Cabo Delgado: Mozambique must manage supports to avoid “salad of interventions” – Watch

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Cabo Delgado: Mozambique must manage supports to avoid “salad of interventions” – Watch

4:00 CAT | 16 Dec 2020

Photo: O País

Mozambique’s President Filipe Nyusi today said that the country must manage international support to combat the armed insurgency in Cabo Delgado, in the north of the country, or risk creating a “salad of interventions”.

“We are receiving intentions to help Mozambique from many countries,” from Europe, Asia, the Americas and Africa, including from the Southern African Development Community (SADC), President Nyusi said in parliament today.

“We need to know how to manage [all offers], at the risk of creating a salad of interventions in Mozambique,” he said.

“We are engaging with all these initiatives,” the president added during his State of the Nation address.

Regarding international relations, he said that Mozambique “has no enemies in the world”, but rather “a certain universal acceptance and sympathy”.

In any case, it will be the country’s Defence and Security Forces (FDS) that will be at the forefront of combat, he said.

The government “is committed to intensifying the training and re-equipment of the FDS in all specialties” while continuing “international cooperation to combat terrorism, always aiming at the preservation of national interests”, the president said.

“We need to develop our skills internally,” he insisted, adding: “We will [be] in the first line of defence of our homeland; nobody else will do it for us dispassionately.”

Regarding the attacks in Cabo Delgado, Filipe Nyusi started today’s speech in parliament with a tribute to “the 53 young people from Xitaxi”, a village in the northern province, slaughtered by the rebels in April.

The president classified them as “true martyrs, savagely slain by terrorists for refusing to be converted into murderers of their own brothers”, while also honouring members of the SDS killed in combat and civilians slain.

Armed violence in Cabo Delgado, northern Mozambique, is causing a humanitarian crisis with more than 2,000 killed and 571,000 people displaced (a number updated today by the head of state), mainly to the capital provincial, Pemba, without adequate housing or food.

The province has been under attack by insurgents for three years, with some of the incursions, since 2019, claimed by the jihadist Islamic State group.

Speaking today on combating the insurgency, President Nyusi said that the problem is in fact more than three years old, and dates back to 2012, and the destabilising intervention of a Tanzanian called Abdul Chaculo, who recruited followers for an insurrection against the state and Islamic norms, a movement which was “restrained until 2017”, the head of state said.

In 2017, armed attacks broke out in Mocímboa da Praia. Since then, Tanzanians, Congolese, Somalis, Ugandans, Kenyans and Mozambicans have been identified among the terrorists captured or killed in combat.

“The leaderships is mostly foreign,” especially Tanzanians, President Nyusi said, citing the names of those killed in combat. Young Mozambicans are recruited in the provinces of Cabo Delgado, Nampula, Zambézia, especially coastal districts, but also from the interior, in Niassa province.

Looting and organised crime are sources of finance, but the flight of the population and the operations of the FDS are limiting insurgent logistics, the president stressed, saluting those veteran fighters who have been mentoring young soldiers during operations in the province.

Source: O País