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Angola Human Rights
Angola was a signatory to several international human
rights
conventions, including the Convention on the Political
Rights of
Women of 1953, the Convention on the Elimination of All
Forms of
Discrimination against Women, the Geneva Conventions of
1949
Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War and the
Protection of
Civilian Persons in Time of War, and the Convention and
Protocol
Relating to the Status of Refugees of 1967. However, as of
1988
Angola was not a signatory to the Slavery Conventions of
1926 and
1956; the Genocide Convention of 1948; or the
International
Conventions on Civil and Political Rights and on Economic,
Social,
and Cultural Rights of 1966.
Although Angola had acceded to such conventions, and
its
Constitution guarantees most human rights, actual
observance was
subject to severe abridgments, qualifications, and
contrary
practices. A human rights organization, Freedom House,
consistently
gave Angola the lowest ratings on its scale of political
rights and
civil liberties, and The Economist World Human Rights
Guide
assigned Angola an overall rating of "poor." Amnesty
International
and the United States Department of State also issued
reports
highly critical of human rights practices in Angola.
The lack or disregard of international human rights
standards
in Angola was evident in several respects. Arbitrary
arrest and
imprisonment without due process were among the most
common abuses.
Although Angolan law limited the amount of time one could
be
detained without charge, there did not appear to be a
specific
period within which a suspect had to be tried, and as many
as
several hundred political prisoners may have been detained
for
years without trial. The regional military councils had
broad
authority to impose restrictions on the movement of people
and
material, to requisition supplies and labor without
compensation,
and to try crimes against state security. The BPV also had
functions relating to maintenance of public order, the
exercise of
which was not subject to normal judicial safeguards and
due
process.
Constitutional protections of the inviolability of the
home and
privacy of correspondence were routinely ignored by
government
authorities, who made arbitrary home searches, censored
correspondence, and monitored private communications.
Arbitrary
executions of political prisoners, especially those
accused of
supporting UNITA or perpetrating "economic crimes,"
occurred
despite international protests and periodic
reorganizations of the
security services. The government maintained strict
censorship, did
not tolerate criticism or opposition, and denied freedom
of
assembly to any group that was not sanctioned or sponsored
by the
MPLA-PT. UNITA alleged that compulsory military service
was meted
out as punishment by the Ministry of State Security and
the BPV.
Furthermore, the government did not permit the
International
Committee of the Red Cross access to persons arrested for
reasons
related to internal security or military conflict.
Amnesty International also reported numerous instances
of
torture during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Ministry of
State
Security officials were reported to have permitted or
sanctioned
torture of criminals and political prisoners by such
methods as
beating, whipping, and electric shock. Political detainees
arrested
for offenses such as criticizing government policies were
deprived
of food and water for several days and subjected to
frequent and
severe beatings during interrogation and confinement.
Although
allegations of torture and mistreatment remained common in
the mid1980s , such practices did not appear to have been
systematic.
* *
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There is voluminous material available on Angola's
military
history and contemporary national security affairs. The
Angolan
independence struggle is thoroughly examined in John A.
Marcum's
two-volume The Angolan Revolution. The civil war of
1975-76
is covered by some of the excellent essays in Southern
Africa
since the Portuguese Coup, edited by John Seiler. The
external
dimension of the civil war is treated in Charles K.
Ebinger's
Foreign Intervention in Civil War, Arthur Jay
Klinghoffer's
The Angolan War, and Ernest Harsch and Tony
Thomas's
Angola: The Hidden History of Washington's War.
The UNITA movement has been extensively studied as
well. One
sympathetic treatment is Fred Bridgland's Jonas
Savimbi. Two
excellent politico-military analyses of the UNITA
insurgency are
Donald J. Alberts's "Armed Struggle in Angola" in
Insurgency in
the Modern World and James W. Martin III's unpublished
doctoral
dissertation, "UNITA Insurgency in Angola."
The human cost of the war--at least in terms of
refugees--is
well covered by the U.S. Committee for Refugees'
Uprooted
Angolans. The devastating economic impact of the
protracted war
is most fully and systematically examined in Tony Hodges's
Angola to the 1990s.
A standard reference work on military forces and order
of
battle data is The Military Balance, issued
annually by the
International Institute for Strategic Studies.
Supplementary
information is available in the annual Defense and
Foreign
Affairs Handbook, specialized annuals such as
Jane's
Fighting Ships, Jane's Weapon Systems, and
Jane's All
the World's Aircraft, and Combat Fleets of the
World,
edited by Jean Labayle Couhat and Bernard Prézelin. Other
useful
reference works are John M. Andrade's World Police and
Paramilitary Forces and Michael J.H. Taylor's
Encyclopedia
of the World's Air Forces. Statistics and other
information on
arms transfers, military spending, and armed forces are
contained
in the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency's
annual
World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers and
the
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute's annual
SIPRI
Yearbook.
Internal security and human rights conditions are
evaluated
annually in the Amnesty International Report and
the United
States Department of State's Country Reports on Human
Rights
Practices. Additional worldwide human rights reviews
are
Charles Humana's The Economist World Human Rights
Guide and
Raymond D. Gastil's Freedom in the World.
Finally, specialized current news sources and surveys
are
indispensable to research on contemporary national
security
affairs. The most relevant and accessible include the
annual
Africa Contemporary Record and periodicals such as
Africa
Research Bulletin, Africa Confidential,
Africa
Diary, Defense and Foreign Affairs Weekly,
Jane's
Defence Weekly, and International Defense
Review. The
most useful sources are African Defence Journal and
its
sister publication, Afrique Défense. (For further
information and complete citations,
see
Bibliography.)
Data as of February 1989
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