Articles > Angola: The Call-Up

Army recruitment in Angola has never been a particularly consistent affair. The rules are what you might call "open to interpretation". On paper the government follows a two-year conscription policy. In practice the process is a little more spontaneous.

"Spontaneous?" cries Kozonty waving his hands about wildly in order to demonstrate his point, "People just disappear, amigo. In your country it is - how you say - kidnap - no?"

We're on the beach at sunset, watching the sky turn a majestic shade of red over the glittering Atlantic. For one beautiful moment it's easy to forget that we're standing tentatively on the edge of one of the world's most dangerous war zones.

"Listen to me, amigo", Kozonty continues breathlessly, reddening with indignation around the ears, "There is no recruitment policy. The students are OK, they're exempt, but as for the rest of them - they just round up the candidates whenever they feel like it."

He paces to the left, kicks the sand, makes aeroplane noises, simulates gunfire. I watch him with suspended amusement. In a previous career Kozonty, a Russian, was Soviet propaganda advisor to the Angolan government. Falling out of bed with communism in the early 90s when the Iron Curtain was whisked ignominiously off the world stage, he switched dogmas and converted to Christianity before coming back belatedly to live in the country he once professed to love - as a university lecturer. But like all lovers Kozonty and the Angolans have their tiffs.

"Olhe..." he whispers covertly as if someone might be listening, "I have witnesses, y'know, testigos - at the university. You will come down and visit. They will talk. Together we will uncover this sordid story."

I work as a volunteer. My job is to help out at a teachers training school called EPF in the western province of Benguela. Investigative journalism is not my gig. At least it wasn't, until the horror stories started filtering in via the irrepressible Kozonty. Tales of young boys being bundled into lorries on their way home from school. Rumours of the infamous government recruitment squads who drove around in armoured trucks abducting any 18-30 year-old male who couldn't afford the bribe.

All things considered, you could understand the paranoia. In the putrid mess of Angola's wrecked economy initiation into the army is no laughing matter. The average lifespan of a rookie soldier, out in what we coast-dwellers euphemistically called "the bush", is notoriously brutish and short.

New teenaged conscripts, sent to go and take pot-shots at Jonas Savimbi's UNITA guerillas, get little or no training. Furnished with a rifle, a meagre ration of ground maize and a dead colleague's boots they get frog-marched off to Luanda airport where they are transported, courtesy of the MPLA government, out to one of the outlying bandit provinces of Bié or Moxico.

Intrigued by Kozonty's pontifications, I decided to pursue the topic further. As luck would have it, the timing couldn't have been more appropriate. The government had just embarked upon a new offensive in distant Moxico in an attempt to flush Savimbi and his UNITA cronies out of their secret headquarters. They needed to bolster numbers amongst Angola's flagging army of unwilling "volunteers". Students, it appeared, were no longer exempt.

A circular was sent out to every educational establishment in the country, including my own school. All adult males - it declared unceremoniously - born between January 1st 1979 and December 31st 1980 were to report to the nearest army recruitment office immediately. Failure to do so would lead to serious repercussions.

Quite suddenly 26 out of the 85 students at my school were being asked to trade three years of hard-earned study for a walk-on part in a brutal and pointless guerilla war that paid little regard to the Geneva Convention. Enthusiasm around the Cavaco House where the students were being temporarily accommodated was not pronounced.

Young men who once revelled in breaking the nightly 8 o'clock curfew were suddenly reluctant to leave the house at all during daylight hours. The dreaded Recruitment officers had allegedly been seen circulating around the town centre sniffing out the cannon fodder. Rumour had it that if you didn't produce the right paperwork, your chances of making it back to school for the nightly feast of funje and cabbage stew were painfully thin.

You didn't need to be an Amnesty International rep to read between the lines. Down on its yearly quotas and incapable of organising any kind of effective conscription policy, the government had resorted to the strong-arm tactics of the press-gang in order to re-ignite its latest war offensive.

Desperately they tried to legitimize everything on paper first. Letters were sent out in smart headed envelopes, schools and colleges were informed with nonsensical bureaucratic memorandums, demands went flying through cyberspace. But it didn't really make much difference. They weren't going to rustle up an army by any legal means. Draft-dodging is endemic in Angola. Why wouldn't it be?

Caught between a rock and a hard place, the beleaguered population has been part-bored, part-terrified into submission by a war that replays itself with tedious regularity. The East against the West, the Soviets against the Americans, oil versus diamonds, MPLA versus UNITA. Patriotism, it can safely be said, died about 20 years ago with the ghost of Agostinho Neto and - if the atmosphere around my school was anything to go by - it wasn't showing any signs of making a hasty comeback.

Sitting dejectedly in the tatty confines of a fly-blown cafe in downtown Benguela I decided to tackle the issue with Nancy, the school's director, a New Yorker with a kind of Mother Teresa aura and a lone voice of sanity in the wilderness.

The agenda of our little meeting, as ever, read like one of Churchill's wartime cabinet briefings. I wondered if my lower class degree in political science from Bristol Polytechnic could be stretched to cover such disastrous eventualities.

* At least fifteen students have malaria, one seriously (cerebral).

* There is no electricity in the living quarters most evenings.

* Two female students are still missing (kidnapped) thanks to a recent UNITA guerilla attack. We have no idea of their whereabouts.

* There are still a number of bullet holes in the outer school walls that need re-plastering (UNITA again).

* We're a bit low on our food supplies for later in the week. Students may have to miss lunch on Friday, unless we can persuade the World Food Programme boys to lob us a couple of spare sacks of ground maize (unlikely).

