By Joe Bavier

KINSHASA, Aug 22 (Reuters) -- Angola has expelled more than 85,000 Congolese citizens over the past three months as the African oil giant prepares for its first elections since a 27-year civil war ended in 2002, the United Nations said on Friday.

Returnees began streaming across the border into Congo from northern and eastern Angola in late May, as Angola's army and police began clamping down on illegal residents, it said.

"It was announced by the (Angolan) authorities that they wanted to expel illegal foreigners before the elections," Ivo Brandau, spokesman for the U.N. humanitarian coordination office in Kinshasa, told Reuters.

An estimated 400,000 Congolese live in northern Angola, with a large number working in the mines of Africa's third largest diamond producer.

"These expulsions targeted the mines first, Brandau said."

The U.N. World Food Programme is planning to send 194 tonnes of food aid to border areas in southwestern Congo to assist some 50,000 returnees in need.

Decades of armed conflict in Angola and a 1998-2003 war in Congo created massive movements of refugees between the two neighbours. In recent years, Angola has tried to draw a line under the anarchy of the war years by bringing order to its diamond sector.

Last year, the medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) accused Angolan soldiers of raping, beating and torturing illegal Congolese migrant workers and their families before deporting them across the border.

Although some isolated incidents of human rights abuses have been reported, aid agencies say conditions have improved during the most recent wave of expulsions.

"I think there is a new will on the part of the (Angolan) government that's making this go better this time. We are no longer seeing systematic abuse," Bertrand Perrochett, MSF's emergency pool coordinator in Congo, told Reuters.

Angola, which rivals Nigeria as sub-Saharan Africa's top oil exporter, is due to hold legislative elections on September 5.

The ruling Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), in power since Angola's independence from Portugal in 1975, faces a divided and underfunded opposition.

The party is widely expected to retain keep control of the assembly, in which it now has 129 out of 220 seats.

Presidential elections have been announced for next year, raising fears among humanitarian agencies and United Nations officials that another 80,000 Congolese could be forced out of the country in the coming months.

Jose Eduardo dos Santos, who succeeded Angola's independence president Agostinho Neto and has remained in power for 29 years, has not yet announced whether he will run for president. (Editing by Alistair Thomson and Robert Hart)

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