ANGOLA
This is the only position in my career with the UNHCR to which I have not applied. The office in Luanda, Angola was looking for a Portuguese-speaking officer to help the Representative manage the operations and at the time I seemed of the few that fitted roughly the profile. So, I was rushed to Angola in 1992, where I worked with three Representatives: Ana Lyria Franch, Marjon Camara and Antoine Noel. I was appointed Programme Officer, P2. And I had an Angolan Assistant by the name of Hilda, beautiful, married, always in a mini-skirt!
So, my third assignment with UNHCR was with the Representation in Luanda. Here I met more experienced officers like Gustave Ngango, Dillah Doumaye. In the end, during my career in the organization, Marjon Kamara was my supervisor a total of three times in. This is the point at which I really sank my teeth into programme as a (the) Programme Officer in Angola. I visited and saw extremely beautiful places in this country, way out of the way in Mbanza Congo, Uige,, Cazombo, Luau, Luena, Nzeto, Cabinda.
The year 1992 was particularly eventful, with a UNITA that was militarily very active, strong and in a position to take power from the governing party. The conflict had resulted in the United Nations establishing a UN mission, led by a brilliant Envoy, a Malian diplomat by the name Alioune Blondin Beye. He succeeded Margareth Anstee, a British personality, in overseeing the political and security work of the United Nations Angola Verification Mission (UNAVEM). He was killed when his plane, on the way to Cote d’Ivoire, came down near Abidjan.
In the year 1993, elections took place in Angola, whose results UNITA refused to accept. I was coopted to be part of the election observation mission of the United Nations, my first and last experience of the kind in a country tensed up so much, that one week after the results were announced, war broke out and helicopters were used as gunships in the capital Luanda. We remained enclosed at home for 4 days without coming out, and we only did come out when the UN decided to evacuate non-essential staff. We were taken by a military UN convoy through the town, to the airport, and evacuated in a plane, where we were allowed only 15Kg of personal belongings, and we sat on the floor, until we reached Windhoek, Namibia. Again, my first time to set foot in Namibia. We were very well received by the UNDP office, well taken care of in good hotels. We spent three weeks, loitering and speculating and gossiping, until we received new instructions: substantive officers were requested to prepare to return to Luanda, but the country now became not conducive for families. Our families would have to go back to their countries. So, mine did return to Tanzania while I returned to Luanda.
UNHCR managed to continue working both in government-controlled Provinces, as well as those controlled by UNITA in the Provinces bordering with Zaire. But every time we flew into UNITA territory, we had to obtain express authorization from both parties. Surprisingly, it worked smoothly and well and we were never refused authorization. We would be told by the government party that we could not fly either in the morning or in the afternoon, depending on their own military flights, but we always operated. At one point, the Representative told me to purchase new vehicles and station them at the border town of Mbanza Congo, to support the repatriation effort, together with reconditioned Bedford trucks from the UK army. And so I did. I have had no difficulties positioning the trucks in the field. However, as soon as I landed with seven new Land Cruisers in Mbanza Congo, the UNITA local Commander came and confiscated them all, very politely I must say, but with a well-armed group of ten soldiers whose demeanor transmitted serious business and the expectation that a Mozambican would easily and readily understand the message. They said that the vehicles were needed for the war effort, and they would be returned after the war. I asked just for half an hour to call my Representative in Luanda. They left and promised to come back in two hours, which they did. Always polite. My Representative in Luanda said: do you think you can do anything to someone who is armed? That reassured me, but I felt desolate seeing our vehicles circulating around and my colleagues in trucks going to the border and returning in the same trucks bundled with the returnees. War!
Our main operation was the reception of Angolan returnees from Zaire, and the repatriation of Congolese refugees back to Zaire. At this point, UNHCR was not involved in the assistance to internally displaced populations but there were many of them in besieged cities in Angola. What I can say is that a good part of the Congolese refugees we repatriated by air, would reappear in the camps two to three weeks later, and appear in the manifests for repatriation four or five weeks later. A revolving transport business had taken root and it required quite complex mechanisms to combat.
It was during my stay in Angola that I would hear about Burundi and the massacre that took place there in 1993. And in Rwanda in 1994. Never did I imagine I would come to deal with these complex situations issue soonest in Tanzania, and again 24 years later at the sunset of my career.
My three lessons: language polyvalence is not a lost skill, the coordination industry and complex UN Missions
Angola offered me another opportunity to learn for the first time about the organization that employed me, as well as the complex world of United Nations Missions.
Knowing Portuguese made it easy for me to get to the Angola post, and I soon realized that mastery of languages is not a lost skill. I lived 4 years in Ethiopia but did not learn Amharic, except to impress my friends. Language learning is no lost effort; there is all the advantage to learning as many languages as possible. For one thing, that opens many opportunities to evolve in different environments. And also, there is little “lost in translation” if you can hear your interlocutor in his/her own language and respond in that language. Language is very much an expression of culture and if you can reach your interlocutor in his culture, you are emotionally intelligent.
This is the first time the issue of coordination among UN entities in a country came to be posited in a forceful manner, particularly with the presence of a Special Envoy of the Secretary General of the United Nations: the role of the Resident Coordinator started to take shape. It is in Angola where one Elike Segbor came from UNHCR Geneva to discuss with us the challenges of coordination, particularly under pressure from a major donor, the United States of America. The debate around coordination would later grow in importance and would take on very large proportions, to a point where an agency was sought to take this role. UNHCR was approached for this but the High Commissioner at the time, Sadako Ogata, declined to take the additional responsibility, given the little clarity of the nature of the new mandate at the time. That led to the creation of the Department of Humanitarian Affairs in 1992 and of the Office of the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in 1997 or 1998.
At this point, there was not much by way of lessons on this theme of coordination, but these became clearer later, as I will recount.
Understanding complex political environments and processes whose side effects are very much central to humanitarian crises: the situations of internal displacement and external displacement (refugees, central to the mandate of my employer). In 1993 the Representative sent me to Johannesburg to participate in a UNITA/MPLA negotiation for a ceasefire and political settlement. I reluctantly went, because I did not understand the advantages of such an exposure. Not that the particular Conference achieved much, because several months later the parties were locked again in fierce fighting. It gave me an opportunity to better understand
that we were evolving in a complex environment,
that the best humanitarian worker is politically aware,
that neutrality is not insensitiveness, and
that neutrality and impartiality are of different essences and politically distinguishable.
Apart from the professional, there is the emotional connection that is developed with these assignments: Angola left me with a permanent impression of a people who love and enjoy life, have beautiful traditions and songs. A very rich country with very poor people, not different from my own Mozambique.
Jose, 15 May 2023
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