Kuito was the most dangerous city in the middle of the worst war in Africa and Hans Peter Vikoler was the only UN worker in town. He had been coming to Kuito since late 1993, when the UN helped to negotiate a cease-fire in Kuito between rebels of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) and troops loyal to the government controlled by the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). At the time, thousands of corpses lined the city's streets, victims of the fighting or of simple starvation.
At first, Hans could not spend nights in the city, which was literally divided into two by the warring armies. The fear was that if the truce was broken, as it routinely was, mortar shells would rain indiscriminately. For expatriate workers, as well as for the Angolans they were there to serve, there would be no way out. So each day Hans would fly in with the first transport plane and out with the last.
After 10 days of fierce shelling in February 1994, the cease-fire held, and Hans, who worked for the World Food Program (WFP), became the first UN aid worker to live in Kuito. He was joined by 10 international relief workers from Medecins sans Frontieres-Belgium, the International Committee of the Red Cross and OXFAM. But unlike them, he had no bunker at the back of his house.
He went to the airport several times a day, depending on how many UN cargo planes were allowed to land. There he monitored the unloading of relief goods, mainly food, blankets, medicines and soap, before making his way back to a UNITA checkpoint manned by young soldiers armed with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades. At the checkpoint, the local commander, Captain Pepe de Castro, made sure that half the goods went to his side and the other half to the government-controlled part of town. That done, Hans drove his battered Toyota Landcruiser across a one-mile no-man's-land into the government-held area-right into another checkpoint. Here, too, he encountered well-armed young soldiers. Their loyalty, however, was to the MPLA government of President Jose Eduardo dos Santos. After a soldier questioned him again pointlessly, since Hans came through this checkpoint five and sometimes even ten times a day, a piece of string that constituted the checkpoint was lifted and Hans was allowed to proceed.
Before him spread the center of Kuito, once a picturesque colonial town, now reduced to big piles of rubble by thousands of bullets and hundreds of mortar shells. Hungry women and children filled the streets and waved as Hans passed in his Landcruiser, one of a handful of vehicles still in working order. As the provider of WFP aid, the principle source of food for the 25,000 people in Kuito, Hans was a celebrity. Everyone had trouble pronouncing his name, so they just called him "Anstee," after the former UN Special Representative to Angola, Margaret Anstee.
As he visited dozens of refugee camps and feeding centers for malnourished children, the same numbing questions were fired at him. "Anstee, when will more food come?" "Can you help us build a new feeding center?" "We have no soap, we have no oil, and the salt is running out. What can you do?" Hans took it all in stride, patiently answering the pleas with promises to do what he could.
Kuito might have been one of Africa's most destroyed cities-it was where UNITA and the MPLA had engaged in 18 months of mortar duels and street fighting that had killed up to 25,000 people. For Hans, though, it was home. He flew the 500 miles to the capital, Luanda, only on weekends. Frequently he could be found on the Atlantic Ocean beaches of the nearby peninsula of Ilha. Hans loved to swim for hours at a time-to escape, for a while, the tragedy of Kuito.
Cynicism became second nature to most aid workers in Angola, where civil war, land mines and famine had claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Hans knew that food aid was no solution, but the alternatives were even bleaker. "No one cares a damn about these people, but if we stop feeding them, they will die for sure," he said.
That knowledge drove him to surrounding villages and towns like Cunje, where a government garrison and 10,000 civilians were completely surrounded by UNITA, and farther out into rebel-controlled rural areas, through countless checkpoints and across roads that in the past had been mined. He could never be sure if all the mines had been cleared.
The peril was greatest inside the city, however. In May, the mortars started firing one evening at 8:00 as Medecins sans Frontieres was preparing to throw a party. For the first night, Hans stayed in his house, the shells landing so fast that it was impossible to count them. The next day he made it to the Red Cross's underground bunker, where he stayed in cramped conditions with four other people for eight nights. At that point, a cease-fire held long enough for a UN plane to arrive and evacuate the foreign aid workers. When Hans returned to Luanda, he caught up on some badly needed sleep and then headed out to Ilha. "So many times while I was in that bunker," he said, "I just thought about when I could swim again."
By: Karl Maier (excerpt from A look at Some Peacekeepers), from: A Global Affair: An Inside Look at the United Nations, published by Jones & Janello, copyright 1995, all rights reserved.
