POLICIES CHANGE, WEAPONRY ENDURES

John Simpson returns to Angola after 17 years, and finds that the slogans have changed but the war goes on

Benguela UNDERNEATH OUR helicopter the landscape was pure Rider Haggard: open veldt, sudden eruptions of bald rock, the stubby forms of baobab trees, earth as red as a blood orange. We were often low enough to see the wild flowers on the ground as we flew eastwards out of Benguela. The Unita guerrilla movement is equipped with American Stinger missiles for shooting down antique Russian heli- copters like ours, so we had to fly very low to avoid them.

Angola is not the first place where the United States has sold weapons to one side in a civil war, then regretted it. In Nicaragua the former contras are using their American arms against the duly elected, pro-American government of Mrs Chamorro; in Afghanistan the Islamic fun- damentalists from mujahedin groups once favoured by Washington have been selling off their Stingers to pro-Iranian buyers at auction, and the bidders sent by the CIA have failed to buy them back. Here, Stingers are being used against the govern- ing party in Angola, the MPLA, which the Americans regard as the rightful winners of last October's election and are quietly helping in the war against Unita. Policies change; weaponry endures.

Our helicopter shuddered towards the town of Ganda, which the government recently recaptured from Unita. It's part of the government's slow and cumbersome

advance towards the city of Huambo, which Unita seized when it refused to accept the result of the election. This being the dry season, the government, which has Russian tanks and mobile artillery and armoured personnel carriers, is on the offensive. Soon the rainy season will be here, the tanks will bog down, and Unita with its lighter equipment will begin a counter-offensive. It has been this way since 1975, and there is no reason to think it will be any different now. It would be very nice if, as the editor of The Beast demanded in Scoop, the Patriots were to score a few quick victories over the Traitors and stage a colourful entry into the capital; but perceptions have changed on the critical question of what constitutes a Patriot and what a Traitor, and at pre- sent the MPLA seems as unlikely to enter Huambo as Unita does to enter Luanda. Only a collapse of Unita's political will, or a collapse of the MPLA economy, will decide the issue.

Since I was last here, 17 years ago, things have, however, changed beyond anyone's imaginings. The old MPLA slo- gans have been modified: Victory is certain has now become The future is certain, which is incontestable but not much of a comfort, and The struggle continues has mercifully been dropped; perhaps it was simply too obvious. Yet only 50 yards from the Grande Hotel M'ombaka here in Benguela, where I have a room which

`This is the queue to be photographed with the royals.'

smells of rank lavatories and a bathroom window shot out in last year's fighting, an enormous placard proclaims something quite unthinkable when I was last in Ango- la: The MPLA is the accomplishment of the laws on multi-party democracy. Not, per- haps, the snappiest of slogans, but it is inconceivably distant from the old Marxist Leninist thought of the 1970s, when Presi- dent Agostinho Neto wrote his poetry and tried to keep Angola true to the interests of its Russian and Cuban sponsors; then all the talk was of the glories of the anti-colo- nialist struggle and of the inseparable friendship of socialist peoples. Soldiers called you 'Comrade' in the streets, and no international credit cards were acceptable.

Nowadays there is not a Russian or a Cuban to be seen, South Africa has opened an office in Luanda which is staffed by white diplomats with the task of arguing that if South African weapons are still reaching Unita it has nothing to do with the government in Pretoria, dollars, marks and pounds are the only currencies anyone wants, and the police call you `Senhor'.

What has not changed is the dire state of the Angolan economy. I changed a hun- dred American dollars with the (entirely legal) street changers, and had to carry my kwanzas around in a plastic shopping-bag. There are some smart cars to be seen in the shabby, decaying streets, and senior military men have nicely tailored uniforms; which argues that the MPLA's privatisation programme has benefited the government and the civil servants, and a few entrepreneurs, and that everyone else is pretty much where they were before except that the schools and medical services are worse.

Like the alternation of MPLA and Unita offensives, it is all deeply predictable. Yet the MPLA did try, if only out of despair, to keep to the bargain on last year's elections, and allowed the Unita leader, Mr Jonas Savimbi, to set up shop in Luanda and every provincial capital; which he did to such good effect, that after he had refused to accept his defeat at the polls, despite international approval of the result his sol- diers kept control of our cities, chief among them Huambo.

