The FTSE 100, which had finished 1998 at 5,882.6, is showing a gain of almost 14 per cent over the year and is mounting a valiant attempt to break through its 6,742.2 all-time high. The broadly-based All-Share is also in record territory, having risen by about 18 per cent over the year. Both indices went through a couple of serious wobbles during the summer and in October, but the underlying trend remained steadily upwards.One of the main reasons for this resounding performance is that the Cassandras were wrong. My hunch is that, barring an international disaster, the FTSE 100 will have a bumpy ride but will manage to break through new highs and end the year at around 7,200.The story so far. A year ago the markets were engulfed in a wave of bearishness and the Cassandras were out in force. ONCE AGAIN it is time for the stock market Scrooges to dust down those “apocalypse tomorrow” forecasts for the UK stock market and mutter “bah humbug” at those who are happily tucking into their turkey in the expectation that another Happy New Year lies ahead.
With shaky emerging markets, dodgy hedge funds and the risk of a UK recession dominating the agenda, all the talk was of shock waves smiting the financial markets and collapsing economies.Fast forward 12 months and the picture looks very, very different. A depressing mixture of international and domestic problems was casting a pall over global equity markets, and there was a feeling that the end of the world was, after all, nigh. For the past decade or so it has been the same every year – the doomsayers pronounce that the UK market has finally reached the top and is due for a plunge over the following 12 months. And then, year after year, stocks have carried on rising regardless of gloomy spreadsheets and worried-looking analysts.
All the signs are that 2000 will be no different. “He just steals everything from the people and keeps it all for himself while we starve.
One of them steals and the other one kills.”THE ANGOLA FILEt Up to 200 people a day are dying as a direct result of the civil war in Angola.About 1.7 million people have been forced by the fighting to flee their homes.An estimated five million Angolans are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance but aid agencies are unable to reach many of them.Unita rebels have reportedly abducted hundreds of civilians, including children, and carried out countless killings and mutilations.Both Unita and government forces have tortured, raped and arbitrarily killed unarmed civilians and executed captured combatants.Unita is besieging and shelling cities, causing unimaginable suffering.Freedom of expression is severely limited; journalists critical of the Government have received death threats; some have been physically assaulted, some killed.Amnesty International www.amnesty .uk. “I’d tell him to come here, and stop making trouble and killing people. And if he refused I would kill him by putting him in a big pot full of boiling tar. When I grow up I want to be a soldier so I can kill Savimbi.”This from a thoughtful child who has tenderly cultivated a collection of flowering plants in Coke and beer cans since arriving in Benguela.Eurico thinks that Angola’s president of the past 20 years, Jose Eduardo dos Santos, is no better.
His mother, half mad with fear and grief, walked out the door and never came back. “She just disappeared,” Eurico tells me, “I never found out what happened to her.” He was seven at the time.Eurico was later taken in by a shelter for orphans in Benguela, 200 miles away on the Atlantic coast. I ask Eurico what he would say if he could send a message to Unita’s veteran leader, Jonas Savimbi. Finally the government surrendered the city to Unita.Throughout the bombardment Eurico and his parents cowered on the floor of their house. One day a bullet came through the window and killed his father.
In 1993, Unita held one half of Huambo while the government’s forces held the other For 55 days the two sides bombarded each other relentlessly. Eurico comes from Huambo, which was once Angola’s grand second city, a monument to all that was best of Portuguese colonial architecture Now Huambo is a monument to 25 years’ war. Every single building is pockmarked inside and out with the scars of bullets and shrapnel.Eurico lived through the legendary “55 days”, the worst period in Huambo’s history, when most of those scars were inflicted. “If we cannot heal the emotional wounds, we may never break out of this cycle of violence.”Eurico Malungo, aged 13, embodies this problem. In order to cope they have become desensitised, which has terrible implications for the future of Angola.”CCF is the only organisation attempting to assess and address the psychological impact of the war on Angola’s children.
