V. Background

The Angolan enclave province of Cabinda, with an estimated population of 300,000, is separated from the country’s other 17 provinces by a strip of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). It produces half of Angola’s oil.

The armed separatist FLEC movement, founded in 1963, first fought for independence from Portugal, Angola’s colonial rulers, and then from Angola itself when Angola became independent in 1975. Following the end of a civil war in Angola in 2002 between the government, dominated by the Popular Liberation Movement of Angola (MPLA), and the main opposition movement, National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), the Angolan Armed Forces (FAA) re-deployed some 30,000 government soldiers to Cabinda to wipe out the remaining separatist insurgency. These military efforts led to the destruction of FLEC’s main bases in the interior and considerably weakened the guerrilla’s military capacity.

In 2004, Human Rights Watch documented human rights violations against civilians in Cabinda in the course of these counter-insurgency operations, including extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detention, torture, and excessive restrictions on freedom of movement. According to that research, most of the human rights violations were committed by the Angolan Armed Forces with impunity.[1] In 2004, the government claimed that the war in Cabinda was over, but dialogue would continue. However, successive attempts to reach a formal peace agreement with several wings of the FLEC remained unsuccessful, and sporadic insurgent attacks continued.

In 2006, a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed by the Angolan government and António Bento Bembe, the former leader of the FLEC Renovada wing and president of the Cabindan Forum for Dialogue (FCD), sought to formally end the armed conflict. The FCD had been established in 2004 as a joint commission including representatives of the two main FLEC factions—FLEC Renovada and FLEC-FAC—as well as members of civil society and the churches, to facilitate peace negotiations with the government. The MOU included an amnesty, a demobilization and reintegration plan for former FLEC combatants, and the allocation of a number of government posts to a range of former FLEC officials.[2]

The peace agreement, however, has enjoyed little credibility in Cabinda, because the most active FLEC wing, FLEC-FAC, as well as other members of the FCD, had been excluded from the talks, and no political concessions were made to the separatists. The armed insurgency has continued, but since 2006 the government has claimed the war ended in Cabinda and has attributed continuing sporadic attacks to “bandits.” FLEC-FAC has claimed responsibility for a number of armed attacks targeting government forces and expatriate workers of private companies. The intensity of the armed conflict and the level of serious human rights violations have decreased since 2004, but the FAA presence is proportionately higher in Cabinda than elsewhere in Angola today, suggesting the government’s continuing concern about the separatist movement.

Despite the peace agreement in 2006, freedom of expression and association remains restricted in Cabinda. The government has used state security concerns to crack down on peaceful opposition and scrutiny. In late 2006 and early 2007, two high-profile civil society activists were arrested for alleged state security crimes in Cabinda and were later released, following local and international public pressure, without having been formally charged.[3] In July 2006, the provincial court banned the civic association of Cabinda, Mpalabanda, founded in 2003, and alleged that the organization had incited violence and acted as a political party campaigning for Cabinda’s independence. The new bishop who took office in June 2006 temporarily dissolved the Catholic Justice and Peace Commission, which had been essential to documenting human rights violations since 2002. As a result, local and international organizations have struggled to obtain independent information from the interior to corroborate allegations of human rights abuses committed by both the FAA and FLEC since 2006.