Mozambique: Alleged recruiter admits attending Junta meeting – AIM report

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Mozambique: Alleged recruiter admits attending Junta meeting – AIM report

7:56 CAT | 20 Jul 2020

Photo: O País

A man accused of recruiting young Mozambicans to join the self-styled “Renamo Military Junta” has admitted that he attended the meeting at which the Junta elected Mariano Nhongo as its President.

Antonio Bauase is one of six people on trial at the Dondo district court, in the central province of Sofala, charged with conspiracy against the security of the state through recruiting people in Marromeu district to join the Military Junta.

Giving evidence for the second day on Friday, Bauase admitted he was at the Junta’s conference in mid-2019, but insisted that the only recruiting he had ever done was for a private security company, and never for the Military Junta.

According to the account of the trial in the independent daily “O Pais”, Bauase said he was unhappy with the result of the Renamo Congress, held in January 2019, and regarded the election of Ossufo Momade as Renamo President as “fraudulent”.

The Renamo dissidents decided to hold their own meeting at which a new President would be elected. On learning, through the media, of the formation of the Military Junta and its plans to hold a meeting in July, Bauase made his own way from his home in Marromeu to Gorongosa district to attend the meeting.

The meeting, which the Junta called an “extraordinary national conference”, in fact took place on 19 August, and elected Nhongo as its President. Nhongo promoted himself to the rank of general and claimed to be President, not only of the Junta, but also of Renamo itself,

Bauase said he support the political positions of Nhongo, but denied recruiting anybody into the ranks of the Junta’s forces. He told the court that one of the recommendations of the August conference was to work through the Renamo parliamentary deputies to remove Ossufo Momade from the leadership of the party.

He insisted that his recruitment work was exclusively for a security company owned by his co-accused, former Renamo deputy Sandura Ambrosio, and had nothing to do with the Junta.

The judge asked him about cryptic Whatsapp messages sent from his mobile phone to another co-accused, Eugenio Domingos. One message said “the matter is serious this December it will not close. Trust me”. Asked what this meant, Bauase said he could not remember ever sending such messages.

Another of the accused, Domingos Marime, charged with financing the Military Junta, said he only knew Ambrosio and Bauase, but not the other three accused, whom he had only met after they had all been arrested. He knew Ambrosio and Bauase because they had all been Renamo activists – indeed, Marime had been a Renamo member of the Sofala Provincial Elections Commission. But he had not spoken to either Ambrosio or Bauase since June 2019.

Marime said he did not know Mariano Nhongo, and had only heard about him from the media.

The only one of the accused who has not yet testified is Ambrosio himself. The judge, Castigo Teofilo, said the court will question Ambrosio next Friday.

Source: AIM