Cabinda History
Cabinda History: The ongoing separatist insurgency in Cabinda came into focus when the fight between the Angolan government and UNITA rebels ended in April 2002. The Angolan government and several separatist groups have been engaged in a decades-long war of independence in Cabinda, an oil-rich enclave that is divided from the rest of Angola by a narrow strip of DRC territory.
This conflict has been dubbed “Africa’s forgotten war.” Over the course of nearly 30 years of independence efforts, about 30,000 people have died. Only individuals employed in the oil industry have been able to enter the enclave, despite the dire humanitarian situation.
Due to Cabinda’s enormous oil wealth, the enclave is both a hotly debated location and a vital part of Angola’s national economy. About 60% of Angola’s oil is produced in the Cabinda oil fields. The province is the primary source of Angolan oil revenues, which account for 90% of the state budget and 42% of the country’s GDP.
Block Zero, Cabinda’s offshore deposit, is the foundation of Angola’s petroleum industry and one of the most profitable oil fields in the world. Block Zero’s concession rights were first given in 1957, and exploration soon followed. Block Zero has produced over two billion barrels of oil since production began in 1968.
Gulf had contributed $1.3 billion to the Cabindan venture by 1983, which accounted for 90% of Angola’s foreign exchange earnings. Significant additional development and production investments were made in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1997, the enclave’s oil exports totaled $2.5 billion. Angola produced about 800,000 barrels per day by 2000, nearly six times as much as it had in the 1980s.
As a result, Angola became the second-largest oil producer in Sub-Saharan Africa, after Nigeria. From its operational base at Malongo, which is close to colonial territory, Chevron Texaco has dominated the development of the province. Private security firms monitor the company’s facility, which is isolated from the rest of Cabinda and has a small refinery, oil storage depots, and a residential area for Chevron employees.
There is a lot of animosity over the differences in living conditions, and local employees do not reside in the settlement. This has increased local discontent about outsiders’ exploitation of the region’s abundant resources. The role that oil firms play in the area has been harshly criticized by Cabindans. Fish stocks were seriously harmed in 1999 by an oil spill close to the Malonga base.
Fishermen in Cabinda have demanded compensation for the damage caused by oil leaks, but Chevron Texaco has only given them US$2000, and barely 10% of them have gotten this money. Reduced fish stocks have also been linked to continuous pollution from routine production in addition to spills.
A major source of contention since colonial times has been Cabinda’s relationship with Angola. The Treaty of Simulambuco in 1885 recognized Cabinda’s unique status as an enclave and politically connected the region to Angola.
Prior to 1956, when it was merged into Angola and placed directly under the control of the Portuguese governor-general of Angola, Cabinda was a Portuguese colony. Cabinda has maintained its geographic, linguistic, and ethnic ties to what are now Congo-Brazzaville and the Democratic Republic of Congo, despite its official ties to Angola.
Separatists claim that Cabinda should have been given its own independence after Portuguese colonial rule ended, and many Cabindans have always maintained that their region is autonomous. In 1960, when armed resistance to Portuguese rule in Angola began to take shape, the Movement for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda, the country’s first independence movement, was established.
At about the same time, two more organizations came into being: the Maiombe Alliance and the Committee for Action and Union of Cabinda. Together, the three movements formed the Frente para a Libertação do Enclave de Cabinda (FLEC) in 1963.
In order to prepare for Angolan independence, the FLEC was not allowed to take part in the Alvor negotiations in April 1974 between the MPLA, FNLA, and UNITA, three Angolan nationalist organizations, and the Portuguese colonial government. Cabinda would continue to be an essential component of Angola, according to Article 3 of the Alvor Accord, which was signed in January 1975.
After FLEC’s appeals to the UN and the Organization of African Unity failed to provide them with adequate support, they turned to armed conflict with the Angolan MPLA government. Attacks on government forces based in Angola and the sporadic abduction of Chevron workers occurred during the guerrilla conflict that followed.
Due to strategic disagreements, FLEC broke up into FLEC-Renovada and FLEC-FAC, the organization’s principal armed faction, in the 1980s. Although FLEC-FAC has continued to engage in some violent acts, its support was significantly undermined in 1996 when Mobutu Sese Seko, the president of Zaïre, was overthrown.
The Cabindan separatists were likewise left out of the 1991–1992 negotiations between the Angolan government and the UNITA that resulted in the signing of the Bicesse Accords. They carried on the war in the enclave after being excluded from the peace deal. Fighting continued unabated in 1994 after the Lusaka Protocol, a new peace deal, once again excluded the Cabindan separatists.
A 2002 symposium on Angola’s constitutional future, which was held in Angola and covered topics significant to Cabindans such as local autonomy, decentralization, and constitutional reform, was not attended by FLEC-FAC. Meetings throughout the 1990s among the various Cabindan independence parties and the Angolan government brought no settlement to the dispute. The Cabindan rebels were unable to use the DRC and the Republic of Congo as bases of operations because of the Angolan government’s involvement in both conflicts. Cabindan complaints about the province’s lack of development and infrastructure have been addressed by the Angolan government since the 1990s. Only 10% of oil earnings are still given back to the province.
The Angolan government, like the Portuguese government before it, would never voluntarily relinquish independence to the enclave because of Cabinda’s oil resources. FLEC-FAC’s main base was destroyed, and many independence fighters were forced to leave the guerrilla battle when Angolan forces conducted a large sweep of the enclave in October 2002 with the goal of forcing secessionists out of Cabinda.
FLEC-Renovada ceased operations after the army also took control of its main base at the end of the year. The 2002 offensive that militarily defeated FLEC left its leaders in exile and renewed government hopes for an end to the lengthy conflict.
There were also indications that a negotiated settlement was imminent after Angolan authorities met with FLEC leader and cofounder Ranque Franque in July 2003. Although FLEC leaders were open to negotiating a settlement after the military setback, the success of peace negotiations will largely depend on whether or not civil society organizations participate in the process.
A cease-fire, an end to the Angolan Army’s abuses of human rights (which included atrocities against civilians), and better rights and working conditions for local oil workers are among the demands made by civil society organizations.
The Portuguese government, which sees the crisis as an internal Angolan matter, has rebuffed calls by the separatists for Portugal to step in and form a transitional administration. The government, which maintains that all Angolans should vote on a matter of national importance, has also rejected FLEC’s calls for an independence referendum, akin to the one conducted in East Timor and overseen by the UN, in which only Cabindans would cast ballots.
Many Cabindans would now accept autonomy, which the Angolan government has stated it would be open to negotiating, even though they still long for independence.
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