Angola's Abused Children

If

children could choose where they were born, there are few worse options than Angola. Consider this: the average Angolan child has a one-in-three chance of dying before the age five from easily treatable diseases that rampage unchecked by a ruined health system. The two who survive have only a one in three chance of attending school — where they'll share a classroom with about 90 other kids, 60 of whom will drop out before completing fifth grade.

But education is an investment in the future, and the very notion of a future may be difficult to grasp in a country riddled with AIDS, starvation and more landmines than any other nation. (By some estimates, there is almost one forgotten landmine or unexploded bomb for every child in Angola.) Almost one-third of those children are refugees, and aid workers estimate that 80 percent of these has come under fire, while at least half have watched someone being blown apart by triggering a landmine. Thousands of them have been forced into the armies of either the government or the rebel UNITA movement, which have been locked into a civil war for the past 27 years — a war that has heaped boundless cruelty upon the nation's children.

The war began in 1975 when the Portuguese colonial regime collapsed, leaving rival independence movements to fight over the spoils. But this was the height of the Cold War, and Angola's civil war was, from the outset, framed and fueled by the geopolitical chess match pitting Washington against Moscow. The government was Marxist, which earned it a steady flow of heavy weaponry from the Soviets, as well as thousands of troops and piloted fighter planes from Cuba. UNITA was anticommunist, and that earned it a steady flow of weapons and financial and political support from the Reagan administration and the apartheid regime in South Africa.

But even after the collapse of communism and the end of apartheid, the war raged on for another 12 years — it had developed a momentum of its own as a primary form of economic activity in a land whose economy had been shattered.

PHOTO ESSAY Photographs of the children by Sebastião Salgado Go to the essay >>

Oil exports funded the government's war, while diamond and timber smuggling financed UNITA's. And even as the war wounded the country and its children, men in uniform knew they had better prospects of filling their bellies as long as they had guns in their hands.

The battlefield killing of UNITA's leader, Jonas Savimbi, last February appears to have finally cleared the way for an agreement to end the war. Foreign observers had long believed Savimbi's recalcitrance had been a major factor in scuttling countless peace initiatives over the past decade. The two parties signed an accord in April 2002 — and hope it creates momentum for peace, disarmament and the eventual rebuilding of the shattered country.

But bitter lessons have taught Angolans to be wary of hope. Too many promises have been broken in the past, too many peace agreements laid waste. Still, Angola's children have an inalienable right to expect better from their parents, and from the wider global community of parents, whose help Angola's parents will require to pull themselves out of a morass of poverty, disease, despair and violence. Wednesday, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan urged world leaders to take responsibility for the fate of the planet's children, and his words held a special poignancy for Angola: "Let us not make children pay for our failures any more."