The choice of the Angolan capital Luanda to lead the global observance of this year's World Habitat Day provoked controversy among housing and human rights organizations.

In a joint letter to the Executive Director of The United Nations Human Settlements Programme UN-HABITAT, who organized the event, Amnesty International, the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions, the Habitat International Coalition and Human Rights Watch have all voiced their concerns about the choice of venue.

The Angolan government has carried out repeated mass forced evictions of its people to facilitate urban development projects and the construction of luxury housing, leaving tens of thousands living in poverty.

Other human rights violations committed in the course of these forced evictions include arbitrary arrests and detentions, torture and ill-treatment and harassment of human rights defenders.

World Habitat Day is organized by the United Nations (UN) to raise awareness of the human right to adequate housing for all and to remind the world of its collective responsibility for the future of the human habitat.

Known popularly as World Housing and Land Rights Day, it has been held every year on the first Monday of October since 1986. Last year, the main celebrations were held in The Hague. In previous years, they have been hosted by Naples, Jakarta, Nairobi and Dubai.

The Global Observance in Angola will take place at the Talatona International Conference Centre, attended by local and international participants from all sectors including governments, municipalities, parliamentarians and the private sector. Amnesty International has expressed concern however, at reports indicating that civil society has been excluded from the UN Habitat ceremony. Events will also be held all over the world.

The theme of the day this year is Harmonious Cities – "where everyone and every culture is at home." The UN chose the theme to "raise awareness about the problems of rapid urbanization, its impact on the environment, the growth of slums, and the urbanisation of poverty as more and more people teem into towns and cities looking for a better life.

"In an age where for the first time half of humanity is now living in towns and cities, the quest for adequate shelter for all along with basic services such as water, sanitation, electricity, decent health care, safe streets, etc., is more urgent than ever, especially in developing countries," according to a statement on the UN-HABITAT website.

"There should also be no illusion that cities have the greatest impact on the environment and climate change. And where they are poorly managed, with weak governance structures, it is their citizens and their surrounds that suffer most."

Luanda was chosen to lead this year's celebrations because it was hoped that this would "show the world how the country, after years of conflict, is progressing in the establishment of harmonious cities through improvements in urban infrastructure and services, and a new urban development strategy."

Amnesty International and the other organizations who sent the letter "recognize the efforts of some members of Angola's government to promote more open participation and decentralized governance, as well as steps to promote the recognition of the right to adequate housing through the enactment of land and housing laws and a housing project to provide social housing for youths in the country. However, such good practices do not seem to have taken hold, nor do they seem to enjoy sufficient support among Angola’s policy makers."

The letter continues "unless and until the government of Angola takes these requisite steps to address the widely reported violations of the right to adequate housing and other human rights in the context of widespread forced evictions, it is inappropriate to raise Angola as an example and focus of World Habitat Day/World Housing and Land Rights Day. By so doing, both the government of Angola and UN-Habitat add insult to the injury committed against Angola’s thousands affected by forced evictions."

The organizations have called on UN-Habitat to use the occasion of World Habitat Day in Luanda to urge the government of Angola to comply with its obligations under international law, take prompt, effective steps to stop and prevent forced evictions.

Amnesty International

The prospect of Angola holding free and fair parliamentary elections in September is diminishing, according to a recent report by Human Rights Watch (HRW), a watchdog organisation.

Georgette Gagnon, HRW's Africa director, said in a statement that with "less than a month before elections, it's clear Angolans aren't able to campaign free from intimidation or pressure and unless things change now, Angolans won't be able to cast their votes freely."

The poll for the National Assembly is scheduled for 5 September and will be first elections since the combined presidential and parliamentary poll during a brief cessation in the civil war, in 1992, after which the conflict reignited over electoral disagreements.

Peace was achieved in 2002 in the wake of the killing of Jonas Savimbi, leader of the anti-government National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA).

Presidential elections are scheduled for 2009 and will coincide with the anniversary marking 30 years of rule by President Jose Eduardo dos Santos in one of Africa's main oil-exporting countries. No date for the presidential poll has been set.

Dos Santos said earlier this month “In this competition (elections) there are no enemies, there are political opponents only, with different political programes that will seek to attract the highest number of votes to conquer the power and exert it with legitimacy.”

