Sleeping sickness, a vector-borne parasitic disease, is ravaging Angola, threatening a third of the population across 14 of the 18 provinces in the south-west African country which is still struggling to rebuild after a 27-year civil war that ended in April 2002. "The situation in Angola is alarming," said Ndinga Dieyi Dituvanga, a doctor and an official with the Institute for the Prevention of Trypanosomiasis, the scientific name for the disease, which is initially characterised by bouts of fever, headaches, pains in the joints and itching and affects both human beings and cattle.

Since colonial times and throughout Angola's 27-year civil war, the Angolan San have been invisible, forgotten and abused suffering social exclusion, discrimination and social exploitation. The hunter-gatherer San are the original inhabitants of Southern Africa. Some 4,000 years ago they began losing land to Bantu people migrating from the north. The arrival of white settlers in the 17th century was accompanied by their dispossession, enslavement and slaughter. Today the San number roughly 100,000 across Southern Africa.

The development agency, Christian Aid, is stepping up a campaign to get church and faith leaders to join the fight against the rising incidence of HIV/AIDS in Angola. The UK-based group plans to integrate HIV/AIDS awareness into its current post-conflict food security activities, and believes the church should play a much bigger role in helping people learn about and live with the virus, rather than fuelling the stigma and prejudice that envelops it.

The international community will work with the Angolan government for the elaboration of a national action plan for human rights in Angola. For this purpose, UN consultant for human rights, Vera Duarte, was in the country last Tuesday, to work with the Ministry of Justice and representatives of the UNHCR.

Refugees repatriating to Angola are returning to a skeleton of a country. Nearly 30 years of brutal civil war reduced most of Angola's homes, schools, hospitals, places of worship, markets, roads, bridges, and commercial and government buildings to rubble. The war also rendered useless hundreds of thousands of acres of fertile agricultural land and countless miles of fish-abundant rivers with millions of landmines and unexploded ordnance, nearly all of which remain in place today. The U.S. Committee for Refugees (USCR) conducted an extensive three-week site visit to Zambia and Angola during November 2003 to examine the repatriation and reintegration of Angolan refugees. As the UN High Commissioner for Refugees pauses for the onset of seasonal rains after phase one of the repatriation program - the agency plans to resume facilitating refugee return in April 2004 - USCR offers timely findings and recommendations on the challenges Angolan refugee returnees face as they attempt to restart their lives in their currently peaceful, but war-devastated homeland.

Food insecurity is still an issue in post-war Angola, but farmers who have been able to return to their fields are beginning to see results after nearly two years of peace. One success story is the farming association Hua Kinga-mbote Kadissuku ("The one who waits for the good never stumbles" in the local language, Kimbundu) in the northern province of Malanje, led by a charismatic and powerful woman, Maria de Fatima Coimbra. "One year ago we were desperately running toward visitors asking for food. Now we greet them with smiles. We dance and clap our hands," she told IRIN.

This position will have overall responsibility for the planning, coordination, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of CARE-Angola's health portfolio, which includes polio eradication, maternal-child health, scabies control, and health post rehabilitation projects. Knowledge of Portuguese or French language required.

A large number of animals came close to extinction during the Angolan civil war. The once abundant wildlife is still under severe threat, poaching is common, laws are not enforced and there are just a few areas where the animals are secure. "Angola may lose all of its once rich biodiversity very soon if urgent action is not taken to preserve the protected areas and the endangered species. First, I was worried about the loss as a result of the war, and now as a result of the peace," Tamar Ron, UN Development Programme advisor to the Ministry of Urban Affairs and Environment, told IRIN.

The Angolan government has reacted strongly to accusations of corruption and mismanagement made by the NGO Human Rights Watch. According to a government response, Human Rights Watch had resumed accusations formerly levelled by some international circles - without any serious base for supporting the allegations - that over 4bn dollars generated from the oil sector between 1997 and 2002 went missing from state coffers.

As another year came to an end, democracy in Angola was carefully folded like a handkerchief and prominently featured in the chest pocket of its ruler’s jacket. The folding took place at the ruling Movement for the Popular Liberation of Angola (MPLA) 5th party congress in December, where it was expected that the conclave would send a strong signal on the course of democracy in the country, given that the democratic mandate of the current government expired in 1996, and that due to the war between 1998 and 2002 elections were postponed until peaceful days arrived. But as 2004 begins and almost two years into peace, there are no signs of even a date for elections that will set the normalization of State institutions in motion.

