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UNITED NATIONS (October 1, 1999 11:08 p.m. EDT ) - Angola on Friday accused the world community of holding a "double standard" for letting civil wars rage in its country and elsewhere in Africa while intervening in Kosovo and East Timor to halt violence. Angola has battled a rebel movement called UNITA since it gained independence in 1975.
The former Portuguese colony's civil war reignited in December, shattering a U.N.-brokered 1994 peace pact and forcing the pullout of U.N. peacekeepers.
Angola's foreign minister, Joao Bernardo de Miranda, castigated the United Nations. "It weighs on our conscience to find that ... for similar human suffering, there are differentiated reactions by the international community. This attitude can lead us to think that we are dealing with a double standard."
He charged that this inconsistent approach had allowed "the most barbarian and bleeding criminals that our memory has registered in Africa during this century" to escape justice.
More than a dozen armed conflicts are raging in Africa.
In Angola, de Miranda reminded the General Assembly that Jonas Savimbi's UNITA rebels "have plunged the country into a new cycle of violence."
UNITA - a Portuguese acronym for the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola - has overrun about 70 percent of the country since the civil war reignited in December.
About 3 million of Angola's 11 million people are refugees or homeless in Angola as a result of Savimbi's campaign, de Miranda said.
An estimated 500,000 people have been killed.
The Security Council voted to end the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Angola in February after full-scale war resumed.
De Miranda urged the United Nations and international community to enforce a peace accord negotiated in 1994, "particularly the disarming of all of Mr. Jonas Savimbi's military forces and the restoration of the state's administration throughout the country."
Noting that the Organization of African Unity had declared Savimbi a war criminal, and the Non-Aligned Movement supported that proclamation, de Miranda insisted that Savimbi "be so treated by all the international community."