Middle East & Africa | Angola's opposition and the churches

A massacre mystery

The government plays it down, the opposition stokes it up

EVERYONE agrees that in mid-April the arrest of the leader of an unorthodox religious sect led to bloodshed. But the scale of it is hotly disputed. The official version is that members of the “Light of the World” sect, an offshoot of the Seventh Day Adventists, killed nine unarmed policemen who had come to arrest the sect’s leader, José Kalupeteka, and that in response the security forces killed 13 of his disciples. But Angola’s main opposition party, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), says that 1,080 members of the sect were massacred, with helicopter gunships mowing them down.

The area where the incident took place, near the country’s second city of Huambo, which is UNITA’s traditional stronghold south-east of the capital, Luanda, has been cordoned off. Reliable witnesses have yet to emerge. Still less clear is whether the bloodshed could spark a resumption of violence between UNITA and the ruling People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), which has ruled the country since it became independent of Portugal in 1975. Civil war between the rival parties ended in 2002.

After the recent shoot-out, President José Eduardo Dos Santos, who has run the show for 36 years, denounced the sect as a threat to “peace and national unity” and said his security forces would “continue with the same vigour to dismantle [it] completely.” The sect has 3,700 members, according to the official news agency. They are encouraged to forfeit material possessions, to live in seclusion and refuse to vote or register for the national census. Mr Kalupeteka, who has yet to see a lawyer since his arrest, says the world will end this year.

Angola’s government dislikes the spread of churches outside the mainstream. It recognises 83 sects but another 1,200 are said to exist illicitly. To gain a licence, a sect must show it has at least 100,000 members in at least 12 ofAngola’s 18 provinces. No new group has been registered since 2004.

The government’s popularity has dipped since the fall in the global price of oil, which accounted for 70% of public spending last year, according to Mr Dos Santos. He is plainly loth to let UNITA ride the rising wave of discontent by linking up with churches beyond his control.

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