Manuel Zacarias lives in a sheet-metal shack in Luanda's Boa Vista shantytown, clinging to the hills overlooking the capital and the city's upmarket embassy row.
The city says Boa Vista is a health and environmental disaster, and wants to move Zacarias and the 11,000 families here out of sight to a new tent city, but so far they have refused to go.
"I've lived here since 1981. We will only leave Boa Vista if the authorities give us something better -- new houses," Zacarias said, standing before his shack.
For city authorities, the standoff over Boa Vista has degenerated into a mini-conflict in this war-ravaged nation, after police tried to forcibly evict residents last week and ended up killing two people who refused to budge.
The city had tried to lure residents away, noting the squalid living conditions in Boa Vista and the environmental dangers they face from the chronic mudslides caused by unusually heavy rains during the last two years.
The new tent city is on the outskirts of Luanda, and has a clinic and a primary school. City officials promise to build more infrastructure after the residents move.
"We think the camp meets basic needs. It's better to live here than to die in the shacks," said Mendes de Carvalho, a lawmaker known as advocate of services for the country's poorest people.
Boa Vista's residents disagree, said Kelopa Chitopota, spokesman for a residents' committee created to negotiate with the city.
"How are people going to survive the storms in tents? And how long are we going to stay there?" he asked.
Chitopota said residents also fear attacks from Angola's main rebel group, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), at the camp.
"It's located near areas exposed to UNITA rebel attacks," he said. "We have no guarantee of our safety."
The tent city is 45 kilometers (25 miles) outside the city center, making it closer to the town of Catete, which has suffered several UNITA attacks already this year.
The residents' committee sent a letter to Angolan President Jose Eduardo dos Santos on June 25, asking the government to build houses, primary and secondary schools, a hospital, and a public transport system, and to guarantee their safety at the new camp.
Without those assurances, residents say they will not leave their metal shacks.
"We deserve better than tents," said one women in Boa Vista.
Angola has suffered nearly 40 years of armed struggle -- first a 14-year war for liberation from the Portuguese colonizers followed by an ongoing 25-year civil war.
The violence has sent Angolans fleeing the countryside, swelling the urban population and creating vast shantytowns that circle most cities.
At least 500,000 people have died in the civil war, while four million people have been displaced, out of a total population of 12 million. |
