A vast humanitarian crisis faces Angola as it deals with the terrible legacy of a 30-year civil war. Declan Walsh reports from Luanda
Finally in Angola, there is a reason to hope. A quarter-century of grinding war between the government and UNITA, one of Africa's oldest rebellions, has reduced the country to rubble. Entire towns have been flattened; countless civilians been killed. Four million people - almost a third of the population - have piled into the dirty, overcrowded capital, Luanda.
But since the UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi died in a hail of bullets last February, change has come to Angola with astonishing speed. Within weeks, his troops - starved into submission by the government's "scorched earth" tactics - gave up the fight and started to hand in their guns. Now the guns are silent, the roads are reopening and entire regions, for years accessible only by plane, are humming with the sounds of goods-laden trucks.
Cynics point out that previous peace pacts failed, most notably a UN-led effort in the early 90s. But this time military men, not self-interested politicians, have negotiated the ceasefire. The nightmare, many Angolans are daring to hope, may almost be over.
The celebrations however have been muted by the emergence of a fresh crisis. The sudden rush towards peace has permitted a million people, previously obscured under the veil of war, to emerge. It is a painful, alarming sight.
After months, sometimes years, of being isolated by war, thousands of villagers are straggling out of the bush. They are a pitiful sight - many are starving and reduced to rags. Disease is rampant. Evidence collected by shocked aid workers suggests these are the lucky ones - many others have already died.
International agencies were already caring for two million people. In the last six months that caseload has increased by a further million. According to the UN, it is the most serious humanitarian crisis in the world today.
The worst areas have pockets of famine - remote villages where mortality rates can reach six people in every 10,000 a day, six times the emergency threshold. But it is impossible to collect accurate statistics as much of the country, covered in a web of landmines and broken bridges, remains inaccessible.
At the Trócaire-funded mission hospital in Cubal, in the southern Benguela province, the wards are packed. Exhausted mothers slowly spoon emergency food to their malnourished children. Some are recovering but the recent arrivals look skeletal. A Spanish nun scolds a father for feeding bread to his withered boy - it will slow the absorption of therapeutic milk.
Veronica Ngeleya, breast-feeding her year-old son, explained it was her first hospital visit in three years. "We were just running from one place to another," she explained. She said she had given birth to 12 children, of which nine had died. It was the same story across the ward.
Even before this crisis, Angola had the third worst child mortality rate in the world: one in four children does not live to its fifth birthday.
Food is in perilously short supply. The region is already facing a broader food crisis later this summer. An estimated 13 million people are at risk, mostly in Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi.
Aid funds are drying up. Western countries say they are growing tired of helping out the Angolan government, which made over $3 billion in oil revenues last year but spent practically nothing on its own people. The president, Eduardo dos Santos, and his inner circle have been accused of corruption and funnelling billions of dollars into secret bank accounts.
The pinch is tightening. Up to two weeks ago, donors had pledged just one third of the $241 million the UN says it needs to run humanitarian operations this year. The World Food Programme says it may run out of supplies by September.
"We understand the donors' concerns," said Lise Grande, UN humanitarian co-ordinator in Luanda, "but we are appealing to them to urgently continue funding for now."
Even before this crisis, Angola seemed a forsaken place. It was a war without rules. More than four million people - a third of the population - were forced from their homes. An estimated half million people have died in the war.
Foreign interests had also complicated the fighting - American capitalists and South African racists backed UNITA; Russian and Cuban communists backed the government. After the Cold War, global businessmen bought diamonds from the rebels and oil from the government.
Both sides treated citizens with contempt. Towards the end of the war, the Angolan armed forces demonstrated this through its devastatingly successful "limpeza" strategy.
Troops forced thousands of civilians at gunpoint from their homes in rural areas. They ferried them into towns by helicopter, then burned their fields - cutting off UNITA supply lines and destroying their food stocks.
In February alone, 4,000 people were moved to the eastern town of Luena. The aid agencies became divided on the issue. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) refused to build an additional health centre to accommodate the new arrivals, arguing it would imply tacit support for the government strategy. Other agencies said they simply had no choice but to help.
The existing health centre was "awful, dirty" and "people were dying on the spot", admitted Kurt de Block of MSF, but his head office ordered him not to move. "I had explicit instructions not to expand our involvement in this structure because this was a forced displacement," he said. Other agencies took a different view. "It was clear that they were going ahead with the strategy, whether we were here or not," said one aid worker.
"Limpeza" was brutally effective in breaking UNITA. According to a senior UN official in Luena, some of the rebel generals were "clinically malnourished" when they came to negotiate a peace plan in March.
Some 80,000 UNITA troops and 250,000 relatives are quartered in 34 demobilisation camps around the country.
Some 5,000 UNITA troops are to be integrated into the government forces; the rest are destined for civilian life.
For many civilians battered by the war, it is too early to be sure of peace.
Jeorge Chisola lost her husband to UNITA gunfire and then lost a leg to one of its landmines. Now she earns a little money to support her six children by baking bread in a project run by Jesuit Refugee Services, a Trócaire partner, in Luena.
"We don't know what is in the hearts of presidents," she said. "This Angolan war is for business. Savimbi's children are abroad - maybe they can restart the fighting?"