thousands, displaced and dispossessed by the war.

They were en route to the port city of Sumbe for a meeting with the provincial representative of the World Food Programme. They were ambushed by a group of men armed with AK47s and RPG-7 grenade launchers. When bullets started flying across the path of their vehicle they were forced to stop and their Land Rover was surrounded.

The attackers first pulled out the driver, Dr Ferreira, and, in full view of the others, killed him by hacking off his head with a machete. Fr Xavier was decapitated in the same way. Then the remaining four were executed with the relatively merciful AK47s.

The assailants hid in the tall grass on the roadside for an hour after the attack until a police patrol vehicle arrived to investigate the carnage. Four police officers went to inspect the dead in the Land Rover, which was when the assailants struck again, firing a grenade that caused the Land Rover to explode, and killing all four policemen.

The assumption is that, on that occasion, the attackers belonged to the rebel movement, Unita - a Portuguese acronym for the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola.

However the Angolan interior is in such a state of anarchy that it is impossible to know anything for sure. Since this war resumed in December, the government has been driven into a handful of cities. Yet the rebels do not have the capacity fully to control the vast countryside, which has become the realm, instead, of roaming death squads andbandits. Unita's strategy is to frighten all civilians out of its territory, into the tiny government-controlled areas, and then to hold them hostage in the starving cities by making the roads so dangerous that only the truly desperate attempt to travel.

Francisco Feliz was desperate. He is one of the 700,000 civilians who have been driven into the cities since the violence resumed. All the people in his home village of Muconda, in eastern Angola, were forced out of their homes last June. Unita soldierspromised they would all be killed if they did not leave. They walked for a week to get to the city of Saurimo, hiding during the day and travelling only by night. Nine thousand of them live in a barren camp outside Saurimo now. They receive some food aid, but notenough.

And anyway, they have no saucepans, no plates, no knives. They have nothing. Which is why Mr Feliz and 30 other villagers decided, two weeks ago, to try to go home - just to fetch some of the food which they had left growing in the fields, and then to return.

When they got home, Unita caught them. "They beat us all with sticks and guns, then they sat down to eat," Mr Feliz said. "When they'd finished their meal their officer told them to kill us, but with knives and machetes, not guns, because he didn't want to waste ammunition."

Twenty-five of Mr Feliz's companions were slaughtered, the adults hacked to death, the children seized by the feet and smashed against tree trunks. "I only survived because I fainted when they hit me and they thought I was dead," Mr Feliz says from his bed of grass, back in the refugee camp.

This then, is Angola's new war, where the weapons are terror and hunger, and aid workers and children are considered legitimate targets. Where the frontline is in the fields and on the roads. It is the constant fear of violent death that accompanies every person who tries to travel overland, which drives farmers from their crops and imprisons hungry millions in cities. It cuts through the life of every Angolan, restricting their movements today, and any hopes they may have had for tomorrow.