Angola warned of bloodshed
2006-04-13 09:13
Luanda - Angolan President Jose Eduardo dos Santos is facing calls for a national campaign to get rid of millions of guns left over from the war as the country prepares for milestone elections.
Proponents of disarmament warn of bloodshed unless many of the weapons - AK-47 automatic rifles and Makarov pistols - were taken out of circulation before an election campaign kicks off, possibly next year.
Matias Capapelo, president of the non-governmental organisation Angola 2000, which had been advocating disarmament since the end of the war in 2002, said: "Elections are a time of high emotions. There are calls for change. People are nervous.
"The presence of guns in our society will be an excuse for atrocities to take place. Some will take the opportunity of this period to take personal revenge."
Three million weapons buried
No one knew how many guns there were in Angola, but Capapelo estimated that some three million weapons were buried in backyards and hidden in homes, in a country of 14 million people.
Many of the guns were handed out to civil militias by Dos Santos' government in 1992 when fighting restarted after failed elections. Police had done some disarmament since the end of the war, but there had been no coordinated national campaign.
In one of Luanda's most heavily-armed slums, Sambizanga, residents said gun violence was an almost daily occurrence, and accused the police of doing nothing to stop it.
Cops to 'round up suspects'
A 34-year-old mechanic who declined to give his name said that women who set out at 05:30 to sell goods at the large Roque Santeiro market were often robbed at gunpoint while break-ins and muggings were also frequent.
He said: "The police will round up suspects, but never those who did it."
A 49-year-old unemployed man said that police had swooped down on Sambizanga to collect weapons, but that they rarely find the biggest caches.
Capapelo acknowledged that Angolans were reluctant to hand over their guns because they didn't trust the police to protect them.
He said: "The police and the army used to act like little kings. But, they are now modernising". He said that police must take more confidence-building measures if disarmament was to succeed.
Disarmament campaign
There was also concerns over the increasing numbers of private security firms, many of them set up by senior members of the government, who were heavily armed.
Under a proposal worked out by NGOs and police, the disarmament campaign would set a deadline for voluntarily handing over guns at designated collection points.
British NGO Halo Trust was to take responsibility for the disposal of the weapons, replicating for Angola the effort that it had been successfully leading in Afghanistan, where 28 million small arms were chopped up after the fall of the Taliban.
Halo Trust had held meetings with most of the police commanders in Angola's 18 provinces and secured about one million dollars in funding from Britain, the Netherlands and the United States to buy machinery and train weapon disposals teams.