The Red Cross in Angola Thursday launched a campaign to track 730 children still missing after the end of the southern African country's brutal 27-year civil war which ended in 2002.
"We urged Angolans to take up the case of the missing children seriously," said Fabrizio Carboni, deputy head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), unveiling a brochure with 730 photographs of the children still estranged from their families.
According to the ICRC and the national Red Cross, 21,890 people are still waiting to be reunited with their families.
More than 500,000 people were killed in fighting in the former Portuguese colony before a peace agreement was signed in 2002, and an estimated 3.5 million Angolans were driven from their homes.
Reunification efforts are now spearheaded by the government, humanitarian organisations and non-governmental bodies who put out profiles on radio and in posters which are distributed nationwide.
However, tracing is made difficult by the fact that vast swathes of the sprawling country are still inaccessible, while acute poverty — officially standing at 68 percent — is another deterrent.
