Modern Angola still bears the scars of one of the most brutal wars of the Cold War era. Barefoot rural children often wear tree bark as clothes, while in teeming urban centres one-legged beggars, the legacy of landmines sown across the country, gather at every junction.

The vast majority of Angola’s 18.5 million population live on far less than the international poverty benchmark of about 50p a day. Only a tiny elite around President José Eduardo dos Santos and his family enjoy riches beyond their countrymen’s wildest dreams.

Hundreds of thousands of people were killed during 27 years of civil war after independence from Portugal in 1975. It pitted the Soviet and Cuban-backed Marxist Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) against the right-wing Unita forces of Jonas Savimbi.

Savimbi, a rebel leader who summarily executed dissenters, was fêted in Washington for his anti-communist rhetoric and received tonnes of weapons and military support from the US and apartheid South Africa. Pretoria, with covert US support, sent into the country troops from Namibia, which it then controlled. It unleashed its notorious Buffalo Squadron, made up largely of black mercenaries recruited from Portuguese-speaking West Africa and commanded by fanatical, anti-communist white officers, on an innocent, rural population.

Fidel Castro responded to the West’s challenge by sending in about 40,000 Cuban troops, backed by Soviet-made tanks and fighter jets. Atrocities were perpetrated by both sides — most of them hidden from the world.

In 1988 the war culminated in the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale, the largest land battle in Africa since the Second World War, where the US and Soviet proxy armies of Angola, South Africa and Cuba fought themselves to a stalemate over several weeks.

Both sides claimed victory but, in reality, the cost was so high that Washington and Moscow, faced with a rapidly changing world, concluded that neither side could win and did a deal under which all foreign troops withdrew.

Angola disarmed and prepared for elections in 1992. However, the West’s protégé, Mr Savimbi, refused to play ball. Once it became clear that they had lost, Unita rejected the outcome and resumed the war. Hundreds of thousands more died.

The MPLA rearmed, with much of the weaponry coming through the deals identified in the French court yesterday. The shipments began when the socialist President Mitterrand was in power in 1993 and continued until 1998, three years after Jacques Chirac’s election. They helped to turn the tide against Unita.

The weapons trade was fuelled by diamond money. In exchange for weapons huge quantities of the country’s precious stones went to the arms dealers, middlemen and other adventurers who flocked to the country in the early Nineties with stockpiles of decommissioned Soviet weapons.

Another peace accord was signed in 1994. This time the UN sent in peacekeepers. The fighting steadily worsened again and in 1999 they withdrew, leaving a country rich in natural resources but littered with landmines and the ruins of war. The war ended only when Savimbi was killed in a gun battle in 2002.

From colonial times onwards it has always been the poor and the weak in Africa who suffer most. Battles in faraway capitals of which the majority of people have never heard have consigned millions to early graves.

The old African proverb, “When the Elephants fight the grass gets trampled”, was never truer than in Angola.

The weapons that poured into Angola in those bloody decades came from freedom lovers on both sides of the ideological divide but killed with equal ferocity. In return, great fortunes were made, especially by businessmen with friends — and relatives — in European capitals.

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