And then, relegated shamefully down the list to "Any other business":

* The government, quite possibly, is going to commandeer twenty-six of our best males for forced military service.

"Surely they can't draft the students now", I reasoned as I mulled over the call-up letter just in from the provincial governer and suffered another sip of the bitter galao coffee that served as the cafe's only palpable refreshment. "They were all officially exempted three years ago - right?"

But Nancy had more pressing news. She was worried. A phone-call had come through from one of our "sister" schools in Cabinda. Apparently 20 students had gone into a military recruitment centre for a routine check-up the previous Friday. One week later they had yet to reappear.

Kidnap? Desperation? A violation of human rights? Could the government really steal our students at two weeks' notice? And were those mythical recruitment squads for real? Or were they just a product of our collective war-weary imagination?

It was difficult to speculate without more reliable information. The Angolan army has always been notoriously secretive and corrupt, whichever side of the fence you happen to be shooting from. But getting a truly objective opinion out of anyone who had actually served in it was like getting Slobodan Milosovic to tell the truth.

Unless, of course, you knew a skillfully eloquent ex-propaganda expert. "His name is Mateus," proclaimed Kozonty, pointing to a nervous-looking student sitting patiently in one of the corridors of Benguela's rather down-at-heel university, "Listen to him, amigo. He has something he would like to tell you." Hastily I pulled up a chair.

In 1989 Mateus Barros, then aged seventeen, was taking his customary walk home from school in his native Lobito with three friends. It was a perfectly ordinary day. None of them had any sense of impending danger when a car stopped up ahead and dispatched two men dressed in khaki military uniforms by the side of the road.

In the whirlwind of events that followed he and his friends were seized roughly by the arms, bundled into the car, driven to Benguela airport and then flown directly onto the so-called Centre for Military Recruitment in Luanda. Over the next three weeks the boys were "trained", registered and sorted out into various groups before being split up and unceremoniously relocated to four different parts of Angola. Three of them had to wait two years before they could be reunited with their families again. The fourth wasn't so lucky.

Mateus' stories about rural army life were equally horrific. Life was desperately cheap out in the bush. Untrained and ill-equipped the men regularly had no boots or clothing. Left to their own devices they were forced to sleep outside stealing or begging to obtain food. What's more, UNITA weren't the only enemy. Some men died of malaria or other tropical diseases, others (as described by Mateus in one particularly horrific episode) got taken by crocodiles. It was difficult to keep track. For every 500 men in this rag-tag military machine there were assigned a mere ten officers.

I went back to the school with alarm bells ringing. Things hadn't been progressing too well. Nancy had been waiting for an eleventh hour reprieve from the provincial government as to the fate of our students, but the all-important piece of paper hadn't yet arrived. People were starting to lose hope. Some of the students had already given up and returned back to their home provinces with the intention of finding some other less official way of avoiding the draft. They were scared. Some disappeared. Others just lay low. It didn't look good. The day of reckoning was fast approaching. An ultimatum arrived.

Anyone who had not presented themselves at the military recruitment centre before Thursday February 15th would be in defiance of the law and would be dealt with accordingly.

On the Monday we held a crisis meeting in the Cavaco house that went on late into the night. Nancy, with tears in her eyes, explained to the students that we had tried every different avenue to no avail. The 26 names on the list would have to give themselves up - or face the consequences. The law was an ass, but the law was the law. There was nothing more we could do except wait... and wait.

You get used to waiting in Angola. It's an integral part of the culture. Waiting for the electricity to come back on after two weeks of power-cuts, waiting for the billions of dollars of oil money to filter down to a starving population, waiting for some kind of significant breakthrough in a war that has been going on for time immemorial. The military saga continued. Our students collectively refused to turn themselves in and Nancy agreed to harbour them. Maybe they weren't going to be drafted after all. First the call-up papers were in the post, then a reprieve was on the minister's desk. The plot thickened daily until we didn't know who to believe. And somewhere in the middle of it all I belted around on my bicycle like the investigative reporter I wasn't, trying to make some kind of sense out of all this insanity.

And then it just ended, like all things end in Angola: suddenly, out of the blue, bringing us hope when we least expected it.

Going back to the beach at sunset one evening in late February, my normally peaceful ruminations were interrupted by a high-pitched and distinctive shouting noise. And there in front of me was Kozonty, appearing even more animated than usual, running along the dilapidated promenade with a sheet of paper in his hand and a grin as broad as the thunderous Atlantic on his face.

"Amigo......o amigo, o amigo....? Have you heard? Savimbi morreu. Savimbi is dead".

Jonas Savimbi was the notorious leader of the UNITA guerillas. On February 22nd 2002 he met his nemesis in a shoot-out with government forces in the outlying province of Moxico. His body was paraded in front of the cameras on national television and that night, against the war-scarred back-drop of Benguela, the whole town took to the streets in feisty celebration. The collective relief was palpable, the war apparently over, the dreaded call-up papers a distant memory.

Or were they? One cannot help but be cynical. Two months later, as I packed up my bags and got ready to leave Angola for the last time, the students were returning with cagey enthusiasm to school amidst rumours that the government was about to sign a much-vaunted peace treaty with the ailing UNITA rebels. But underneath the simmering atmosphere of uncertainty that passes for normality in Angola, life seemed to be carrying on pretty much as before.

A covered truck full of drunk, Kalishnakov-wielding soldiers sped noisily along the seafront. A couple of street kids with tins full of black polish waited hopefully outside the crowded marketplace for a pair of shineable shoes. Somewhere 50 miles away a tall and skinny goat-herder strolled inadvertantly across an unmarked minefield and stuck his foot on something hard and metallic.

One day this war's gonna end. But it's not over yet.

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