Dhlakama says Renamo will only surrender weapons when it has officers in the Defence and Security Forces

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Dhlakama says Renamo will only surrender weapons when it has officers in the Defence and Security Forces

11:38 CAT | 05 Apr 2018

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Renamo leader Afonso Dhlakama has said that Mozambique’s main opposition party will only hand over the arms of its military wing when the officers of the organisation are integrated into the command of the various branches of the Defence and Security Forces.

“The weapons we have for our security will only pass from the hands of Renamo men to credible and balanced state institutions,” Dhlakama said in an interview with the weekly newspaper Canal de Moçambique, published yesterday.

According to him, this credibility of the Mozambican Defence and Security Forces depends on the entry of officers of the Mozambican National Resistance (Renamo) into positions of command.

“Weapons in the hands of Renamo guards will be delivered to the institutions which will [then] already be [institutions] of the state and not Frelimo, because we will be commanding together. Without that, all this weapons [surrender] story is just a big story, because Renamo will not surrender the weapons which assure its security and deliver them to a group of people who take orders from Frelimo,” Dhlakama said.

The Renamo leader said that his party wanted to see the Defence and Security Forces run by officials nominated by the main opposition party and the ruling Frelimo Liberation Front of Mozambique, and to cease its alleged partisanship.

“The idea is simple: where the head is Frelimo, the ‘vice’ should be from Renamo, and vice versa,” he said.

Dhlakama rejected Frelimo’s position that the demobilisation of Renamo’s residual forces and its integration into the Defence and Security Forces should run in parallel with the country’s administrative decentralisation.

“What I want to make clear is that we never discussed the exchange of anything. President Nyusi has never officially approached me to say that decentralisation is in exchange for disarmament, they are two different things,” he said.

Although the Government and Renamo signed the General Peace Agreement ending 16 years of civil war in 1992, the main opposition party has maintained an armed contingent that has engaged in several cycles of violence with government forces, especially after elections.

Source: Lusa