`The worst place on earth to live'

From the air Luanda looks much like any other African city, a mix of colonial buildings and high rise housing, the streets teeming with people and vehicles. This is Angola, described by the UN executive director of the World Food Programme Catherine Bertini as `the worst place on earth for a human being to live."

But you don't really see this from the air. It is only when you land in Angola's capital city you notice the rusting husks of military aircraft at the side of the airfield, the run down, refuse strewn airport with stray dogs running across the tarmac. Or the terrible poverty, the cratered roads, and the number of people with missing limbs.

Statistics from Angola are terrible. Some 200 people a day die as a result of malnutrition. The average life expectancy is 41. A third of all children die by the age of five.

This is the country where Princess Diana launched her anti-mine crusade. Since her death it has surpassed Cambodia as the most mined country on earth, estimates vary as high as 20 million mines or almost two per head of population.

Not surprisingly with the countryside so heavily mined, agriculture has collapsed. Famine is averted on a daily basis only by the emergency efforts of foreign aid agencies. In the cities highly priced imports are financed by whatever oil revenue is not spent on mines or arms.

In the countryside where the rule of rebel leader Jonas Savimbi holds sway, the arms are financed by sales of diamonds - despite a global ban on trading in Angolan diamonds. This is the tragedy of Angola: the country is magnificently wealthy in assets. There are diamonds, oil and coffee.

In perspective, there were some 600,000 refugees from the Kosovo conflict during the fighting for four months of this year. There are an estimated 1.9 million refugees from the fighting in the Angolan conflict which has raged virtually continuously for 25 years since independence.

The country got off to a shaky start. A coup in Lisbon in April 1974 saw a hasty dismantling of Portuguese colonial rule in favour of the Armed Forces Movement (the MFA) liberation army. But the movement quickly split and it has been a fatal cycle of civil war almost continually since.

Coming from the airport crowds of men and women walking through the traffic are selling everything from plugs to food. Almost everything in Angola is imported and expensive. With the rebels in control of the countryside outside the western seaboard, the agricultural production has completely broken down.

The people crowding the streets in Luanda have mainly come from the outlying cities of Huambo, Kuito and Malange in part to avoid Unita raids, in part to avoid starvation.

"The centre keeps disappearing" explains Mark Allison, Concern's director in Angola. "Everybody is moving off the land towards the provincial cities. In the cities those who could afford it have got out and moved to Luanda and in Luanda those with any money have got out and gone to Portugal."

The newly arrived live in barios, little more than mud huts surrounding the city. Many have been maimed by the mines - estimates vary but most sources suggest there are somewhere between 15 and 20 million mines in Angola. "They are literally hopping around looking for food" says Mark.

The single story suburban villas are mostly in very bad repair, where they are not they are sheltered behind high walls and tall metal gates. Often they are guarded by private militia.

Everything is covered with a good coating of fine red dust, blown up from the ground. Cars that are not washed at least once a day look wrecked and, perhaps because labour is available, everywhere you look somebody is washing a car. Even outside the most run down villas a toyota will be gleaming.

Although the MPLA government has moved away from its connections with Cuba and the former Soviet Union towards a free market economy, the streets still bear names such as Avenida Lenin and the socialist emblems of the hammer and sickle are very visible.

The high rise housing schemes which have been completed in the last 25 years look seedy and run down, their ground floors, the spaces reserved for shops, vacant and derelict looking.

On a hilltop overlooking the harbour is the American Embassy, heavily fortified with high walls topped with barbed wire, the US flag barely visible above the parapet.

The embassy looks out across a sand spit towards the oil platforms, the chief source of the government's wealth and the beaches where the oil workers play on jet skies. At this end of town the rich live and play and the oil company personnel are among the very rich.

The mausoleum of the country's first president, Agostinho Neto, stands rocket shaped, towering above the waterfront. It is however, unfinished as the money for its construction, as the money for everything else but the war effort, has run out.

AT an aid workers party in Luanda everybody agrees that if only the fighting would stop there would be some hope of development. "We are hoping for a day when the government will spend its own money on food for the people and look to foreign aid to buy arms" says a Dutch worker. "It worked for a while but the embargo on diamond sales which fund rebel arms was not respected by the international community."

Dr Mary Kelly is from Monaghan and is married to Benjamin Castello, a former Angolan government minister for agriculture. An aid worker with Development Workshops, she is critical of the UN role in monitoring a recent peace process.

"Angolans want to know how the UN could have let the rebels re-arm. How were they allowed to defeat an embargo on diamond sales?" she asks.

Shortly after the process broke down, the UN monitoring group pulled out arguing that there was no peace to monitor. The result was that Mary Kelly and other Angolans watched the massive UN aid mission to the refugees of Kosovo wondering "if in the UN eyes being black African was somehow different to being white and European".