However, Gagnon said "Angolans need to see improvements now if September's poll is to have a chance of meeting the basic requirements of a free election."

In a statement HRW said Angola's MPLA government was failing to adhere to electoral guidelines established by the regional body, the Southern African Development Community (SADC), of which Angola is a member.

Angola's poll will be the third major election in the SADC region this year, and while Botswana's elections passed off without a hitch, the SADC remains embroiled in the fallout from Zimbabwe's elections, which were declared as falling short of the body's electoral standards.

HRW conducted research in the Angolan capital, Luanda, the Cabinda enclave, and the central provinces of Huambo, Bie and Benguela, between March and June 2008, and found the government was "failing to fully ensure the right to free elections, and other rights critical to a fair poll, including the freedoms of expression and assembly".

The rights body said incidents of political violence were occurring, mainly in the country's rural areas, which had been fiercely contested during the three decades of civil war between the MPLA and UNITA.

"Patterns of violence include sporadic assaults by local MPLA supporters, sometimes involving traditional authorities and local MPLA leaders, against local UNITA party members and their property and party symbols," the HRW said. Traditional leaders in the provinces were also increasingly being targeted by the MPLA in a bid to thwart UNITA's political activities.

Citing an example of this trend, the HRW said: "On May 30 (2008), a group of 30 MPLA supporters beat the traditional leader, Pedro Pomba, in the village of Bongue Kandala [Kapupa commune, Cubal Municipality, Benguela] together with five UNITA members, on the grounds that he allowed a UNITA flag to fly in the village two days before."

Cabinda

Despite a 2006 peace agreement signed with a faction of the separatist group, the Liberation Front of the Enclave of Cabinda (FLEC), HRW said "a low-intensity, but still violent, separatist conflict and heightened military presence continues in the province."
The rights group said government intimidation, military detention, and restrictions on freedom of expression and assembly "significantly undermined" any chance of free and fair elections in the restive province that is the source of most of Angola's oil.

Earlier this year a manifesto was signed by thousands of Cabindan residents calling for dialogue to solve Cabinda's claim to self-determination, and promote debate on issues concerning autonomy.

"No such discussions have occurred and there is little space for expressing such opinions," HRW noted after finding that such expressions attracted the ire of the authorities.

"In August 2007, Mateus Massinga, the provincial secretary of the opposition Frente para a Democracia (Front for Democracy), was sentenced to five months in prison, suspended for two years, for 'insubordination and incitement of violence' after attempting to distribute a news release supporting autonomy," HRW said.

Electoral oversight

The rights body said the National Electoral Commission (CNE), the 11-member oversight body for elections, chaired by the deputy president of the Supreme Court, was not independent and the "majority of the CNE members are effectively appointed by the ruling party."

Attempts by civil society to access the voters' register, compiled by a government agency between November 2006 and May 2008, to conduct an independent audit have been denied. "The central voter register seems to be property of the CIPE (Inter-Ministerial Commission for the Electoral Process) and the government," HRW commented.

A presenter at the state television broadcaster was suspended after admitting publicly to MPLA interference in its editorial policy, and legal proceedings against the independent media have accelerated.

"In June 2008, a court sentenced the director of the independent weekly newspaper, Semanario Angolense (Angola Weekly), Felisberto Graça Campos, to a six-month prison sentence and ordered him to pay US$90,000 in damages following his conviction in three separate libel cases filed by government officials, which had been pending for years," HRW said.

A recent government press statement said all political "parties and coalitions will have an air time for radio and TV broadcasting, to expose their messages and present their government programmes and their electoral manifestoes."

IRIN 

Widespread flooding in southern Angola has been blamed for a surge in cholera, with 4,500 cases of the waterborne disease reported this year, and 150 fatalities.

According to Angola's health ministry, there were 590 new cases in the week running up to 31 March, up from the 503 cases reported the previous week.

About half of the infections were in Angola's southern provinces of Cunene and Huila, which have been hard hit by flooding.  According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, over 81,400 people had been affected by the floods, with more than 56,000 displaced.

"The flooding caught everyone by surprise," said Adam Berthoud, Regional Public Health Advisor for the development agency Oxfam: limited access to the affected areas also slowed assistance.

