Amnesty International Report 1995 - Angola

Critics of the government were briefly detained and may have been prisoners of conscience: there were attempts on the lives of others. Hundreds of unarmed civilians were reported to have been deliberately killed by both the government army and forces of the União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola (UNITA), National Union for the Total Independence of Angola. In November, amidst news of continued fighting and deliberate killings of defenceless civilians, officials deputizing for President José Eduardo dos Santos and UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi signed a new peace agreement, known as the Lusaka Protocol. This supplemented and modified the 1991 peace agreement which collapsed after UNITA disputed the results of the September 1992 elections (see Amnesty International Report 1994). Under the terms of the Lusaka Protocol, the UN was to monitor government troops and supervise the confinement to assembly areas of UNITA troops. UNITA's weapons and those in civilian hands were to be collected and stored under UN supervision. The formation of a joint army, which was incomplete when war broke out in late 1992, was to be completed and any soldiers not incorporated into the army were to be demobilized. The Lusaka Protocol provided for UNITA members to be incorporated into the police and for the police to be properly trained and to abide by internationally recognized human rights standards. UNITA was to participate in all levels of government. The peace agreement was to be implemented by a Joint Council composed of government and UNITA representatives and chaired by the UN with representatives of the governments of Portugal, Russia and the USA as observers. The strength of the UN Angola Verification Mission (UNAVEM II) was to be increased to some 7,000 military and police observers and other staff. Finally, the UN would supervise the second round of presidential elections between President dos Santos and Jonas Savimbi – this had not taken place when war resumed in late 1992. In November the government passed an amnesty law to give effect to the Lusaka Protocol's provision that all civilian and military prisoners detained as a result of the conflict were to be released under the supervision of the International Committee of the Red Cross. No details of any releases had been published by the end of the year. During the year Angolans continued to die in their thousands in besieged towns and in devastated rural areas, either in the fighting or from hunger or disease. Both sides deliberately killed prisoners; bombed or shelled predominantly civilian areas; and prevented the delivery of food aid to areas controlled by the other side. Three million of Angola's 10 million people were in need of emergency re-lief. The government forcibly conscripted youths under 18, the minimum age in Angola for compulsory military service. UNITA also forced civilians to serve as soldiers and porters. Government forces in Cabinda, an Angolan enclave separated from the rest of Angola by Zaire's corridor to the sea, faced attacks by both UNITA and the two armed factions of the Frente de Libertação do Enclave de Cabinda (FLEC), Cabinda Enclave Liberation Front. Four journalists were briefly detained and appeared to be prisoners of conscience. Leopoldo Baio and Ricardo de Melo were arrested in May and held for several hours while they were questioned about articles they had written about government corruption. In Cabinda, also in May, João Mavinga was detained for about a day and questioned about his report that FLEC had set up a radio station. Mariano Costa was detained for a day after returning from Lisbon, Portugal, in September and was reportedly asked to reveal his sources for a story on UNITA. A human rights worker was prosecuted in circumstances which suggested that he was being punished on account of his human rights activities. Lourenço Adão Agostinho, Secretary General of the Associação Angolana dos Direitos Humanos (AADH), Angolan Human Rights Association, had been detained in 1989 on charges of embezzlement but did not stand trial. In May 1994 he was rearrested when six plainclothes police stopped him in the street at gunpoint. He claimed that his defence counsel was unable to consult the trial dossier until shortly before the trial started in late May. Lourenço Adão Agostinho was acquitted of charges of theft and falsification of documents but convicted of "abuse of confidence" in connection with missing money and sentenced to two and a half years' imprisonment. It was impossible to establish how many political prisoners were arrested in 1994 or how many arrested in previous years were still held. UNITA claimed that some of the hundreds of suspected UNITA supporters arrested between November 1992 and January 1993 (see Amnesty International Report 1994) were still held without charge or trial. The government occasionally reported that it had captured UNITA soldiers. Other sources indicated that captured UNITA soldiers were often shot. There were attempts on the life of some government opponents, some