Narette Cassoa spent the first 30 years of her life in the town of Calandula, in the northern Angolan province of Malanje. Calandula is a richly fertile place of great beauty, the site of the Calandula Falls, the second largest waterfall in Africa.

For the last year, however, Narette has been subsisting, with her three small children, in one of the squalid, sprawling slums which are engulfing Angola's coastal capital, Luanda.

She is one of the million Angolans who have been displaced and dispossessed in the last 12 months by the resurgence of the 25-year-old civil war between the Luanda government, and Jonas Savimbi's Unita rebels.

"We ran away from Calandula because Unita kept attacking. They killed lots of people, laid new landmines and spread fear and misery." Narette explains, wearily, "We walked to Malange city, hiding in the day and travelling at night, but when we got there Malange was attacked too, so we ran away to Luanda."

Housed in a courtyard

A grass mat is all the refugees can call home

Narette left Calandula with nothing but her children and the clothes on her back. In Luanda, where she knows no one, she has found refuge with a local church.

The church's tiny, dusty courtyard is now home to 427 newly displaced people, including 157 children. During the day these refugees scavenge for food and water, at night they lay out grass mats on the ground and sleep, squashed together shoulder to shoulder.

"Life here is terribly difficult. It takes all of our energy just to survive," says Narette.

Narette, and hundreds of thousands like her, receive no assistance from the Angolan government, nor from the UN nor from the 150 aid agencies working in Angola.

'Recipe for disaster'

The countryside is littered with the relics of war

The government is pumping its resources into fighting the war. The relief agencies are doing their best, but they do not have enough money to cope with the constant flood of refugees, who are driven by the fighting to abandon their homes in the countryside and converge upon the over-crowded government controlled cities.

Exhausted aid workers watch in despair as cash gushes into Kosovo, while they try, empty-handed and ignored by the outside world, to fend off mass starvation.

"We have a combination of no food, inadequate transportation and a growing number of beneficiaries," bemoans Maria Flynn, World Food Programme spokeswoman in Luanda.

"If that is not a recipe for disaster, I don't know what is".

Cities besieged

WFP is already keeping 800,000 people alive with food aid. Emergency relief operations are concentrating on besieged cities in the interior of the country, like Malange, Huambo, Kuito and Luena.

These cities now stand like starving islands surrounded by hostile, Unita controlled countryside. Displaced farmers cannot return to their fields to gather their harvests, or plant for the next crop. The roads have been turned into impassable death traps by ambushes and landmines.

The only way to transport emergency food and medical assistance is by air - yet air transport is prohibitively expensive, several aircraft have been shot down, and airports are regularly closed by shelling.

Little to show for aid

Today's children are the second generation to grow up amid war

The UN agencies in Angola, including WFP, have just doubled their funding appeal for 1999 - from $67 million to $110 million - in an attempt to stave off a catastrophe. To date, with the year already half gone, donors have come up with just $25 million. First world governments are sick of pouring money into Angola.

Their reluctance is not unjustified. Angola has been at war virtually non-stop since independence in 1975. Two UN monitored-peace processes, costing billions of dollars, have merely resulted in a return to fighting.

Any trust which might have existed between the two sides has evaporated, and the government now insists that it will never negotiate with Unita ever again, preferring instead to fight to the end.

That end could be a very long way off. Since full-scale war resumed in December, two major government offensives have been repulsed by Unita. A third was promised for May, but has yet to materialise.

Meanwhile new tanks, heavy artillery and planes - purchased at great expense in eastern Europe - have been pouring into the port of Luanda. While the military build-up continues, the people suffer.

Natural riches

Oil wealth has not improved the lives of most Angolans

The great tragedy is that Angola is not a poor country. On paper it has one of the fasting growing economies in Africa. The government is funded by the $9m worth of oil which Angola produces every day.

Unita is sustained by the diamonds which litter the eastern half of the country, and which are so priceless that three rounds of UN sanctions have not managed to keep them off the world market.

Angola is nevertheless bankrupt and its people are some of the poorest in the world. Corruption, incompetence and war have left the country with external debts of $12bn and no ready cash with which to pay them.

Yet every major international oil company is represented in Luanda, desperate to win the rights to explore for rich new oil fields off Angola's Atlantic coast.

In the latest round of bidding, which ended in May, Exxon, BP-Amoco and Elf each paid the government $300m just for the right to explore virgin areas of the sea bed.