Category: Human rights

Angola: More Extra-Judicial Killings

Officers from Angola’s National Police and Criminal Investigation Service have been accused of executing two unarmed men, in cold blood, in the latest display of what witnesses say is the out-of-control behavior of armed police in and around the Angolan capital, Luanda. A ten-year-old girl was also injured by a gunshot wound received as the officers fired indiscriminately in the middle of a suburban residential neighborhood at 10.30 in the morning on September 6. Suzanete Gomes was playing with friends in her neighbor’s back yard when they saw someone trying to climb over the wall and heard shots. As they turned to run from the yard in fright, Suzanete saw she was bleeding. She had been shot – the bullet striking her in the back and exiting through her abdomen. The child told Maka Angola that a uniformed policeman approached her and asked her if she’d been hit. “I said yes […]

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Assault and Battery, Angolan Style

Angolan national police officers have again been accused of carrying out extra-judicial executions at a police station. On a single day, August 31, the bodies of three men taken to a hospital morgue in the capital, Luanda, all displayed the unmistakable signs of being badly beaten. Autopsies revealed all three had been severely beaten with blunt objects, causing cranial fractures and other internal injuries, which directly caused their death. Opposition Member of Parliament Mihaela Webba, from the UNITA party (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola), told Maka Angola “the National Police are, in effect, carrying out the death penalty, with no respect for peoples’ lives.” One of the victims, 40-year-old José Padrão Loureiro, known as Zeca, was laid to rest on Sunday. His grieving widow, Margarida Maria Armando, says that at approximately 7.30pm on the evening of August 31st, two patrol cars pulled up outside her home. The […]

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Shoot the Messenger!

“Be careful! Be VERY careful!” That was the late-night advice to award-winning Angolan journalist and human rights defender Rafael Marques de Morais from Vice-Admiral Pedro Chicaia, the Cabindan brought to Luanda as the right-hand man and special adviser to the Angolan Navy Commander, Admiral Francisco José. It was an unusual time to call – a Sunday evening at 9.27pm – and an unusual response to enquiries into allegations of the illegal expropriation of land in the municipality of Viana. As Maka Angola revealed in a special report this week, the disputed land is a 15-hectare plot in Mucula Ngola, Viana province, registered in the name of Garcia João Camangumba who gave his sister, Helena João Teka power of attorney to manage his affairs when he became ill in 2012. Soon afterwards Helena’s home was demolished at night, killing her two young children, during what is alleged to have been one […]

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Abuse of Power in Angola (Part II): Beware the Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing

In Part One, Maka Angola reported how Helena João Teka was driven off her family’s land by armed police, losing her home and her two children in an illegal forced eviction connected to the Angolan President’s right-hand man, Chief of Staff Edeltrudes da Costa, who owns a large country estate just across the road. Helena is the official guardian to her brother Garcia João Camangumba’s six children. With the onset of mental illness, he gave Helena power of attorney, which had the effect of transferring his title to the land, to his sister. After the first two demolitions, she and her wards had taken refuge at the home of a friendly neighbor who allowed them to live rent-free on land close to their parcel but they were warned this was only a temporary help and they couldn’t stay much longer. Desperation drove Helena to erect a makeshift dwelling on the […]

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Abuse of Power in Angola (Part I): How the MPLA Elite Clears Land for Their Own Use

Earlier this month graphic pictures emerged from Angola of the killing of 14-year-old Rufino António, shot in the head at close range by a soldier enforcing demolitions in the poor neighbourhood of Walale, south of the capital, Luanda. This is not an isolated incident. The Angolan authorities have commonly resorted to sudden mass demolitions of entire neighbourhoods to clear the land for redevelopment, with little or no regard for residents’ legal rights, or even their lives. Sometimes there are legal grounds for these actions, such as slum clearance within the ambit of the Luanda Development Plan – a scheme praised by international urban planners unfamiliar with the reality of how it is being executed. All too often, however, the mass demolitions are ordered by unscrupulous and greedy members of the ruling elite who see the chance to grab choice portions of land for their own ends. Bound by blood to […]