of which may have been attempted extrajudicial executions. The government failed to establish who was responsible. Mfulumpinga Lando Victor, leader of the Partido Democrático para o Progresso–Aliança Nacional Angolana, Democratic Progress Party–Angolan National Alliance, had just entered his apartment in central Luanda in April when his car and apartment were sprayed with machine-gun bullets. In July an explosion wrecked the apartment of Nelson Bonavena, leader of the Frente para a Democracia, Front for Democracy, who was not at home at the time. There were many reports of government soldiers carrying out extrajudicial executions after taking control of villages and towns which had been held by UNITA. Usually few details were available and it was impossible to find witnesses who could corroborate the accounts. In January, four people, including a six-year-old boy, Francisco Lele, were reportedly shot dead in their homes in Luavo village, Cabinda, by soldiers conducting a house-to-house search for UNITA or FLEC soldiers. UNITA said in June that government troops had extrajudicially executed about 300 people after they occupied Quilengues, in Huila province, in August 1993. It named about 20 of those killed, including a doctor, two Portuguese businessmen, and two members of the local Roman Catholic church. It appeared that some extrajudicial executions had occurred but it was not possible to establish how many. UNITA said that some of the victims were forced under torture to name people hostile to the government. Eduardo DomiNGOs, an economics professor and a well-known UNITA supporter, was killed in Lubango in October, allegedly by government forces. He had been detained for a month in January 1993 because of his membership of UNITA. A parliamentary Commission of Inquiry reported in January on its investigations into the killings of members of the Bakongo ethnic group in Luanda a year earlier, in January 1993 (see Amnesty International Report 1994). The commission found that 12 people had been killed in an isolated incident but that those responsible – police and members of the Civil Defence (militia) – had been motivated not by the ethnic origin of the victims but by a desire to revenge themselves against Zairians who had assisted UNITA troops in expelling government forces from the town of Soyo in northwestern Angola. Some 20 people had been detained in connection with the killings but they were released without charge a few weeks after they were arrested. The findings were disputed by the leaders of some political parties and members of the Bakongo ethnic group who claimed that many people had been killed. By the end of the year there was no news of prisoners whom UNITA had detained in 1994 or in previous years (see Amnesty International Report 1994). Those detained in 1994 included four Roman Catholic missionaries, the Congolese husband of a US aid worker, and two other people captured in August after UNITA soldiers attacked a convoy of vehicles travelling between Luanda and Porto Amboim. In July UNITA threatened to execute two South Africans whose plane UNITA forces had shot down and whom they regarded as mercenaries. The two men were employees of a South African company which said it had a contract with the Angolan Government to provide guards and military instructors. UNITA representatives later said they had not been killed. There were many accounts of defenceless civilians, particularly government officials or supporters, being deliberately and arbitrarily killed by UNITA. Witnesses from N'Dalatando, which the government reoccupied in May, reported having seen UNITA soldiers shooting civilians or hacking them to death with machetes. Journalists who visited Huambo shortly after government forces recaptured the city in early November found the bodies of dozens of prisoners held by UNITA who had apparently been deliberately killed a few days earlier. Some were found in the precincts of a prison and of houses which local people said had been used as prisons: other bodies had been deposited in wells. Another armed political organization, FLEC-Renovada (Renewed FLEC), captured government soldiers in Cabinda and threatened to shoot 10 of them. It later appeared that these threats were not carried out. In November FLEC-Renovada captured three Polish employees of a logging company, apparently to draw attention to its complaints that the government did not use profits from extractive industries to benefit Cabinda. The three hostages were released in December. Amnesty International was concerned about the arrest of possible prisoners of conscience and continued to appeal for an end to all unlawful killings. In response to Amnesty International's inquiries, the Minister of Justice told the organization that Lourenço Adão Agostinho had received a fair trial. The organization received no response to its inquiries about people who had been extrajudicially executed or had "disappeared" after war resumed in 1992. Nor did it receive any reply from UNITA to its inquiries about people who were reported to have "disappeared" or been killed in UNITA custody.