JOHANNESBURG Civil wars in Africa tend not to top the world's news agenda, particularly when they've been raging for nearly 30 years and are blanketed in propaganda. Angola is no exception, where as the war drags on, the Agitprop (dissemination of political propaganda) grows more furious and distracting by the day. Rebels of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) are as efficient at sending out a weekly fax round-up boasting of their successes as the government is at filling the pages of the daily Jornal de Angola with details of UNITA's alleged barbarity.

Between the claims and counter-claims, close to a million Angolans have died in the fighting, which started in the early 1970s, and more than two million a sixth of the population have been made homeless since December last year. The landscape is scarred by landmines, and by diamond mining companies who have been accused by geologists of going as far as to divert rivers with concrete to tap the veins of alluvial gemstones.

In July, the war of words was stepped up. Concern and some confusion accompanied the discovery of a mass grave: Had UNITA taken its campaign to a new level of inhumanity, or had the government raised the propaganda stakes to a fresh extreme? UN Horror Turns to Confusion The United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan expressed outrage at the findings and ordered an investigation, despite the fact that the Angolan government had forced UN peacekeepers out of the country four months earlier.

A small team of UN human rights experts, left behind when the main peacekeeping operation was dissolved, went to the site of the alleged massacre, in the central highlands southeast of the capital Luanda, at the heart of the fighting. Earlier this month, they released their findings. "Based on what they saw and conversations they had with locals, (the UN human rights division) did not find any evidence of bodies as proof of a massacre," a spokeswoman for for the secretary-general said.

While the investigation did not suddenly turn UNITA into angels, it dented the government's credibility and threw another layer of distraction over an already intractable conflict. More worryingly, international exasperation at quite what is going on in this southwest corner of Africa threatens to turn donors away from the country just when support is needed most. "People are just getting tired," Hannelie de Beer, an Angola specialist at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria, told Reuters. "The humanitarian situation keeps Angola on the map, but in terms of caring about the sides and the war itself, the international community is tired." Handing Aid to the Helpless The humanitarian crisis is of epic proportions.

The rebels, who occupy about 70 percent of the country, have forced most of the rural population into government-held cities. Hundreds of thousands are crammed into derelict sports halls, huddling around fires while their children sit in raw sewage. Luanda is now home to around a third of the country's population, most of them homeless and hungry. There hasn't been a proper harvest in Angola in more than a decade and the withered soil is unlikely to recover in the next 10 years.

A July appeal by the World Food Program for $40 million attracted hardly any donations, and raising the $100 million total aid budget for the country a modest sum in comparison to other disaster areas has proved a struggle. The warring sides appear not to worry. The government, which earns huge revenue from vast offshore oil deposits, proudly announced in June that it would spent $200 million to make the country Y2K compliant, but hasn't proposed similar spending on humanitarian aid.

The rebels, led by veteran guerrilla Jonas Savimbi, who founded the movement in 1966, are happy to report that UN sanctions are having little impact they're still managing to export the gem-quality diamonds that litter the land they hold. "There certainly is a donor fatigue, but the issues are more frustrating than that," says Professor John Stremlau, head of the International Relations Department at Wits University in Johannesburg. "What's the point of pumping in more humanitarian aid when you've got billions of dollars of oil money flowing through the hands of the government in Luanda, and hundreds of millions of diamond dollars in the hands of the UNITA warlords? "I don't see any political will on the part of the international community at this stage to bring the warring parties to heel." People Forgotten in Cold War Playground Given the track record of trying to bring the protagonists to task, the international community's frustration seems understandable.

War first broke out even before Angola won independence from Portugal in 1975, which came only after a 14-year struggle, as three rival movements bickered over who would take the reigns. During the Cold War the Soviet Union and Cuba backed Luanda and the now ruling, once Marxist MPLA government led by Jose Eduardo dos Santos. The U.S. and South Africa financed Savimbi. A peace treaty was brokered in 1992 and elections held.

But Savimbi refused to accept the result and went back to war. On the brink of defeat, he agreed to another peace treaty in 1994, known as the Lusaka Protocol. That was broken in December last year after the government, frustrated by UNITA's lack of compliance with the Lusaka agreement, attacked rebel strongholds in the central highlands. Savimbi, feeling in control and looking for a better deal, says Lusaka is dead but that he's ready to negotiate again.

Dos Santos says Lusaka is alive, but refuses to deal with Savimbi. Even seasoned Angola watchers are at a loss. "It's an almighty mess frankly. Both sides are going to have to negotiate again eventually, but how the hell does anyone negotiate with Savimbi? How anyone can square that circle, I have no idea," said a Western diplomat in Luanda. With ideology long since eclipsed by greed and drowned in propaganda, the suffering and political will of the Angolan people, half of them born during war, has been forgotten.

"The will of the people has to be listened to. There has to be some empowerment of the common folk. I imagine they don't give a damn who runs the country, they just want peace," says Stremlau. "If one of these warlords were to leave the scene it might change the equation. But as long as they are there, things will continue as they have done for the past 25 years." (Reuter)