"Oxfam has been working with the Angolan Red Cross, [UN children's fund] UNICEF and government stakeholders to ensure access to clean water, sanitation and key hygiene items such as soap and buckets," Bertohoud told IRIN.

Floodwaters were expected to recede in the coming weeks, but "health risks will escalate", he warned.

"Stagnant ponds create further breeding sites for malaria-carrying mosquitoes; wells and latrines have been contaminated with floodwater, and local communities are cut off from their usual water sources. Without clean water families hit by the floods are at serious risk of death and disease."

A persistent problem

Cholera is an intestinal infection causing acute diarrhoea and vomiting and, if left untreated, can cause death from dehydration within 24 hours. It is easily treatable with rehydration salts.

Berthoud said recurrent cholera outbreaks have underlined deep-seated problems in Angola related to poor sanitation and hygiene practices, and the lack of access to potable water.

"The government of Angola, which faced serious national cholera outbreaks in both 2006 and 2007, has made significant strides in its cholera response capacity through building up contingency plans and stocks," he noted.

According to the World Health Organisation, a year-long cholera outbreak that began in February 2006 resulted in 70,000 reported cases and nearly 3,000 deaths.

Angola, sub-Saharan Africa's second largest oil producer after Nigeria, is currently in the middle of a multibillion-dollar reconstruction boom fuelled by record high oil prices. Yet, despite its oil wealth, most citizens still subsist on less than US$1 a day.

Source: IRIN

Maria Antónia* began to wonder about her husband's frequent trips to neighbouring South Africa, especially when he was away for 15 days without contacting her on one occasion. She decided to investigate whether he was going to South Africa to see another woman, but discovered that he was going to get antiretroviral (ARV) medication because he was HIV positive.

Miguel André's wife died in 2001, officially from typhoid fever, but before she died she told her child's godmother that she had AIDS. She never found the courage to tell her husband, but the news spread and soon everyone in Benguela, a coastal town in central Angola, was talking about it. André was the last to find out that his wife had been HIV positive.

Stories like these are repeated time and again in Angola, but fear of a partner's reaction, fear of being abandoned, fear of discrimination, even fear of shame, are just some of the reasons that prevent people living with HIV from telling those dear to them.

Many only discover the HIV status of their partners after they have died, and then learn that they are also infected, but it is often hard to know who infected whom, or how. An estimated 2.5 percent of Angola's 16 million people are living with HIV/AIDS.

To tell or not to tell?

The debate in Angola about the role of healthcare workers in disclosing the HIV status of their patients has been heated. On the one hand there are those who believe that health workers should do their utmost to find the spouses of patients living with HIV, as was once the case with syphilis, and there should be compulsory notification. Others say doctor-patient confidentiality should be preserved at all costs.

António Coelho, executive secretary of the Network of AIDS Service Organisations (known by the Portuguese acronym Anaso), feels there should not be mandatory notification of spouses, but rather awareness-raising to enable HIV-positive patients to tell their partners.

He stressed that by law "infected persons have the duty to inform those people with whom they have or intend to have sexual relations about their serological status."

But Catarina Saldanha, executive secretary of Mwenho, an association of HIV-positive women, believes that doctors should inform their patients' spouses.

Saldanha, who is HIV positive, told IRIN/PlusNews this was to protect the partners of people living with HIV, because the network of sexual relations is often not restricted to spouses, but extends to previous partners and extra-spousal relations.

She said some doctors in Angola were already doing this: they told patients that they could continue treatment only if their spouse or partner also came to the next appointment.

The country's network of people living with HIV/AIDS is calling for a compromise. "First, the doctor should exhaust every possibility of changing the infected person's behaviour. If this doesn't work, the doctor should make his position clear regarding intentional infection - that it is a crime punishable by law," said Noé Mateus, the network's executive secretary.

"But confidentiality can and should be discarded as soon as the physician realises that the infected person's behaviour places his or her spouse or others at risk of becoming infected."

The mysterious cassette tape

UNAIDS official Roberto Campos said confidentiality should be maintained in all instances, without exception. "People have to have the sovereignty to reveal their serological status to whomever they wish. They and they alone have this right, under any and all circumstances."