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All the President’s Dogs

A protest in the Angolan capital, Luanda on Saturday August 20, was broken up by security forces who set dogs onto the 30 or so demonstrators calling for the resignation of President José Eduardo dos Santos. António Francisco Diogo, 25, had a chunk ripped out of the back of his thigh by a bulldog unleashed by the military. President Dos Santos had just been reelected as leader of the ruling MPLA (Peoples’ Movement for the Liberation of Angola) with 99.6% of his party’s vote. His re-election means he will be the sole MPLA candidate for next year’s presidential election. The MPLA has ruled Angola for 40 years, since wresting independence from its colonial master Portugal in 1975. Widely derided as a tyrant, President Dos Santos, who has ruled the country for 37 of those years, is unable to tolerate any call for him to step down, however small or insignificant. […]

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Angola’s Latest Ploy to Silence Critics: A Regulatory Body to Censor Social Media

Angola’s governing MPLA party (People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola) is gearing up for a tough battle to retain its 40-year grip on power in the face of a rising tide of discontent, swelled by the biting economic consequences of low oil prices and poor governance. Its response is to tighten control by restricting civil liberties – and in particular freedom of information. Ahead of this month’s ruling party congress, the National Assembly has passed a set of four bills which, in effect, hand control (and censorship) of all mass media outlets, including social media and the internet, to a new MPLA-controlled supervisory body: the ‘Entidade Reguladora da Comunicação Social Angolana’ (ERCA) – the Angolan Social Communications Regulatory Body. The aim, says Maka Angola’s award-winning editor, Rafael Marques de Morais, is to “control and censor any attempt by political activists to use social media and the Internet to blow […]

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Police Torture in Angola – Part II: The Persecution of Matata

People living in Cacuaco municipality, on the outskirts of the Angolan capital Luanda, have good reason to fear the police who operate there.  Residents complain that officers in both the National Police and the Criminal Investigation Service arrest people at random and then try to force them to confess to crimes. Bernardo Correia Gaspar – known to family and friends as ‘Matata’, is 22 years of age.  He is currently languishing in Viana Prison, waiting to be charged for crimes of which he says he is innocent.  And it’s not the first time that he says the police have tried to frame him. He was arrested in 2013 at his Aunt Emilia’s house in Viana municipality on suspicion of involvement in the murder of a police officer, known as ‘Frank’.  According to Bernardo Gaspar, Frank had been a gang leader with criminal associates before joining the National Police. “He was […]

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Police Torture in Angola – Part I: The Death of Flávio Carizo

Flávio Agostinho Carizo was laid to rest on June 25. It was his birthday. He would have been 26 years old. Those who witnessed his final hours are prepared to testify that he was killed by police officers who were trying to torture a confession out of him. Flávio Carizo was one of a group of five young men subjected to repeated beatings and ill-treatment between June 15 and June 19 this year at a police station commonly known as the ‘Cauelele Police Station’: Police Station 39 in Kikolo neighbourhood, Cacuaco municipality, on the outskirts of the Angolan capital, Luanda. Eye-witnesses to the killing say he was tortured to death by police officers over that period: struck in the head with an AK 47 rifle butt, beaten with iron and wooden bars, stabbed in the legs and having a ligature tightened around his testicles. Their accounts are confirmed by the […]

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Mothers Denied Justice Due to Traditional Beliefs

A petition for clemency by mothers of two of Angola’s prisoners of conscience has gone unheard by the judge notorious for presiding over the show trial of the 17 Luanda Book Club activists. The mothers are pleading for the release of their sons, 19 year-old Nito Alves and 27 year-old Francisco Mapanza, who remain in jail in spite of a Supreme Court ‘habeas corpus’ ruling that forced the release of fellow activists convicted last March over an alleged conspiracy to incite political rebellion.. Nito Alves is one of the 17 Luanda Book Club activist, sentenced to four and a half years in prsion, who are appealing their conviction on the conspiracy charge.  He has not been freed because he is serving an additional six-month sentence for contempt over his remark in court that the show trial was a sham. Francisco Mapanza, who was attending the trial, became the unwitting 18th victim in the case, when he echoed Nito Alves’s comment. Judge Januário […]

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