Now Huambo is regularly bombed by the Migs of the MPLA, while Unita forces are besieging the town of Cuito to the south- east, firing (it is said) four thousand shells a day at it. In Sarajevo last month we thought things were bad when half that number of shells were fired at us by the Bosnian Serbs. As the helicopter put down, at last, as close to the front line as the mili- tary were prepared to let us go today, I wondered about the analogy between Bosnia and Angola which the United Nations representatives here have been making recently. 'If Europeans were dying here instead of Africans,' one UN official had said, 'all the big international news organisations would be reporting it. `Worse than Bosnia', 'worse than Somalia'; nowadays all these conflicts and disasters have to be fitted onto a scale of some kind.

We climbed out of the helicopter, ears ringing, and were driven around the recap- tured area of Ganda. It slowly became evi- dent what was happening here. Ganda, until very recently, had been a prosperous area for Africa: the houses were built of stone blocks, the wells contained pure water, the animals were plentiful and fat. But the fighting, which began last October after an 18-month lull, has completely dis- rupted the slow processes of the agricul- tural year, and nothing much has been planted. Instead, people have been living on their reserves of food, and with all the refugees who have been pouring into towns and villages all over Angola to escape the fighting those reserves are now about to be finished. Nothing new will be grown here until January or February, even where planting has been possible.

As we wandered through the market- place or along the paths between the neat little thatched huts, most people still seemed reasonably well-fed. But a digni- fied old man in a suit jacket which looked about the same age as him explained that the food stores in the village were now almost empty. Cholera is just beginning at another small hamlet nearby: easy enough to cure, if you do not have to worry about over-crowding. Now, all over this once productive area, there are almost twice as many people as before the recent out- break of fighting. Realising that we had come from Benguela, where the MPLA is in full control, the villagers explained that the problem had been created by Unita. Had we come in from Huambo, their story would no doubt have been different. All they can think of now is trying to placate those who have the power to help them. When we climbed back on board our truck, they applauded us enthusiastically; they would have applauded anyone who took an interest in the catastrophe which is now only a few weeks away for them.

This is a quite unnecessary war, and a quite unnecessary disaster. Yet since the collapse of the Bicesse Accords the out- side world, having assumed the necessary deals had been done, has lost whatever lit- tle interest it had in Angola. 'What has this country done wrong that it should be punished in this way?' asked a rather grand figure in a set of carefully tailored African casuals. It was the governor of Benguela, Paolo Jorge, whom I had last seen in 1982 when he visited London. Then he was foreign minister; now he seems to have gone down in the world a little, but he is still inclined to be imperial and speaks superb English with a faint Zambian accent. He still boasts about the hour he spent talking to Margaret Thatch- er in Downing Street, when the official programme called only for a perfunctory 15 minutes. She wanted to talk to him, he said; he kept giving opportunities for her to break off. As for his question, it is hard to answer: Angola's crime seems to be that it is a natural battleground, with excellent resources — gold, oil, diamonds — and a set of politics based at least partly on tribal divisions; and the MPLA, no matter how unpopular, has tried to move away from those divisions.

I remembered the words of the reminisc- ing former foreign minister as our Soviet helicopter lurched and shook its way upwards over the baobabs again. A man of perhaps 20 had been put in the helicopter with us. His nose had been smashed by a rifle-butt, and he had a bullet-hole in his shoulder; both nose and shoulder were patched with sticking-plaster, the only treatment he had so far received. Every shudder of the ill-maintained engine made him wince, but he sat quietly on the metal floor and waited in patience for the flight to finish. He had been attacked and left for dead by a group of Unita soldiers who broke into his house the previous day. He can't have cared whether they were Unita or MPLA: neither will have meant much to him, though his village had mostly voted Unita last October. What had he done wrong to be punished in this way? The answer, I suppose, is that had the misfor- tune to live in a country whose government has had to give up proclaiming Victory is certain, and can only say now that The future is certain.

John Simpson is foreign affairs editor of the BBC.