Campos stressed that because of the extremely high levels of stigma still associated with HIV/AIDS, doctors could place patients at risk of being publicly condemned by revealing their seropositivity. "Health professionals must be competent enough to give patients all the information they need to make the decision," he added.

António Feijó, the director of Hospital Esperança ("Hope" in Portuguese), a healthcare facility for HIV patients in the capital, Luanda, said doctors should encourage their patients to tell. "Notifying a patient's spouse about his or her serological status cannot be decided in an arbitrary manner ... It's immoral to treat one of them and leave the other's life at risk."

When she was 17, Suzana* married her first boyfriend. After 25 years of marriage her husband died in her arms, but she only learned that he had died of an AIDS-related illness when, during the funeral, she heard a cassette tape on which he confessed to being HIV-positive.

Her husband had given the cassette to a nephew, who thought it contained his wishes regarding his estate and it would therefore be appropriate to play the tape at the funeral.

With clearer rules covering confidentiality and HIV, the final message left by Suzana's husband could have been a message of love, or even about his estate, rather than a painful confession of his positive status.

Human rights activists in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have accused their government and that of Angola of turning a blind eye to reports of widespread rape and other abuses of DRC migrant workers in neighbouring Angola.

“The situation seems to be getting worse but the Angolan and Congolese authorities we have repeatedly approached show no political will to end the situation,” said Floribert Chebeya, who heads Voice of the Voiceless, a DRC NGO.

Amigo Gonde, president of the Human Rights Defence Association, was equally critical of the DRC government. "Rape is used here in Congo as in other countries as a psychological weapon to defeat the enemy and humiliate ... Similarly, by these acts, Angola wants to reinforce the idea that Congolese people are and should remain inferior.

"The DRC government has an obligation to protect its citizens both on its own soil and abroad but instead our leaders display weakness when it comes to talking to other countries, especially Angola, where it plays the beggar," he added, noting the abuses had been going on since 2004.

The issue gained widespread media attention on 5 December when Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), an international humanitarian organisation, released a statement denouncing what it described as “the pervasive and systematic use of rape and violence perpetrated by the Angolan army during the expulsions of Congolese migrants working in diamond mines in the Angolan province of Lunda Norte”.

“Women are systematically raped by several soldiers, some of them raped in front of their children. This abhorrent practice continues and is repeated over several days as they are transported to the border,” MSF director of operations Meinie Nicolai stated.

The head of the Belgian branch of MSF in DRC, Josep Prior, told IRIN that the aim of the “rape and violence against Congolese [was to] make them leave” Angola.

The MSF statement included testimonies from 100 women who claimed to have been violated several times during their expulsion from Angola.

"They are often gang-raped by Angolan soldiers, one after another, often repeatedly and sometimes in front of other expellees," said Fabienne de Laval, MSF-Belgium's field coordinator in Kasai Occidental province, one of the border areas where tens of thousands of those expelled from Angola have been arriving.

"In Kamako village, we have organised a place to take care of women who come with major difficulties, such as sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV/AIDS, and other complications," said De Laval.

Some women said they had been forced to leave their Angolan husbands behind after being threatened by soldiers.

"What we denounce is not the expulsions per se, but the systematic practice of putting people in police cells, sometimes for a whole week, raping them every day, leaving them without food or water, and sometimes transporting them in lorries where they are again subjected to violence," said Prior.

Many people die en route and their corpses are thrown into the bush, asserted the MSF report. According to testimonies quoted by Prior, men, women and children had died of starvation.

Figures compiled by the UN show that 44,000 Congolese have been expelled from diamond mining areas of Angola since January 2007. An estimated 400,000 DRC citizens still live in those Angolan areas despite the problems. Activists have accused the Angolan military of committing the same abuses on DRC territory.

Asked about the MSF report, Angola's ambassador to DRC, Mawete Joao Baptista, would not comment.

DRC human rights activists held marches in July to denounce the evictions and violations and handed protest memoranda to both the Angolan embassy and the DRC authorities.

Angolan authorities began to expel illegal immigrants from the country in December 2003, targeting illegal workers in its diamond mines near the border with the DRC.

