ABSTRACT
In the autumn of 1992, Angola was plunged back into a murderous civil war, shattering the hopes generated by the Bicesse Peace Accords signed in May 1991 and the brief respite it had provided from nearly three decades of violent conflict. The immediate trigger to war was the decision by the leader of the Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), Jonas Savimbi, to reject the outcome of the first nation-wide democratic elections ever to be held in the country. These had taken place in September 1992 as stipulated in the peace agreement reached the previous year; an agreement that also envisaged what proved to be a wholly unsuccessful attempt to demobilise government and UNITA troops and to create a unified armed forces. By the time the ‘peace process’ appeared to be back on track in late 1994, an estimated 200,000 people had perished and many more had been displaced. Under the so-called Lusaka Protocols signed in November 1994, the government and UNITA renewed earlier pledges to disarm and demobilise, though this time the DDR process would be under the auspices of a large-scale UN peacekeeping operation, UN Angola Verification Mission III (UNAVEM III). Even so, within four years the Lusaka Protocols had gone the same way as the Bicesse Accords and Angola was once again in the thrall of bloody civil war. The war finally came to an end with the death on the battlefield of Jonas Savimbi in early 2002 and the military defeat of UNITA. By the time the nation-wide elections were held again in 2008 – the first since the disastrous elections of 1992 – the country, as Alex Vines and Bereni Oruitemeka note in this volume, had gone ‘from being one of the most protracted conflicts in Africa, [to] one of the most successful economies in sub-Saharan Africa’.1
