Angola still has one of the highest rates of child mortality in the world, says UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) Country Representative, Mario Ferrari, and challenges relating to children remain huge. Three years after the end of the country's 27-year long civil war, "the situation is that the long period of war had the effect of dismantling the social services, weakening social services in a radical way in the country. The effect is that ... this country has a child mortality rate of 250 per 1,000 - one of the highest in the world," Ferrari told IRIN.

Angola has made "limited progress" in improving the country's health network since the devastating 27-year civil war ended three years ago, according to a new report by the UK Department for International Development (DFID). Progress in implementing new health sector projects funded by UN agencies and other donors has been affected by poor capacity, noted the report on a case study by researcher Suzanne Fustukian of DFID's Health Systems Resource Centre.

The UN Human Rights Committee has ruled that Angola violated the freedom of expression of a journalist who was imprisoned in 1999 for criticizing the country's president. Rafael Marques de Morais, an Angolan journalist, was arrested and imprisoned in Luanda, on October 16, 1999, following the publication in the Agora newspaper of remarks by him about Angolan President José Eduardo dos Santos. Among other things, Marques said that the President was responsible "for the destruction of the country" and "accountable for the promotion of incompetence, embezzlement and corruption." Marques was detained for forty days without charges, ten of them incommunicado.

IRIN Radio Southern Africa, in collaboration with Radio National de Angola, has launched a serial drama entitled "Camatondo" to support Angola's post-war reconciliation. The drama explores the stories of refugees and displaced persons, while also providing information related to healthy living and everyday development challenges facing rural Angolans. Camatondo mirrors the evolving realities and challenges faced by the resettling rural population, including storylines about reconciliation, psychological trauma, agricultural modernization, HIV, gender issues, micro-credit schemes, governance and electoral education, among others.

Recent tensions between Angola's ruling MPLA party supporters and members of the opposition, UNITA, were more about competition for resources than political differences, a senior analyst said on Tuesday. Martinho Chachiua, Angola programme officer at the Electoral Institute of Southern Africa, told IRIN that while the number of reports of violence between the country's two main parties had increased in recent months, the conflict centred around access to limited resources, such as water and fertile land.

As the death toll from the Marburg virus in Angola creeps up to the 300 mark, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has expressed concern at the current situation and is warning that the outbreak is not yet over. Uige-based WHO spokesperson Aphaluck Bhatiasevi told IRIN on Monday that some recently-identified cases of the killer disease had not been linked to earlier cases, raising fears that the epidemic was not yet under control since it first appeared in October 2004.

A civic rights group from Angola's oil-rich Cabinda province said on Tuesday that oil had been a "curse" for the region and called on American giant ChevronTexaco and others to recognise the dire humanitarian conditions of the people who live there. "Oil is a veritable curse for the population of Cabinda - a source of problems and not solutions," said Raul Danda, who heads the Mpalabanda rights group, the most influential in the northern enclave.

Researchers trying to battle the outbreak of deadly Marburg virus in Angola claim that traditional healers' practices could be helping the virus spread. They believe that healers are re-using syringes and needles to inject patients. This, say the researchers, could explain why the virus is still killing an average of three people a day, one month after the outbreak was identified.

Residents of Angola's northern Uige province, the epicentre of a haemorrhagic fever outbreak that has killed more than 150 people, are trying as best they can to get on with their lives despite living under the shadow of the epidemic. Teca Garcia, the resident programme officer in Uige for the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), told IRIN that the horror that enveloped the provincial capital in the days after the Marburg virus was identified had eased as the local population learnt more about the bug.

The Angolan ambassador to South Africa says political conditions in his country "needed to be normalised first", before the government could address the issue of fiscal transparency. In response to comments by Doug Steinberg, the outgoing country director of the development agency, CARE, ambassador Isaac Maria dos Anjos told IRIN that making transparency a condition for holding a donor conference - to help fund Angola's reconstruction effort - was "uncalled for".

A deadly hemorrhagic fever which has claimed the lives of 96 people, mainly children, in Angola's northern Uige province has been identified as the rare Marburg virus, officials from the Ministry of Health and World Health Organisation (WHO) said late on Tuesday. The illness, characterised by high fever, severe headaches, vomiting and diarrhoea, was first spotted in Uige and is from the same family as the deadly Ebola virus.