The number of people affected by a mystery illness that has already claimed the lives of 4 children on the outskirts of the Angolan capital, Luanda, has climbed to 284. Contaminated food is a suspect but authorities are still in the dark as to the exact cause.

"More than 80 percent [of cases] are children, and the four deaths that happened were kids," Vita Vemba, Luanda's provincial health director, told IRIN. The children who had succumbed to the illness were already weakened by high levels of malnutrition and in one case the child had pneumonia.

"When patients complained about a dry mouth, drowsiness and a foul smell in the air we started to think about the possibility of poisoning," Vemba said, and the authorities were currently following up the poison lead because most patients had reported eating maizemeal before falling ill. "We now think the [maizemeal] was stocked next to pesticides, or these people were exposed to some unknown chemical substance."

On average, 20 new cases per day have been reported since Monday. The first cases were observed in early October by a traditional healer in Cacuaco, about 20km north of Luanda, and the authorities were alerted by mid-October, when the Municipal Hospital started registering patients. Approximately 208,000 people live in the coastal municipality.

The symptoms include weakness, drowsiness, muscle spasms, a confused state of mind, dizziness, and difficulty in walking and speaking, but the culprit disease has yet to be identified.

Initial testing has ruled out the possibility of allergic reaction, and bacterial and viral infection, Vemba said.

A World Health Organisation (WHO) statement on Tuesday said it had deployed "an international team of experts in clinical toxicology, epidemiology and environmental health, as well as laboratory personnel, to assist the Ministry of Health in the ongoing investigation" and that "experts from the [US] Centres for Disease Control (CDC), based in Luanda, have also offered support for the investigation."

Samples of blood, urine and faeces had been taken for testing. Balbina Felix, the WHO's disease control officer in Luanda, said these had been sent to the CDC in Atlanta, US, and to testing facilities in France, the UK and Germany. It was still unclear as to when results could be expected.

An undiagnosed disease that has affected 200 and left at least four dead in Cacuaco, about 20km north of the Angolan capital, Luanda, has health organisations scrambling to identify the illness.

The first cases were reported in early October. "What we know is that new cases keep arriving at the hospital," Balbina Felix, disease control officer at the World Health Organisation (WHO) in Luanda, told IRIN.

According to the Municipal Hospital in Cacuaco, 20 new cases per day have been reported since Monday, with symptoms that include weakness, drowsiness, muscular spasms, a confused state of mind, dizziness and difficulty to walk and speak. Approximately 208,000 people live in the coastal municipality.

Felix described the illness as a "clinical neurological disorder", and dismissed fever or cholera as possible culprits, but health organisations are still in the dark. Identifying the disease has become a priority, to help prevent further transmission and treat fatally ill patients.

On Monday, a delegation comprised of Health ministry officials, Cacuaco municipal officials, and representatives of WHO, the US-based Centre for Disease Control (CDC) and the Angolan military health services visited affected areas.

Over 2,700 Angolans succumbed to cholera in 2006, and the waterborne disease has already killed over 400 people this year. In 2005 the country experienced the largest-ever recorded outbreak of Marburg haemorrhagic fever, a rare but fatal disease caused by a virus from the same family as the Ebola virus.

A WHO statement released on Tuesday said the organisation had deployed "an international team of experts in clinical toxicology, epidemiology and environmental health, as well as laboratory personnel, to assist the Ministry of Health in the ongoing investigation" and "experts from the Centres for Disease Control (CDC), based in Luanda, have also offered support for the investigation."

The teams would "support the Ministry of Health ... provide advice on case- and risk-management, and identify laboratories for analysis of human and environmental samples to investigate the cause and the source of the disease". According to Felix, samples have already been sent to the CDC in Atlanta, US, and to testing facilities in France, the UK and Germany.

The Ministry of Health has advised the population to observe individual and collective measures, particularly related to hygiene, to avoid risk and report to the nearest health facility at the first sign of illness.

The present situation in Angola gives a lot of opportunities to solve the difficulties in the country. The main way out which can be found is using some new oil field, there is a window for the government to use the additional bonus to make the adjustments which are needed to get out of the circle mortgaging rising amounts of current manufacturing for future debt service. The overvalued exchange rate worsened in those areas which produce export products.

