By Fernando del Mundo

Like a sphinx, Angola is rising from the ashes after three decades of civil war. Schools, clinics, hospitals and homes are being rebuilt in the south-west African nation. Roads are being repaired. And most importantly, people are going home. More than one million persons, mainly civilians, were killed, four million were displaced within Angola and nearly 500,000 fled to neighbouring countries during one of the world's most enduring conflicts.

But following a peace agreement in April last year between the government and Angola's rebel movement, UNITA, some 1.6 million displaced persons 'spontaneously' returned to their towns and villages in a country twice the size of Texas and rich in oil, diamonds, other minerals and fertile land.

Early this summer, UNHCR began an organized repatriation of refugees, opening up routes from neighbouring Namibia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia as the tempo of return increased.

In Angola's eastern province of Moxico, there is a mood of optimism amid the war ruins. Davide Zeferino, a 41-year-old former maths teacher, walked for 10 days from the Meheba refugee camp in Zambia to the town of Cazombo on a look-see visit before asking his wife and seven children to join him.

He carried 10 kilos of rice and clothes as capital to establish himself as a small time trader selling dried fish. He hopes eventually to use his education to join a non-governmental or international organization. "Life here is very difficult," he concedes, "but there are practical things you can do and be hopeful about the future."

Maria Clara Bambi, who fled the country in 1978, has turned a pile of rubble in Cazombo into a neat home. In Kinshasa, the Congo capital where she spent her exile, she learned how to make pastries from which she now earns a small income. With her blond hair, fuchsia jacket over a blue shirt and denims and black JP Tod's moccasins, Maria Clara Bambi is also optimistic: "There is no more war. It is all over."

HOPE AND CAUTION

Just off the main road leading into Cazombo, a small colony of soldiers who were demobilized several weeks earlier await their promised rehabilitation in a dozen tents and grass huts. They are both a symbol of hope – that the war may really be over – and of caution – that much remains to be done if the scars of war are to be healed.

In the north of the country, returnees are rebuilding their shattered homes. Sixty-percent of Kuimba commune was destroyed in the war and it was empty just a year ago. Today, 60 percent of the original 25,000 population has returned. "This place had been swallowed up by the forest, but when the people returned they pushed it back," said Alexander Gomes, a local education coordinator, proudly.

But amidst the general euphoria, there are cautionary signs. Most of the country's infrastructure was destroyed and the landscape remains pockmarked with bullet-sprayed homes, shops, barracks and churches, many of them a legacy of 400 years of Portuguese colonial rule. It will take years or decades to repair the damage.

"In many places, the basic infrastructure is not there yet to make returns feasible," according to UNHCR's Angola representative Janvier de Riedmatten, which is why the agency is only helping people to return to 'viable' communities.

HEAVILY MINED

Angola is one of the most heavily mined regions in the world. More than 100,000 people were disfigured by the deadly ordnance during the war and it remains a threat today. A test run for a repatriation convoy from Zambia was delayed for one month earlier this year after an unexploded anti-tank shell was found near the highway which is lined with tall elephant grass severely restricting visibility through the rainforest.

It is a difficult choice to abandon the comparative safety of a refugee camp, its schools, medical services and vocational training facilities, for a very uncertain future, especially for particularly vulnerable people.

Forty-five-year-old Catherine Kadina-Mungeko lost her husband to the war and two children to disease. Following renewed fighting in 1998, a land mine blew off her leg as she was carrying her fifth child. "I can only go [home] when the time is good," she says cautiously.

Sixty-year-old Isabelle Lututala first fled the country in 1973. After several years in exile, she returned home and fled again as the pace of the war ebbed and flowed. In the process she lost four of her nine children – a daughter and three sons – one of whom was shot in front of her. This time, she said, "When I go home, I want to stay for good."

Source: Refugees Magazine Issue 132: "The Changing Face of Protection" (September 2003). Download the complete issue in pdf format: low-resolution (620Kb) here or high-resolution (1.8Mb) here