Mozambique: Renamo leader wants international help to fight insurgents – Lusa report

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Mozambique: Renamo leader wants international help to fight insurgents – Lusa report

7:33 CAT | 06 Apr 2021

Picture: Sala da Paz

The president of the main opposition party, the Mozambican National Resistance (Renamo), Ossufo Momade, on Tuesday called on the government to ask the international community for support in fighting the armed groups carrying out attacks in the north of the country.

“The government should ask the international community to support it legally and openly to help Mozambique fight these terrorists,” he said.

“The occupation of several districts of Cabo Delgado and the progressive advances of the insurgents put the population and the entire country in great insecurity, and it is increasingly clear that there are major weaknesses within the Defence and Security Forces,” he said.

Without an effective response, the action of armed groups could spread from Cabo Delgado province to two other provinces in the north, namely Nampula and Niassa.

The president of Renamo rejected the use of mercenaries to fight the armed groups, noting that this option would only aggravate the violence and the vulnerability of Mozambican sovereignty.

Ossufo Momade said that the government should identify the authors of the armed violence in the north, “which seems to have internal sponsorship, judging by the way this war started and the strange way in which alert information was neglected, as early as 2017.”

Momade criticised the Defence and Security Forces (FDS) triumphalism in the fight against the armed groups, labelling it as inconsistent and disqualified platitudes.

The Renamo president warned of the desperate situation in which thousands of people forced to flee the war in the north find themselves, deploring the lack of conditions in the centres and families hosting the displaced.

Ossufo Momade also rebuked the president, Filipe Nyusi, for having said that the attack of 24 March on the town of Palma “was not the biggest of many”, accusing him of “sidelining the life and suffering of the people”.

The violence unleashed more than three years ago in Cabo Delgado province took a new escalation about a fortnight ago, when armed groups attacked the village of Palma, which is about six kilometres from the multi-million dollar natural gas projects.

According to United Nations data, the attacks caused dozens of deaths. They forced thousands of Palma residents to flee, worsening a humanitarian crisis that has affected some 700,000 people in the province since the conflict began.

The Islamic State terrorist movement claimed on Monday control of the town of Palma, near the border with Tanzania.

Several countries have offered military support on the ground to Maputo to fight these insurgents, whose actions have been claimed by the self-proclaimed Islamic State. Still, so far, there has been no acceptance of this, although reports and testimonies point to security companies and mercenaries in the area.

Source: Lusa