The Angolan government should put an immediate end to the climate of impunity and terror that exists in the diamond rich Lundas provinces in north-eastern Angola and restore human dignity and the socio-economic integration of local people. For their part, diamond mining companies should respect human rights and prevent acts that violate people's rights and freedoms on the part of the security companies which are contracted to them.

These are some of the recommendations contained in a report 'Lundas – The stones of death: Angola's deadly diamonds', which details human rights abuses in the Lunda provinces of Angola. The report says the entire area constitutes diamond bearing reserve zones, of which tens of thousands of hectares have been granted in mining concessions. It shows how the concessions limit the free circulation of people.

“In practice, villages located in the diamond concession zones are forbidden. Populations of villages that fall within a concession zone are uprooted and forced to relocate to other areas, without any support from the authorities or from the concessionaires, and the land that the people traditionally worked and which belongs them is stolen without any compensation."

The report was conducted by Rafael Marques, freelance journalist , and Rui Falcão de Campos, a lawyer.

* Compiled from the report by Pambazuka News.

Three years after the end of Angola's brutal civil war, the Angolan government is failing to care for the country's huge population of returning displaced persons, Human Rights Watch has said in a new report. Hundreds of thousands of recently returned refugees, internally displaced persons and former combatants face daunting challenges in reintegrating into Angolan society, with little government assistance.

Refugee leaders who fled Angola's oil-rich enclave of Cabinda during the long-running separatist conflict recently went home for a "go and see" visit, organised by the UN refugee agency (UNHCR). The aim of their trip was to assess whether conditions were suitable for returning. "But, after a three-day trip, visiting three municipalities, leaders said they would be reluctant to come home unless conditions improved.

Caravan of Life is a project that sensitises and mobilises the Angolan population on the need to take precautions against malaria. The project highlights the importance of malaria prevention and at the same time promotes the use of impregnated mosquito nets for pregnant women and children. The Caravan of Life programme is used to mobilise resources to assist in the delivery of malaria interventions. The project consists of a convoy of vehicles which transport medicine, mosquito nets, insecticides, computers, communication equipment and vehicles for the purpose of enabling the workers' in the malaria-affected areas to fight malaria.

Although Angola applied for funding to fight malaria, the money will arrive too late to switch to more effective combination drugs and avoid another grim season of preventable deaths. Stamping out the scourge - one of the biggest killers of Angolan children - is considered a top priority by many in the health ministry and the humanitarian community, but events have undermined the good intentions of the government.

Almost 2 million Angolans could go hungry because their government has banned genetically modified food aid, the UN's food agency warned. A shipment of 19,000 tonnes of maize from the US may have to turn back because the southern African state has become concerned about the environmental risks of biotechnology.

Angola has yet to provide the International Monetary Fund (IMF) with details of its windfall from high oil prices, delaying the Fund's mission to the country and raising doubt among donors about concluding an agreement any time soon. An IMF mission scheduled to come to Angola in November last year was postponed to January 2005, but would not take place before the end of February, sources in the capital, Luanda, told IRIN.

Through AFFORD's Opportunity Africa Programme, we have secured an internship with the World Bank in Luanda, Angola for 2 to 3 months – there is no deadline at the moment, but we would like the person to start as soon as possible. To be eligible for the internship, one must be an Angolan national, fluent in Portuguese and living in London. The internship will be paid and this is an opportunity that would benefit some young Angolans living in London to gain some experience in the field of international/African development. As the first step – the young Angolans attend the Opportunity Africa careers seminar on Tuesday 8 February 2005 from 6pm to 9pm at the AFFORD Offices in Vauxhall (31-33 Bondway, Vauxhall, London). The nearest tube and train station is Vauxhall (Victoria Line). Our office is opposite the new bus terminal outside Vauxhall station.

The appointment this week of Angola's first Justice Ombudsman has sparked concern among human rights activists, who fear a lack of transparency and consultation in the process will render the position ineffective. Human rights organisations and civil society groups are up in arms because they have had no part in the selection procedure. "The Angolan government has violated the rules of the game," said one human rights worker. "They are going against international guidelines - the Paris Principles - which expect a consultation with civil society over the nomination of the candidates, as well as the structure and function of the whole institution."