In the absence of clearly defined norms that set out states’ obligations toward vulnerable irregular migrants, the Angolan government has had significant dis-cretion in defining its response to the Congolese on its territory. In this case, almost all the incentive structures have leaned toward a repressive response. At the domestic level, the buildup to legislative and presidential elections gave the MPLA government a strong incentive to remove from its territory Congolese who had historically been close to UNITA. At the international level, the desire to create conditions that would attract inward investment in the diamond in-dustry incentivized the harsh response toward the Congolese. While the overall trend during the period 2003–2009 created continuity in these incentives toward repression, changes in domestic and international incentives also help to explain shifts in the GoA’s behavior over time.
Domestic
After independence in 1975, Angola was embroiled in a twenty-seven-year civil war. Peace talks between the MPLA and UNITA at the end of the Cold War led to national elections in 1992. In the legislative elections, the MPLA won 120 seats and UNITA 72 seats. The MPLA victory led to the resumption of civil conflict, and UNITA seized de facto control of the area in which it had its geographi-cal support bases—predominantly the Lunda provinces to the northeast of the country—scuttling peace and giving UNITA control over most of the country’s diamond mines. In February 2002, the leader of UNITA, Jonas Savimbi, was killed by the Angolan army, leading to a ceasefire agreement and the end of civil war.
For the first time, the MPLA controlled the entire territory of Angola. Yet 80 percent of the country lay outside its historical sphere of influence. During the conflict, the MPLA was primarily an urban-based movement, relying on its control of Luanda and the oil fields for its support. It had no historical support base in areas such as the Lundas in the periphery of the country. Through a
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combination of co-optation and coercion, the MPLA has sought to assert its au-thority across the country (Pearce 2005). It has bought out many former UNITA generals, acquiring their loyalties by, for example, giving them a stake in the diamond mining industry or the politics of the territories. In other cases, it has used violence as a means of demonstrating its authority (Marques 2011; Pearce 2004, 2005).
In taking control of the country, the MPLA agreed to work with the opposi-tion parties—including UNITA—toward naopposi-tional elecopposi-tions, both legislative and presidential. However, on numerous occasions, the dates of these elections were postponed by the MPLA and President Eduardo Dos Santos. The first legislative elections held since 1992 were originally scheduled for 2007 and then postponed until September 2008, when the MPLA proclaimed itself to have won 81 percent of the vote and UNITA just 10 percent. Meanwhile, presidential elections had originally been suggested for 2009 but were repeatedly pushed back.
The most intense waves of deportations were in the buildup to the legisla-tive elections, and the timing of the waves coincided with key moments in the election process. As part of the preparations for elections, a nationwide popula-tion census was carried out to establish entitlement to vote. One of the GoA’s principal aims was to ensure that Congolese would not register to vote, given that they would be likely to vote for UNITA. In the colonial era, Lunda Norte had closer social and economic ties to the Congo than to Luanda, in which a strong Lunda-Chokwe identity connected the southern provinces and the Lun-das (Pearce 2004). In the civil war, Savimbi had been a close ally of Mobutu, and both were strongly supported by the U.S. government in the struggle against the Soviet-backed MPLA (Pearce 2005). It was in this context that large numbers of young Congolese had not only been tolerated in the Lundas but actively recruited by UNITA as both soldiers and artisanal diamond miners. Conse-quently, in the aftermath of the civil conflict, the GoA continued to believe that Congolese living in Angola would inevitably be UNITA supporters, electorally if not militarily.
Each of the main waves of deportations links closely to aspects of the elec-toral cycle. The 2004 wave coincides with the MPLA’s acquisition of control over the Lundas and recognition of the need to remove foreign UNITA supporters from the territory after an agreement was reached to work toward elections. The 2007 wave coincided with the setting of dates for legislative elections and the beginning of the census to register voters. The 2008 deportations took place in the buildup to the legislative elections of September. Although the Bas-Congo episode in 2009 follows a slightly different logic, it was partly motivated by a similar suspicion of a potential Congolese support base for the Cabinda seces-sionist group FLEC.
International
Between 1992 and 2002, the MPLA’s control over the diamond areas was lim-ited to Cafunfo, and the surrounding areas were controlled by UNITA. UNITA’s exploitation of the alluvial and kimberlite mines had not been systematic or founded on international investment. Rather, it was based largely on artisanal methods, and a significant proportion of the diamonds were smuggled across the Congolese border to evade the international sanctions imposed on UNITA. With the end of the conflict, the GoA sought to privatize part of the diamond industry and to attract greater foreign investment. It created Endiama, a parastatal com-pany to act as trustee for the nation’s mineral rights. Endiama was empowered to develop joint ventures with foreign companies that could bring investment and technical expertise to the industry. Typically, a given mining project would involve Endiama, an Angolan national company, and a foreign company, all of which shared ownership of a mine.
