Word: huambo
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Nowhere is the misery of Angola's civil war more palpable than in the provincial capital of Huambo. Lavender-blossomed jacaranda trees line the streets, but many buildings are pockmarked by shellfire and bullets. At a health center, one-legged children push themselves on wooden trolleys while waiting for fresh supplies of artificial limbs. Most became amputees the same way as Fernando Segunda, 16: his right leg was blown off when he stepped on a land mine...
...convoys find few passable roads and are in constant danger of attack from rebels. Though statistics are hard to come by, those who suffer most in Angola seem to be the young. The U.N. Office of Emergency Operations reported in 1986 that up to 45% of the children in Huambo province, where guerrilla activity is common, suffered from malnutrition...
...commandos periodically cut the Benguela railroad that formerly carried Zaïrian and Zambian ore to the seaport at Lobito. The sabotage has deprived Angola's government of $100 million a year in rail revenues. UNITA'S guerrilla attacks have also disrupted diamond mining, as well as farming in the Huambo district, which is Angola's main granary. The country's only sizable revenue (about $700 million last year) comes from oil rigs in Cabinda that are operated under Cuban protection by the Gulf Oil Corp...
...also the contrasting reports of Huambo and Luanda in The New York Times; also Southern Africa magazine, February...
UNITA's administrative capital, Huambo, fell on February 8, 1976, but the war was far from over. Guerrilla bases which had been operation against the Portuguese have been re-activated, and the military has moved back into the bush areas, which are inaccessible to Soviet tanks, and which provide dense forest cover against MPLA bomber attacks. Because the support base of UNITA is essentially the hundreds of deep villages which dot the vast Angolan countryside, the fall of Huambo has had relatively little effect on the functioning of the movement inside the country...