Churches help make peace a reality in post-war Angola

July 29, 2002 News media contact: Linda Bloom·(212)870-3803·New York 10-31-71BP{329}

NOTE: Photographs are available with this report at http://umns.umc.org/currentphotos.html.

By Paul Jeffrey*

LUANDA, Angola (UMNS) -- After decades of war, Angola is struggling to make peace with itself. Yet in the wake of a war in which brutality often took precedence over rights, constructing a culture of peace and mutual respect will take a while.

Reconciliation won't be easy. But most Angolans, tired of so much suffering and convinced the war is definitely over, are eager to turn themselves to learning the ways of peace.

Action by Churches Together, an international alliance that includes the United Methodist Committee on Relief, is providing critical material aid to the victims of Angola's conflict. At the same time, it is helping construct a new culture of reconciliation.

Working closely with the Human Rights Division of the United Nations Office in Angola, ACT has made it possible for pastors and church leaders from several war-torn provinces to be trained as human rights counselors or peace and reconciliation counselors. In cooperation with local government officials and traditional village authorities, they have created local and provincial human rights committees that are reinventing ways to peacefully resolve conflicts within families, among neighbors and between former enemies.

In many areas of the country, this peacemaking takes place in a vacuum. After the studied neglect of Portuguese colonial rule and 27 years of post-independence warfare, most provinces have no judicial or penal system. According to a U.N. survey in 2001, only 13 of 164 municipalities had functioning municipal courts. "They don't take many prisoners in the provinces," said Patrick Hughes, deputy chief of the United Nations' Human Rights Division in Angola.

To construct a working legal system, Hughes' office is training judges and prosecutors and providing computers to track cases. Hughes says a major problem with the existing court system is a dysfunctional bureaucracy that simply loses cases. "A poor guy could steal a bag of cement and spend years in jail because they lost his case," Hughes said.

Training lawyers to do their job is another element of remaking the judicial system. "That's a massive task," said Hughes. "Lawyers here have been trained to obey the police and judges. We're teaching them how to be lawyers, that working for their client is their main job."

In a July 3 report, Human Rights Watch claimed that the Angolan legal system - or lack of one - is particularly harsh for the 4 million Angolans who have been displaced by the war.

"Many of the displaced lack identity documentation, facilitating harassment by the authorities, especially the national police. Arbitrary beatings and arrests occur when the displaced are unable to present personal identification documents to the police and are unable to bribe their way out," the report said.

"Women and girls are particularly vulnerable to assaults, including sexual violence, by policemen and soldiers located in road control posts when on their way to and from isolated agricultural areas or when collecting water. Additionally, without documentation, the displaced, and especially children, are unable to access social services.

"The sobas (traditional authorities) routinely demand bribes to include people on lists to receive assistance. Local landowners regularly exploit the internally displaced as a source of cheap labor for cultivation; those that manage to find work as agricultural laborers are regularly subject to extortion at military and police checkpoints when they return from the fields. Soldiers that guard access to the camps also 'tax' the residents and steal food and non-food relief items," the report stated.

Such human rights violations could not be redressed quickly enough by only changing formal structures. What was needed was the cultivation of a culture of complaint among the people affected. Aid workers, having witnessed two periods of quasi-peace during the 1990s dissolve into bloodshed, believed that empowering civilian leaders could help break the cycle.

"It's much easier to distribute food and blankets, but this work of building peace and reconciliation is extremely important. One of the reasons that past cease-fires didn't succeed was that no one was speaking up about human rights violations," said Carl von Seth, the Angola representative for the Lutheran World Federation, the lead ACT agency in Angola.

During much of the 1990s, the U.N. mission in Angola was sharply criticized by rights activists for failing to include human rights education in its work. This time around, people like Hughes are determined to do it differently.

In cooperation with the U.N. Office in Angola, ACT began workshops last year in the war-torn eastern province of Moxico. The Angolan constitution and several international legal documents, like the United Nations' Declaration of the Rights of the Child, served as texts.

According to Moises Gourgel, the ACT director in the provincial capital of Luena, the workshops focused on "encouraging people, especially the displaced, to know their rights and obligations, and then speak up. If people don't demand their rights, it makes it easier for the government not to assume its responsibility."

At the same time that church leaders are being trained as human rights activists, the United Nations is conducting seminars on conflict resolution for the sobas, the traditional village leaders.

According to Emilio Cesar, the Moxico coordinator for the ACT program on rights, reconciliation and peace, the work of the church-based counselors became even more urgent with the April cease-fire that followed the death of Jonas Savimbi, who led the rebel group UNITA. "With these people emerging from the bush, there cannot be room for revenge or rancor," Cesar said. "And the church is in a unique position to help create this culture of peace. The church is a bridge. It's present in every village, and it's willing to get involved without fear."

Yet von Seth says the workshops, and a variety of related skits broadcast in six languages on provincial radio stations, often focus more on peacefully resolving conflicts within the family than on larger political tensions. "You don't have to talk specifically about conflicts with UNITA to get your point across," said von Seth. "Angolans need to learn new ways to resolve conflicts at every level, and it may be easier to start at a family level."

The lingering political gaps aren't ignored. ACT helped organize a June 29 ecumenical worship service in the UNITA demobilization camp at Chicala. Gourgel says it was an important moment for local leaders of churches and other civil society groups to dialogue face to face with the former UNITA combatants.

In the northern province of Uige, another ACT member, the Evangelical Reformed Church of Angola, co-sponsored a May workshop where 59 peace counselors were trained. One of those trained was Armando Mabaia, a Reformed Church pastor in the provincial capital. He says police abuse of civilians was a main topic addressed in the workshop. "These things happen because the police don't know the laws, and the people don't know their rights and how to defend themselves against the police," Mabaia said.

To educate both civilians and government officials, the provincial human rights committee broadcasts a live, 45-minute program every Saturday on the local government radio station; the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees picks up the tab for the airtime. Committee members discuss a different theme on each program, and citizens are invited to call in with their complaints.

A test of the radio program's effectiveness came when someone called to denounce the case of two police officers who had raped a woman and yet not been punished. Appeals to the officers' superiors were going nowhere. A phone call to the radio program led to the eventual jailing and prosecution of the two officers.

"People have a right to know that they can expect certain things of the government, but it's clear we have to struggle for those things. If we wait on the government to make change, we'll be waiting a long time," said Kula Romanos Jose, a Baptist and secretary of the provincial committee. # # # *Jeffrey is a United Methodist missionary in Central America. He was on assignment in Angola for ACT International.

************************************* United Methodist News Service Photos and stories also available at: http://umns.umc.org