Angolan Foreign Affairs Minister, João Miranda, on Sunday, in Addis Ababa, refuted strongly the allegations from the African Union commission for human and people's rights, which qualifies as xenophobic the repatriation of illegal foreigners, that has been carried out by the Angolan Government.

In the North of Angola, the Uíge province has the second largest city, with the same name, after Luanda. The province has an estimated population of 1.5 million inhabitants. Out of 412 industries registered before independence, the province today has just four bakeries as a result of the war, the inefficient economic system and of the deliberately neglectful administration. On May 12, 2004, the Campaign for a Democratic Angola was launched in Uíge, in the old Moreno Cinema, before an audience of more than 500. For the first time, after the resumption of the war in 1992, a delegation of the campaign, among them opposition party and civil society leaders, travelled about 400 km, over treacherous roads, for a greater understanding of the reality that exists between the provincial capitals, usually connected by air.

Last month, the Angolan government did something startling: it announced that an oil deal signed with ChevronTexaco would bring the country $300 million. The disclosure of a single figure may not seem a triumph of transparency, but in the past Angola - like many other countries - treated its oil revenue as a state secret. Revealing its oil payments is the first of many anticorruption measures that Angola desperately needs.

Day to day survival is the chief concern of most Angolans, rather than the current debate among politicians over the date of the country's next general elections. Low levels of government expenditure on health and education, and escalating unemployment have made many Angolans apprehensive about politics and politicians, analysts told IRIN.

Angola needs urgent funding for essential drugs if lives are to be saved, particularly among resettling populations, warned a mid-year review of the UN's Consolidated Appeals Process (CAP), released on Tuesday. The CAP review, prepared by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said that at the end of April, funding for the essential drug component of the Minimum Health Care Package stood at approximately 50 percent.

Hundreds of Guineans expelled from the diamond-mining area of northeastern Angola have begun arriving home, complaining of poor treatment by the Angolan authorities as they were packed onto planes to Conakry. The Angolan government has deported tens of thousands of foreigners since December last year.

On 8 and 9 June 2004, the Campaign for a Democratic Angola convened Angolan civil society and political parties to discuss the status of elections and electoral reform, as well as plans for Constitutional reform. With over 200 participants in attendance, including key figures from over fifteen political parties and members of civil society organisations, the two-day Conference concluded with the issuing of declarations and recommendations regarding the most appropriate way to proceed with the drafting of a new Constitution, and the imperative nature of holding national elections in 2005. The recommendations also addressed other critical matters of central interest to the Angolan population.

Over 100.000 children might become orphans by the year 2005, due to the growing proliferation of HIV/Aids, said the Angolan Minister of Welfare and Social Reintegration, Joao Baptista Kussumua. According to the minister, three decades of the war have left a "serious humanitarian legacy", which continues to cause the death of more than 180.000 children aged between 0 and 5 years old, due to difficulties in accessing health services and water, and poor food, personal and family hygiene, and housing conditions.

A new United Nations report has urged the Angolan authorities to transfer more power to local communities. The joint study by the UN Development Programme and Angola's ministry of territorial administration has called for greater decentralisation of power. The report noted an "enormous need" for local-level staff to provide basic services and promote development in areas such as agriculture, commerce, transportation and housing.

After months of urging the authorities to set a date for Angola's first post-war general elections, opposition parties have walked out of a commission tasked with laying the groundwork for a national poll. Opposition parties said in statement on Wednesday that they had "decided to suspend, as of 12 May 2004, their participation in the work of the constitutional commission of the National Assembly, until the President consults with the parties and a definite timetable is approved" for holding elections.

The displacement of the local population due to mining activities, high poverty and inflation indices and a process of direct capital accumulation by the emerging economic and political ruling class indicates that the East of Angola is being transformed into a zone of potential future conflicts with unimaginable consequences, besides the aggravation of the socio-economic situation. This is according to the conclusion of a report on the region from the Campaign for Democratic Angola.

Angola's decades-long civil war is over, but the presence of landmines and other unexploded ordnance (UXO) remain a major obstacle to recovery. The city of Luau in the eastern province of Moxico, once a bustling centre with 90,000 inhabitants, has been isolated since the war destroyed roads and the railroad. In a few weeks' time about 9,000 refugees will return to Luau from the DRC, increasing the population by a third. They will return to a place where land mines and UXOs are a daily threat.

An independent inspection of accounting practices used to log Angola's oil revenue made recommendations on how to increase transparency, but officials said they had not yet decided whether to implement the proposals. The government published last Wednesday a summary of the report it requested from KPMG after accusations from rights groups that high-level corruption led to the disappearance of billions of dollars from the oil industry.

A few months ago nine-month-old Aurelio Clemente, battling with malaria and meningitis, would have been yet another child mortality statistic in Angola, where one in four children die before their fifth birthday. But since the opening of a specialised malaria centre earlier this year in Kuito, capital of the central province of Bie, Aurelio's chances of survival have improved considerably.

The Angolan government must stop its military forces from conducting brutal body searches, beatings and rapes of Congolese migrant workers in northern Angola, Human Rights Watch says. Since early April, tens of thousands of migrant workers from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have been subjected to brutal physical abuse as part of an operation conducted by Angolan soldiers to expel them from the diamond-rich border province of Lunda Norte. Angolan authorities claim that they are repatriating Congolese and other workers who have been illegally mining diamonds in northern Angola.

Crop losses due to heavy rains has jeopardised the food security of more than 300,000 families in the central Angolan province of Huambo, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network has reported.

Former rebel group UNITA has called on Angolan authorities to speed up integration of its health workers into government services, noting an acute lack of medical professionals in the country's ailing health sector. UNITA secretary for health and environment Carlos Morgado told IRIN on Wednesday that despite an improvement in the number of ex-UNITA health "technicians" enrolled at public hospitals last year, there were thousands of trained health workers without employment.

Despite the fact that Angola has one of the world's highest infant and maternal mortality rates, few pregnant women are accessing the available medical services. The maternal mortality rate in Angola is 1,000 deaths per 100,000 births, while the mortality rate for infants reaches 250 per 1,000 births. Only Sierra Leone and Nigeria have infant mortality rates worse than Angola's.

Angolan refugees coming back under a formal programme from the Republic of the Congo, and neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zambia and Namibia are aided by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). But many more - the so-called spontaneous returnees - have struggled home on their own since the end of Angola's civil war in 2002. In recent months their passage has been hampered by the rainy season, which has rendered many roads impassable and increased the ever-present threat of landmines. Just crossing the border back to Angola can be the biggest challenge facing returning refugees.

The United States, as the main investor in and beneficiary of Angola's oilfields should stop supporting the "sham government" of Angola, according to Rafael Marques, a freelance journalist and director of the Open Society Foundation, Angola. "The US has more leverage than any other country or international institution over the Angolan rulers. It has been very supportive of them. So it can help, through a clear and committed support to democracy and human rights protection, to stop them from plundering the country and from derailing it back into the darkness of sheer violence and an uncertain future." Marques was making a presentation to the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars Africa Program in Washington DC on April 5 2004.