From Africa Recovery, Vol.11#3 (February 1998), Baobab page

Hoping for peace: a soldier's story

By Djibril Diallo

Domingues Manuel Sampaio is certain about one thing. He wants to have nothing more to do with war. "Nothing will make me go back to fighting again," he told a group of international journalists who visited Angola recently. "Not money or coercion," he said through an interpreter.

Mr. Sampaio is part of a growing group of Angolans who have thrown their weight behind the 1994 Lusaka Peace Accord, which remains the basis for ending the decades-old civil war that has charred the lives of people all over Angola.

At 23, Mr. Sampaio has become a veteran. Wizened by almost a decade of life in the bush, he credits his being alive today to an accident that cost him one arm. He was barely 14 when he was drafted into the Angolan army. Like thousands of other child soldiers on either side of the civil war, his childhood was lost in the bush in a war that pitted the former Marxist government against the rebel UNITA movement. For Mr. Sampaio and his colleagues, many of them also child soldiers, UNITA was the enemy, to be killed on sight.

Two years ago, his military adventure came to an end. His unit had stopped to rest during a routine patrol when a mortar fell nearby, triggering a buried land mine. When the dust settled, his right arm was gone, severed in the explosion. But he was lucky. Many of his unit fared worse. The force of the explosion was enough to turn their patrol vehicle into a blazing wreck and the other soldiers, dazed by the sudden impact, were unable to get clear of the vehicle in time. Most were burnt to death. Mr. Sampaio was saved only because he had wandered a short distance away from the vehicle.

After spending several months in hospital, his wound healed sufficiently for him to be moved into a training centre for war-disabled people on the outskirts of Luanda, Angola's capital. The centre, run by the government with support from the UN Development Programme (UNDP), the International Labour Organization and a number of other agencies, provides vocational training to disabled soldiers, giving them new skills to help them secure gainful employment.

At the centre, Mr. Sampaio joined more than 100 other disabled former soldiers who were already receiving vocational training. Early in life, he had set his mind on becoming an auto mechanic and owning his own workshop in Luanda, but he has had to settle for a course in tailoring at the centre. Still, he is happy and hopes for a brighter future.

He is confident that with the implementation of the peace accord, the climate in Angola will be just right for the new life on which he has decided to embark. "When I leave here, I want to open a small business, a micro-business," he told the journalists. "I want to buy some more machines and set up a little shop to employ people, and I hope, with that, my future will look bright."

Like Mr. Sampaio, many Angolans, young and old, are pinning their high hopes on the success of the peace process. For them, an end to the fighting and the return of peace is the only way out of the years of hardship, death and deprivation forced on millions of ordinary people by the civil war. Peace will also create the appropriate conditions for an onslaught on one of Angola's most serious problems -- the millions of landmines scattered across the country.

The programmes run by the training centre for disabled former soldiers are part of a concerted attempt to tackle some of the most insidious effects of landmines. Other ongoing efforts include a National Mine Clearance Programme which aims to strengthen Angola's demining capacity. Also supported by UNDP, the $25 mn programme focuses on capacity-building at the Angolan Institute for the Removal of Obstacles and Explosive Ordinance.

Restoration of peace in Angola means that these programmes can continue and that they can be expanded to those parts of the country that have been under UNITA control, with the possibility of reaching greater numbers of those in need. That is why people like Mr. Sampaio are so determined that the peace process must succeed.

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