Macuane attack: Further details and reactions – AIM

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Macuane attack: Further details and reactions – AIM

6:02 CAT | 24 May 2016

CRV Magazine / Jsé Jaime Macuane in hospital after he was kidnapped and shot yesterday

24 hours after prominent Mozambican academic and political commentator Jose Jaime Macuane was abducted and maimed, his assailants remain at large and the police apparently have no clues as to their identity.

Contacted by reporters, the spokesperson for the Maputo Provincial Police Command, Emidio Mabunda, could only say that an investigation is now under way.

After speaking with Macuane, his father-in-law, Pedro Guambe, gave reporters details of the abduction. He said that Macuane was snatched outside his house, in the Maputo city neighbourhood of Coop, at about 08.30 on Monday morning, as he was on his way to the Eduardo Mondlane University (UEM), where he worked as a lecturer in the political science department.

The assailants used three cars to surround Macuane. They told him that they were police officers, and that the car he was driving was stolen. They dragged him into one of their cars and then drove him out of the city.

The kidnappers took the Maputo Ring Road into Marracuene district, about 30 kilometres north of the city. They then turned onto a dirt track, and drove onto a barren patch of land, where they shot Macuane four times in the legs. As they did so, they told their victim they had orders to leave him lame.

They then abandoned their victim, lying helplessly on the ground. Local residents found Macuane and took him to the Marracuene Health Centre. From there, he could contact his family, who collected him and drove him to the Maputo Private Hospital, where doctors operated to remove a bullet from a shattered femur.

Cited in Tuesday’s issue of the independent newssheet “Mediafax”, Guambe said that Macuane has lost lone of his mental faculties. “He speaks well, and he remembers everything that happened to him”, he said. “We think he’s out of danger now”.

As far as Guambe knew, Macuane had never suffered any threats before. “He’s been working normally, and he never mentioned any threats”, he said.

The family had no suspects in mind. “We think that’s the job of the State”, said Guambe.

Macuane has been a political commentator on the independent television station STV since 2014. and since last year he has been a regular guest, alongside journalist Fernando Lima, on the STV Sunday night talk show “Pontos de Vista” (“Points of View”).

Both Macuane and Lima are analysts who speak their minds, and have been highly critical of government policies and statements. Inevitably, this leads to suspicions that Macuane was attacked because of his political views.

Senior journalist Tomas Vieira Mario, who chairs the Higher Mass Media Council (CSCS), the press freedom watchdog body established under the Mozambican constitution, said “it is almost inevitable to associate this attack to the fact that Jaime Macuane is a commentator on Pontos de Vista. This being the case, we are facing a serious assault against human rights. A scenario of terror has been created, in which we don’t know from where and for whom the shots will come”.

Vieira Mario, who was Macuane’s predecessor on “Pontos de Vista”, before taking up his post at the CSCS, said one of the results of the attack “is to create fear among citizens, and intimidate them so that they do not express their thoughts honestly and frankly”.

Investigative journalist Marcelo Mosse, on his Facebook page, said the maiming of Macuane “represents what is most sinister in this modus operandi of silencing the voices most critical of the status quo with the resort to physical violence of the most extreme cruelty”.

“Macuane”, Mosse added, “told truths that no gun pointed at our heads can silence: that the current model of reproduction of our elites, based on the theft of public assets, is exhausted”.

Mosse doubted that President Filipe Nyusi could possibly approve of what had been done to Jaime Macuane, and he urged the President “to condemn publicly and vehemently these acts”. Taking such a public stance, he added, was fundamental for the President’s own image, and “to clarify whether we are indeed advancing towards a State of fear and censorship, in which citizens cannot discuss particular matters for fear of being shot”.

Lima, who chairs the independent media company Mediacoop, and is a former chief news editor at AIM, said the attack on Macuane was a matter of concern, but was not surprising, given the current climate of tension in the country.

But he pledged that, despite this climate of intimidation, he intends “to continue fighting so that freedom of expression does not die”.

Source: AIM