The GoA strategy proved successful in hugely increasing production and rev-enue in the diamond sector. In the first five years after the civil war, production nearly doubled, from 5 million carats in 2002 to close to 9.5 million carats in 2006. Gross revenue from diamond sales also doubled, from US$638 million in 2002 to US$1.2 billion in 2006, while government income from diamonds tripled from US$45 million to US$165 million over that same period. A key part of this success came from creating conditions under which international companies were prepared to invest in the mining industry.
The GoA sought to ensure that concessionaire companies would enjoy exclu-sive rights to the mines, that firms would operate with security, and that diamond smuggling would be eradicated. A range of firms were attracted from around the world, but the most high-profile individual investor was the Israeli businessman Lev Leviev, who through his various business interests and his connections to the GoA established privileged rights to a significant proportion of the Angolan diamond industry. Many of these outside corporations not only demanded sig-nificant security but also employed private security firms, which have also been implicated in human rights violations toward nationals and migrant workers.
Leviev and his business associates, for example, have been accused of encourag-ing an environment in which industry security is privileged over rights. It was in the context of creating attractive investment conditions that Operação Brilhante was conceived as an “anti-smuggling” operation.
However, while the political economy of diamond access privileged a repres-sive response, there was almost no countervailing pressure from the international community or neighboring states to encourage the GoA to develop and secure the diamond mines in a manner that was consistent with human rights. Western
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diplomatic partners and neighboring states were extremely slow and reluctant to criticize Angola’s conduct. As a major oil-exporting country, Angola was partly insulated from international criticism. For example, even after news of the 2004 deportations had broken, the Bush administration still encouraged Dos Santos to stand for reelection and signed a deal for Chevron Texaco to extend its conces-sionary access to Angolan oil (Médecins Sans Frontières 2004).
Ricardo Soares de Oliveira (2011) highlights the reasons why Angola has been able to pursue a generally illiberal postconflict strategy that has remained rela-tively immune to criticism. He argues that the MPLA elite has stood apart from international criticism or influence because of the outright military victory of the MPLA, its economic autonomy, the coherent and pragmatic approach of the MPLA in managing international actors, the lack of a well-funded domestic lib-eral alternative, the interests of international actors and donors, and the lack of commitment by Western donors to their own purported liberal agendas.
Like that of the wider international community, the response from the DRC was almost nonexistent, even though its own citizens were the victims of the rights violations. MSF described the Kinshasa response as based on “a relative passivity” (Médecins Sans Frontières 2008). There were even claims that around 2007 and 2008, a prominent DRC minister argued that the Congolese in An-gola “got what they deserved because of being illegals.” 33 Part of the reason for the DRC’s limited criticism of Angola was the asymmetrical power relationship between the two countries. There is a long history of Angolan military and dip-lomatic interference in the DRC, and even during the civil war the MPLA was im-portant in bringing Laurent Kabila to power as Mobutu’s successor in the DRC.
Dos Santos was instrumental in enabling Joseph Kabila to succeed his father as president of the DRC in 2001, and since 1997, when Laurent Kabila came to power, Angolan soldiers have formed the basis of the presidential guard, being one of the main pillars of both presidents’ ability to preserve some vestige of au-thority across the DRC. In the words of Felly Ntumba of OCHA, “Until 2009, the Kinshasa government was not very interested; there were discussions, but they mainly took place at the local level between the Western Kasai and local Angolan authorities. They trivialized things a bit; they did not take much responsibility;
they took a laissez-faire approach, assuming and expecting that all the response will come from the international community.” 34
When the international response shifted and different sets of international incentives were created, Angola’s behavior was at least partly tempered. In 2009, for example, the DRC government responded to the deportations from Cabinda to Bas-Congo with a stronger, more retaliatory approach, reciprocally deporting Angolan refugees. One of the reasons for this was that in 2009, an alliance between Kabila and Paul Kagame of Rwanda emboldened Kabila in his relationship with
Dos Santos, making him more prepared to stand up to a challenge. As a result, a moratorium was agreed to that rapidly ended the reciprocal deportations. 35 Similarly, during the 2007 and 2008 waves, international condemnation—for ex-ample, through the MSF testimonies and resulting press conferences—brought some change in the methods of deportation used by the GoA. While the de-portations did not come to an end, the difference between the rights violations recorded in December 2007 and in May–June 2008 shows that an international reaction was instrumental in tempering the most serious violations.