On December 09 at the party congress, the president of MPLA and only candidate, José Eduardo dos Santos, was re-elected for another five-year term, unanimously and by acclamation not by vote. When it came to suggestions for a fair democratic process by secret ballot only the president voted in favour of such a procedure. The other delegates, more than 1400 of them, voted for acclamation. There was only a single abstention.

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With an estimated 30 percent of Angolan children aged between five and 14 forced to work, officials and aid groups gathered on Wednesday to discuss ways of tackling child exploitation. The meeting in the southern Cunene province was expected to highlight children's rights, an issue that has largely been ignored in Angola.

More than four billion dollars in state oil revenue disappeared from Angolan government coffers from 1997-2002, roughly equal to the entire sum the government spent on all social programs in the same period, Human Rights Watch says in a new report. Meanwhile, although the 27-year civil war ended in 2002, an estimated 900,000 Angolans are still internally displaced. Millions more have virtually no access to hospitals or schools. According to United Nations estimates, almost half of Angola's 7.4 million children suffer from malnutrition.

Long-standing president Jose Eduardo dos Santos is once again firmly established at the helm of Angola's ruling MPLA after he was elected without opposition to the party's presidency. The congress, which ended last week, voted in Dos Santos by acclamation, paving the way for him to run again in national elections he has said will not be held before 2005. "Dos Santos is very firmly in the saddle," said Herman van der Linde, consultant at South Africa-based Executive Research Associates.

How many young girls were used by Angola's warring parties during its 27-year war is anyone's guess. Denial - by both sides - and fear of discrimination and stigma among former girl soldiers continue to stand in the way of any effort to come up with precise figures. Both the government and the former rebel group, UNITA, have in the past denied recruiting child soldiers. However, Human Rights Watch (HRW) has claimed that minors were widely used by both sides during the conflict. The refusal to acknowledge the role played by child soldiers, especially girls, during Angola's hostilities has complicated efforts by aid groups to address the problem.

An International Monetary Fund technical team is in Luanda this week seeking to mend years of problematic relations with Angola. But as fresh signs of rapprochement emerge, a new chapter has opened in a murky saga involving debt deals with Russia, long a stumbling block in the country's relations with the IMF. A rapidly expanding offshore oil industry and abundant other resources make Angola one of Africa's brightest prospects. But the economy has been undermined by decades of civil war and corruption.

At least 35,000 Angolans face starvation in the central province of Huambo by the end of the year because food stocks are limited and supplies have been interrupted, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) said Monday. A WFP official told the Roman Catholic Radio Ecclesia that the affected areas were the municipalities of Bailundo, Caala, Cuima, Gove and Catata in Huambo.

This is a full-time appointment for an initial period of one year as of January 2004, with the possibility of extension. The researcher will be based in one of HRW’s offices (New York, Washington DC, London or Brussels) and should be prepared to travel frequently to the region to monitor violations of human rights and international humanitarian law in Angola.

When Joana Napeio first took her seat in the new classroom built by her local community, she wanted to cry. So it goes with children all around the world on their first day at school, but unlike most children, her tears were of joy. If Joana Napeio, bright and now being educated, represents the future of Angola, the country is in good hands. She is one of a quarter-of-a-million Angolan children who, at the start of this year, returned to school as part of the ‘Back-to-School’ campaign, an Angolan Ministry of Education and UNICEF initiative.

As millions of displaced Angolans arrive back home after a devastating 27-year war, arguments over land ownership and access are on the rise, raising concerns over the potential for serious conflict. Aid and humanitarian agencies are worried that the poor in both rural and urban areas, already in a vulnerable position, will have insufficient access to the benefits of the government's proposed land law, which has itself come in for criticism.

Summary killings, rape, torture, and illegal detentions remain commonplace. Children are among those who have been subjected to physical and sexual abuse by soldiers. Villagers have been harassed by Angolan Armed Forces (FAA) soldiers while working in their fields, hunting in the forests or fishing in rivers. As a result, some Cabindans, especially those in rural areas, are afraid to pursue the livelihoods that ensure their existence. Growing numbers of villagers are suffering from hunger in a region that is rich in natural resources. This is according to a report on the human rights situation in Cabinda, which is an enclave that seeks independence from Angola.