When they lose this, they lose their lives, everything they have scraped together. And when war comes, and they have known nothing else since the early seventies, they lose it all. It is stolen by the armies or destroyed by the artillery and the exigencies of refugee existence. Government troops repulsed the assault on Kuito in early January 1999. This is extremely disruptive to the population as the MPLA and Unita armies see-saw across central Angola.
Provincial capitals are, as a result, only reachable by air.
But Unita emerged better equipped than ever before. Unita relies on its diamond mining areas for funds to equip its army. It may be, although I have no way of knowing, that the CSO buys up these surplus diamonds to maintain international diamond prices, and thereby may indirectly fund Unita's war effort. This is speculation on my part. It has been reported that the son of Zambia's president Frederick Chiluba is involved in selling and supplying arms to Unita.