Angola: Promises and Lies (Paperback)

Karl Maier describes the long-running Angolan conflict as 'the worst war in the world'. During my tenure there in 1992-3 as Special Representative of the Secretary-General and Head of the UN Angolan Verification Mission (UNAVEM II) I also dubbed it 'the forgotten tragedy'. Although the horrific armed struggle that engulfed the country once again after Savimbi refused to accept the results of the September 1992 elections claimed more lives than the fighting in Bosnia - 1000 people were dying every day - Angola got scant attention from the media.
The author was an exception and I respected him for his commitment and his objectivity. Even now it is difficult to lift the veil of silence. Both Karl Maier and I know how hard it is to persuade anyone to publish a book about Angola. The argument is that there is no public interest - and apparently no desire to awaken it either. This book is therefore all the more welcome, and Serif are to be congratulated for making it possible.
It makes a rivetting read and deserves to reach a wide public. With passionate eloquence Maier depicts the horrendous sufferings of ordinary Angolans, who have known nothing but war for over thirty years - enduring constant bombardments from one side or the other, families divided and uprooted, many thousands mutilated for life by anti-personnel mines, many thousands more, mainly women, children and old people, dying of hunger and malnutrition. The author's moving account of his encounters with individual Angolans of all ethnic and political persuasions brings out the indomitable tenacity and courage of ordinary Angolans, especially the women, as well as the senseless stupidity of the conflict. Maier describes it as 'a civil war fought primarily against innocent civilians, the povo (people), by armies of conscripted youngsters on behalf of power-mad politicians'.
The other great strength of this book is that Maier sets the war in its historic and cultural context. His episodic technique does, however, make it more difficult for those unfamiliar with it, to trace the evolution of the conflict and the reasons for the failure of the various attempts to resolve it. Yet this also serves to underscore the futility of it all. No attempt at rational analysis can justify this degree of suffering.
Understandably Maier is at his best when recounting his own experience. His attempt to recreate the sanguinary battle for Luanda during the last weekend of October 1992, when he was not in Angola, is less successful. There are errors of chronology and of fact, as well as some internal inconsistencies. This is not surprising since even for those of us who did live through those dreadful events, and were trying to negotiate a cease-fire, there are still mystifying aspects that may never be unravelled.
Maier has some stern things to say about the United Nations, though he does recognize that the mandate and resources handed out to UNAVEM II as a result of the Bicesse Accords were pathetically inadequate to the enormity of the task, and that the powers for whom Angola had been a desirable pawn during the Cold War, now wanted to get shot of the problem as quickly and cheaply as possible. I agree with many of his comments but regret that he does not always distinguish between the Security Council, UN Headquarters, and the peace-keeping mission on the ground - and thus sometimes mistakenly apportions blame or overestimates what could in practice be done. He contends, for instance, that demobilization delays in the pre-election period could have been solved by UNAVEM threatening to withdraw but such threats could have achieved nothing: if UNAVEM's bluff had been called, the fighting would simply have started earlier. While he shows understanding of the difficulties of my situation he claims that, when the peace process began to crumble after the elections, 'she did not use the power she possessed as the focal point of world opinion'. What power? What focal point, given the indifference of world opinion? He himself appears to deny his own thesis by admitting, in the next breath, that 'the Western countries, especially the United States, did little to back her up'.
There is a big difference between being an onlooker and being a player. Cautious public utterances by senior UN officials - and here I refer to his almost contemptuous dismissal of Marrack Goulding's statement, at the end of his visit to Angola in November 1992, that the peace process was 'seriously threatened' - should not too easily be dismissed as naive or complacent. According to Mr. Maier, the peace process was already dead, but he gives no clue as to how it might have been revived.
At that point, the United Nations, in contrast to the marginal role assigned to it in the pre-electoral period, was unceremoniously pushed to centre stage, and expected to resolve the crisis. There were three main options open: to mediate and try to persuade both sides to withdraw from the brink; to send in massive reinforcements - 'Blue Helmets' - to prevent the two sides from fighting; or to withdraw altogether. The last was unthinkable, the second impossible because the initial reluctance of the Security Council and the international community to commit any significant resources to resolve the Angolan issue had hardened even further as a result of the Bosnian experience and the growing crisis of peacekeeping in general. Neither the mandate nor the troops would have been forthcoming. Mediation was thus the only course. Even the possibility of bolstering the mediation efforts by sanctions was ruled out because the United States continued to cling to its mistaken belief that it still had influence over UNITA in Security Council resolutions. In any case, as Maier himself writes later, when partial sanctions were eventually applied against UNITA in September 1993, they proved ineffectual.
Some remarks specific to UNAVEM also require elucidation. Maier's encounter with an American UN electoral observer in Kuito leads him to 'wonder where the United Nations finds such people for so important an assignment'. A few observers may not have had the required experience, but his sweeping comment takes no account of the outstanding performance of the majority, many of whom had had valuable experience in Namibia, Nicaragua and Haiti. Moreover, the United Nations had little time in which to mobilize this group and was obliged, because of budgetary constraints imposed by member states, to recruit all but a few from within the existing Secretariat.
The author's description of myself as 'a United Nations diplomat' (whatever that is) and Under-Secretary-General gives the impression of someone who had been catapulted from a desk-bound Headquarters sinecure into this African maelstrom, rather than of someone who had worked in more than a dozen countries, including some of the most underdeveloped, in all regions of the world, among them Africa, had managed large-scale operations in all of them, and had had her (literal) baptism of fire in situations of civil strife in Colombia, Bolivia, Morocco and Chile. More seriously, the comment that UNAVEM 'voted with its feet' after the battle of Luanda (referring to the fact that UNAVEM military observers were among those leaving on the first plane) is inaccurate and grossly unfair. It implies that they went of their own volition (an impossibility) out of cowardice and a spirit of self-preservation. It also overlooks that fact that UNAVEM's main mandate ran out on 31 October 1992, coincidentally the day the fighting broke out. While the Security Council had authorized the retention of a smaller mission until the end of the year, several contingents were to leave at the end of October and their routine departure had been held up by the closure of the airport. Contrary to the impression given, UNAVEM was still clinging tenaciously to its 67 team sites all over the country, admittedly in an increasingly thin blue line, but all its members were working tirelessly