To raise the economy of the country it is necessary to use those areas of production which were not yet used. It means that except oil industry the country needs something else. The hardest hit area in Angola is agriculture together with connected handing out and transforming industries. It is historically developed, that Angola has always been the agricultural country and the biggest part of labor forces was concentrated in the fields.

This means that from the point of view of both poverty and equal opportunity, there is influential case that can minimize overvaluation to stay away from the penalizing of agricultural area. Another good idea is the rehabilitation of the transport system of the country, as well as investments in research and extension of agriculture.

The government should pay much attention to many other areas of industries, which can be profitable and use all possible chances to increase the economy of the country, which was in full decrease after the post-war period.

Investment in human capital is one more area high returns can be made. In addition, there are a lot of factors that complicate the development of industry on the proper level: it is lack of public services such as water and sanitation, electricity and other services. All these factors are grave restrictions to industrial investment and treatment, which are so necessary in such situation.

About the Author
Ann Sammers is a member of a support team at Editing Services. Having completed a number of Technology courseworks himself, Ann uses her knowledge to provide individualized customer support to students.

Luanda Sanatorium Hospital, which has a reputation as being Angola's leading tuberculosis (TB) treatment centre, should be a place of relief and recovery for patients with the disease in the capital, Luanda. But with a lack of protective materials for healthcare workers and crumbling infrastructure, the hospital has become a dangerous breeding ground for TB, infecting both staff and patients.

A survey of 119 of the 400 workers at the healthcare facility found that 70 percent of them were infected by Mycobacterium TB, the bacterium that causes the disease. One in three of these workers will develop active TB and become infectious. "We have workers [that are] infected and sick," the hospital's clinical director, Afonso Wete, admitted.

The survey participants also agreed to be tested for the HI virus. "It's clear that there are some cases of HIV, which are being followed up and put on medication," he told IRIN/PlusNews.

When someone's immune system becomes compromised, for instance by HIV, people infected with TB bacteria are likely to develop an active form of the disease or be more susceptible to infection. TB is a leading cause of death among people who are HIV-positive.

Precarious conditions

Twenty-seven years of civil war led to the almost complete destruction of services and infrastructure in Angola. When hostilities ended in 2002, the country experienced rapid growth, mainly in the oil sector, where exports have grown by 90 percent. Despite one of the highest growth rates in Africa, many of its services and much of its infrastructure are still in poor shape.

The precarious conditions at the Luanda Sanatorium Hospital, now 40 years old, were a primary cause of the vicious cycle of TB infection. The overcrowded hospital, with dilapidated walls and cracked floors, has never been renovated.

The sewage system and basic hygiene measures practically do not exist. "There's a lot of contact between patients and workers," Wete said. "Even those working in administration are affected because they are in permanent contact with the patients."

Poor bio-safety was another aggravating factor, as healthcare workers had limited access to disposable gloves, masks and other materials. Recent studies have shown that more than 16 percent of hospital infections in Angola were caused by unhygienic conditions.

Ana Joana, who has been working at the Luanda Sanatorium Hospital for 18 years, is one of the staff members with TB. She takes care of the hygiene needs of patients, principally those who are most debilitated.

"I give them a bath, feed them when they can't feed themselves, wash their clothes; and I do all of this without a mask or gloves to protect myself," she said.

Joana's family has also been tested for TB and four of her grandchildren have the disease. "We are infected with tuberculosis, and the cause of contagion was right here," she said.

Roberto Brant Campos, a partnership and social mobilisation consultant for UNAIDS, said another obstacle was the absence of coordinated action to address the two epidemics. "There are also few measures taken for both TB and HIV at the same time."

Wete acknowledged that the situation was alarming. "If urgent measures aren't taken, workers run the risk of catching the disease."

The rates of TB co-infection with HIV at the hospital are about 29 percent among interned patients and 17 percent among ambulatory patients. Campos pointed out that there were few data available on the co-infection of HIV and TB in Angola.

To make matters worse, discrimination in Angolan society made it difficult for people to step forward and be tested for TB. "As a culture here, people tend not to go to the hospital; they stay in churches, they go to traditional healers," Wete said.

"People with TB are not diagnosed in time. When they get to the hospital they are already at an advanced stage of the disease, and that's why the mortality rate is extremely high."