All events · Cold War Proxies

Angolan Civil War

1975–2002 · Sub-Saharan Africa

Displacement Mass Killing

Displaced

4 million

an estimated 4 million people were internally displaced at various points, plus about 400,000-500,000 refugees in neighboring countries; total war deaths are estimated at 500,000-1,000,000

Share of the population affected

61%

of the population of Angola at independence, when the civil war began, 1975

Killed

500,000–800,000

conflict deaths incl. combatants

Open on the interactive map →

What happened

Angola's civil war began almost immediately after independence from Portugal in 1975, as the MPLA government, supported by Cuban troops and Soviet aid, fought the UNITA insurgency backed at various points by the United States, apartheid South Africa, and Zaire, making it one of the Cold War's major African proxy conflicts. Fighting continued with only brief interruptions until UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi was killed in 2002, ending large-scale hostilities. The war killed an estimated 500,000 to 1,000,000 people and displaced roughly 4 million internally at various points, along with several hundred thousand refugees in neighboring Zambia, DR Congo, and Namibia; landmines laid during the conflict continued to kill and injure civilians for decades afterward.

Parties

The MPLA government, backed by Cuba and the Soviet Union, fought UNITA insurgents, backed by the United States, South Africa and Zaire, in a Cold War-era proxy war following independence from Portugal

The denominator

The 1970 colonial census counted about 5.6 million and UN estimates put Angola at roughly 6.6 million in 1975; the country had reached about 14 million by 2000 and 16 million by the war's end in 2002. At the peak of the fighting in 1999-2002 UN agencies recorded some four million internally displaced people, close to a third of the population, alongside several hundred thousand refugees in Zambia, the DRC and Namibia.

The four million displaced were counted at the war's end when Angola's population was more than twice its 1975 size, and many people were displaced repeatedly across 27 years, so the ratio against the 1975 baseline substantially overstates the share.

Where the baseline comes from

Angolan Civil War — Wikipediaopen-edited
Demographics of Angola — Wikipediaopen-edited

On the death toll

The commonly cited range for the war from 1975 to the MPLA's victory in 2002 is 500,000-800,000 dead, with over 500,000 attributed to the 1975-89 phase alone, killed either in combat or indirectly through bombing, landmines and starvation, and about 120,000 killed in the eighteen months of renewed war after the 1992 election. Amnesty International estimated 30,000 killed in the MPLA's 1977 purge following the Nito Alves coup attempt. These aggregates fold in indirect deaths from war-induced famine and mine injuries and are therefore not comparable with battle-death counts; no post-war mortality survey has been conducted, and the MPLA government has not sought one.

Documented forms of violence

Mass KillingStarvation and Siege

Amnesty International documented the mass killings of the 1977 purge; the sieges of Kuito and Huambo and the indiscriminate shelling of besieged cities, with starvation as a consequence, were documented by UN humanitarian agencies and by Human Rights Watch's reporting on Angola.