Washington, DC — "A large number of Angolans are still in a precarious situation... starving, not because of natural disaster, drought or crop failure, but as a direct result of how the war was fought," said Dr. Morten Rostrup of Mèdecins Sans Frontiéres (MSF) or Doctors Without Borders, in a statement before the Senate Subcommittee on African Affairs, Wednesday.
The end of fighting in April, "revealed a humanitarian crisis previously hidden [as] hundreds of thousands of starving civilians emerged from rural areas to which MSF and other agencies had been denied access by both the Angolan Armed Forces (FAA) and Unita," said Rostrup.
Unita strategies that kept agencies like MSF out of areas they controlled, combined with the government's confinement of aid agencies to provincial capitals, even in government-held regions, "led to a near-complete failure of health services," testified Rostrup.
Both Unita and the government pursued a "scorched earth policy", MSF said in a report entitled "Angola - Sacrifice of a People" - released earlier this month. "As a matter of policy, both warring parties unhesitatingly used these forms of violence and terror to dominate civilian populations, depriving them of food and basic resources needed to survive. Abused for years as instruments of war, these civilians were simply abandoned after the war," MSF said in a statement accompanying the report's release.
In his testimony before the subcommittee, Rostrup said MSF teams found mortality figures "nearly four times greater than what is internationally accepted as the threshold for an emergency." Moderate malnutrition was found in 50 percent of the population in some areas, while acute malnutrition sometimes afflicted over 20 percent.
A recent World Food Programme (WFP) report described the situation as "critical" in two locations in south-eastern Cuando Cubango province. A joint WFP and UN security assessment team estimated that 23,000 people needed immediate humanitarian assistance in the areas of Likwa and Rivungo on the border with Zambia.
Morten Rostrup said WFP estimates that nearly two million people will need food for their daily survival until "well into 2003". However, according to the MSF representative, "as of early October, WFP's budget was 74 percent under-funded and cereal supplies are predicted to run out in January."
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In terms of MSF efforts, the worst nutritional crisis is unfolding in the south-eastern town of Mavinga, he said. There, 250 children are being fed in an MSF feeding center while 10,000 children and "vulnerable adults" are being fed in two reception areas with a combined population of 70,000.
In Huambo province, MSF is currently treating 350 children in therapeutic feeding centers in Bailundo and receives 90 new patients each week. Rostrup, however, called this an improvement. Two months ago they were treating more than 600 children.
