"Confusao", the Portuguese word for confusion, is key to understanding Angola. Locals use it all the time to explain myriad situations: the military situation, the political situation, the economic situation. Everything here is confusing. There is never one truth.
In December, the head of the army, Gen Joao De Matos, told the nation on state television, TPA, that peace was in sight. At the beginning of the year, the Defence Minister, Mr Kundi Pai hama, said the war was coming to a close. Speak to anyone in the provinces and it's hard to find evidence to support the high-level promises.
"He saw nothing real, everything around him had been set up to please him." This is how the rebel group, UNITA, summed up the recent visit to Angola by Mr Robert Fowler, head of the UN sanctions committee on Angola.
That the sanctions are designed "to reduce the rebels' warring capacity", as Mr Fowler puts it, makes UNITA's conclusion rath er predictable. But read purely as semantics, not propaganda, the rebels' words touch on a problem at the heart of the Angolan conflict: the difficulty of deciphering what is real and what is not.
Take the recent refugee crisis in south-west Zambia. Since October last year, nearly 21,000 Angolans have crossed the frontier to escape attacks and fighting in Angola's south-eastern corner.
The Angolan government blames UNITA for the insecurity. Many of the refugees admit fleeing from the rebels. Officially, Zambia takes the same line. Officially, it also blames UNITA for an attack against eight villages just 10 km inside Zambian territory in early January. Behind the scenes, the story takes a twist however.
"There are suspicions in Lusaka that Angolan government troops are in fact the guilty party," said a Zambian government source. Zambia has reason to be sceptical. Last February, US and Dutch investigations found that the Angolan government was responsible for planting seven bombs in Lusaka, the capital of Zambia. Absurdly, one of these exploded inside the Angolan embassy itself. But security blunders aside, the Angolan government was out to teach Lusaka a lesson: stop assisting UNITA.
Whether Zambian officials are really doing as the government alleges is hard to prove. Mr Fowler, during his visit, said "the role of intermediaries" within Africa is crucial to UNITA's capacity to bring arms into the country. However, the UN sanctions committee, which vows it will name and shame known violators of the sanctions, has yet to list one publicly.
Whether the UN is having problems deciphering the culprits or is "playing private diplomacy", as one African diplomat insists, is hard to tell. During his trip, Mr Fowler was taken by Angola's armed forces (FAA), to UNITA's former headquarters at Andulo. There, in the central highland town which was captured by government forces in October, he was shown what he described as "a magnificent display of military hardware". Mr Fowler said he was impressed by the amount of arms the FAA had captured from the rebels.
However, when asked how he could be sure the equipment he had seen was formerly in the hands of UNITA, and not simply the government's own, he seemed apathetic.
"A lot of diplomats have asked me that question. I think it is irrelevant," he said. A few sentences later he softened and said: "I'm sure that a lot of equipment is with UNITA, then with the government, then with UNITA and then back with the government." He admitted that he has no way of always proving what is true and what is not true in Angola.
In the meantime, the war rages and innocent civilians are displaced or get killed either by bullets, malnutrition or diseases. In the central highland city of Kuito, 100 km south of Andulo, the aid agency Medecins Sans Frontieres (Belgium), reported in January that up to 12 children under five are dying each day in the refugee camps around town.
Displaced families arrive in the city regularly. Two weeks into the new year, armed men attacked a nearby village and killed 115 civilians.
In Huambo city, the situation is similar. "Between 35 and 50 families are coming each day because of insecurity," a senior western aid worker said. This week, two towns, Cuima and Sambo, both 50 km south of Huambo, were retaken by UNITA. In Bailundo, a former UNITA stronghold, 70 km to the north, civil administration was due to replace military authority on January 26th. Due to insecurity, the plans were scrapped at the last minute.
"There's a real desire to believe things are better. But in some ways it's got worse," is how one aid worker explains the contradiction between the government line and the facts on the ground. For all the government's claims and UNITA's counterclaims, one thing is easy to decipher at the start of the new century: nothing has changed for the people of Angola.