Mozambique: Ossufo Momade postpones Renamo National Council
Mozambique: Renamo dissidents say attacks will only end when party leader goes
2:57 CAT | 29 Dec 2019
Ossufo Momade. [File photo: Lusa]
The leader of a dissident group in Renamo, Mozambique’s main opposition party, said on Friday that armed violence in the centre of the country will only end with the resignation of the party’s current president, Ossufo Momade.
“If the government recognizes that Ossufo does not represent Renamo, there will be no more shooting here,” Mariano Nhongo said in a conference call with journalists in the city of Beira from an unidentified position in central Mozambique.
According to Nhongo, the self-proclaimed Renamo Military Junta sent a document to the Frelimo government and to a contact group for peace negotiations, listing all the conditions for its guerrillas giving up their weapons, including the removal of Renamo’s current leader.
The Nhongo-led group has said that it rejects Momade’s leadership of the party and “the Mozambican government must accept that it does not represent Renamo.”
According to Nhongo, his group “sent the document on October 2nd and to date we have had no answers. What we are seeing are armoured vehicles [parked] at Renamo bases,” he added, suggesting that there are links between those in power in the party and government forces.
“Now we’re going to burn these armoured vehicles,” Nhongo said, without however taking direct responsibility for the attacks that have taken place in central Mozambique since August.
Nhongo accuses government forces of kidnapping Renamo guerrillas, with Momade standing by and doing nothing.
“Ossufo and Filipe Nyusi [Mozambique’s president] are stealing what is ours and we will not accept going home with nothing,” said Nhongo, who complained about the conditions under which Renamo guerrillas are supposed to be integrated into the country’s armed forces under the Peace and Reconciliation Agreement signed on 6 August.
“We’re going to do what we know,” threatened Nhongo. “We are not kidding and Frelimo should not mess with us.”,
Nhongo said that Momade and André Madjibire, Renamo’s secretary-general, are betraying the ideas of Afonso Dhlakama, the former party leader who passed away in May last year.
Lusa contacted Renamo spokesman José Manteigas, who reiterated that the party “has nothing to do with Mariano Nhongo”, saying that he is a defector and stressing that the main opposition party remains committed to complying with the peace agreement clauses.
Since August, a total of 21 people have died in armed attacks by groups in Manica and Sofala provinces on civilian targets as well as police and official vehicles, all attributed by the authorities to Renamo guerrillas.
On Wednesday, Mozambique’s minister of interior, Basílio Monteiro, announced the strengthening of security measures in Manica and Sofala, which include more policing and military escorts in some sections, as happened during the peak between 2014 and 2016 of military clashes between the government and Renamo.
The latest raids have been taking place in an area that is a Renamo stronghold and where its guerrillas clashed with Mozambican defence and security forces and attacked civilian targets until the December 2016 ceasefire.
The group run by Nhongo, a former Renamo general under Dhlakama, remains dug in in the forests of central Mozambique.
Mozambique’s civil war caused tens of thousands of deaths in the 1980s and 1990s.
Despite the various peace agreements that led the country to multiparty elections, the issue of integrating the guerrillas into society and the state forces was never resolved and Renamo has always maintained an active armed wing in central Mozambique
Source: Lusa
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