By Zoe Eisenstein

LUANDA, March 29 (Reuters) - Angolans returning home after years in exile from civil war will face huge challenges in a country gearing up for its first national elections in more than a decade, a senior U.N. official said. Antonio Guterres, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, said 410,000 people had returned home in the last four years, many returning to areas still devastated after a 27-year war that ended in 2002.

"These provinces still have a lot of landmines, the infrastructure has been massively destroyed by the war and is recovering at a very slow place," Guterres told Reuters.

"The scale of the problem and the difficulties involved are huge," he said in an interview late on Wednesday.

The Angolan refugee repatriation programme, which officially ended on Wednesday, involved the organised repatriation of almost 140,000 Angolans, many of them by charter aircraft, along with help for tens of thousands who made their own way home.

Much of Angola's infrastructure is still in ruins five years after the end of a war that killed about one million people and forced millions of others to flee their homes.

The refugee situation could complicate voter registration for planned parliamentary and presidential elections in 2008 and 2009 respectively, the first nationwide polls since a 1992 presidential campaign was aborted and fighting resumed.

Officials are registering some 7 million voters around the country, but logistical problems are already proving a hurdle.

Although Angola is in the midst of an unprecedented economic boom, largely thanks to rising oil production and high crude prices, most of its population of over 13 million live on less than $2 a day.

One in four children do not make it to their fifth birthday and critics say the government has spent too little of its oil money on rebuilding its health and education sectors.

Guterres said Angola's government and the international community both had to ensure the returning refugees are able to make a go of it at home.

"We know that (refugee) return has not been sustainable in other parts of the world. Even peace and democracy has not always been sustainable," he said.

Guterres said half of all war-torn countries that had reached peace lost it within five years, though he did not see that happening in Angola.

But some 190,000 Angolans are still living outside Angola -- mainly in Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo -- and Guterres said many would likely decide to stay where they were.

"Many are children born in the last twenty years and they don't speak Portuguese and became fully integrated in their host countries," he said.

The UNHCR would help any who wanted to come back in the future, he said, but added: "We don't' force people back."

AlertNet news is provided by