LUENA - I kicked myself when I heard Diana would be going to Angola. I'd left
the country nine months earlier and could not make a case for going
back. Along with many other Angola-watchers, I sneered a little as the
media circus gathered steam and read with wry amusement the tabloid
versions of a country I'd lived in for three years and had yet to shake
off. But I also felt I'd missed out. Diana amongst the landmines was a
terrific story. I knew she'd be visiting places and meeting people
I'd known, some of them all too well.
Sure enough, the man who guided Diana through the minefields of Kuito
was Paul, the leader of the anti-landmines group, the Halo Trust. Quick-tempered and low on diplomatic
finesse, he'd already shown Madeleine Albright and Lynda Chalker how to
blow up a mine. I too had put on the Halo body armour and followed a
group of bemused Angolan de-miners as they went about their work. I hoped
Paul had watched his language with his Royal visitor. He hadn't, of
course. But he was grudgingly impressed with Diana: "Very sensible, did the
job," he said. "I think people liked her".
Others agreed. Even those who had privately disapproved of her visit, suspecting a search for headlines and a dilution of the
issues, admitted they were impressed both by Diana's ability to confront the landmines issue and to try and understand what it was like to lose a limb, to be maimed by a metal disk hidden in the ground.
In Angola you sometimes feel you can't move for mine victims. You also don't have to go far to find stories of amazing courage. Equally prevalent are stories of seemingly impossible adjustments made to keep life on the move.
But mine victims are not all stoical survivors. Known simply as the "amputados", or "mutiladosquot;, the victims often hobble across the traffic, soliciting change from weary motorists. A negative response might result in a crutch being brandished at the windscreen. But you get used to them. I know I did.
During the war, every
provincial hospital would have beds reserved for those who had
stumbled into the minefields. Visiting cities like Luena, Malange and
Kuito, you got used to the stained mattresses, rusty bed-frames and
foul-smelling wards. But you never got used to the doctor or orderly
pulling back the sheet to reveal the stump beneath.
Angolans are generous with their time and testimony. But I remember the horrible feeling of intrusion as a colleague and I filmed a woman in Luena who had been hit that morning. Her wounds looked raw and beyond repair. The sense of giddy horror and the grim banality of
her story was overwhelming. All she had done was go out looking for food in the surrounding countryside
I also remember Isabel, young and far too pretty. She lay in a scratch
hospital in the town of Kuito, the bravest and most battered of all
Angola's cities of war. She grinned at the tape-recorder and explained
how she had lost her leg to a landmine - and how soldiers at a road-block had laughed. Halfway through her explanation she broke
down: "Too many people have died here. Can't they
Three years later Diana came to Kuito. In the interim, the
fighting had stopped and the town had picked itself up, despite having buried
more than 15,OOO of its residents. The Halo Trust had become one of the city's
biggest employers, beginning a long campaign to empty the minefields and
make the countryside safe.
Outside Angola, the landmines issue was prompting conferences and
international resolutions. Governments finally were beginning to yield to the
growing sense of outrage. Inside Angola, people were getting on with
life, still living with the dangers, coping quietly and resourcefully.
Diana, it seems, could see the links. She saw the individuals behind
the statistics. In the end, that probably counted more than she realised.