Mozambique: African Union mission to assess support – Lusa

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Mozambique: African Union mission to assess support – Lusa

6:39 CAT | 26 Jan 2021

Photo: Lusa

The chair of the African Union Commission, Moussa Faki Mahamat, announced on Tuesday that a mission from that organisation would assess, in Mozambique, the support needed for the fight against terrorism in the country.

“We are not insensitive to what is happening in Mozambique. The African Union is engaged in the fight against terrorism, whether in the Sahel, the Chad basin, Mali or Mozambique,” Moussa Faki Mahamat told Lusa, after meeting the president of Cabo Verde, Jorge Carlos Fonseca, in Praia.

He said that a mission from that organisation to Mozambique would assess in the next few days “the practical ways in which the African Union could support the fight against terrorism,” referring to the armed insurgency in the northern province of Cabo Delgado.

“We act based on the principle of subsidiarity. Mozambique belongs to the SADC [Southern African Development Community] area, so it is in the SADC area that the issue has to be addressed. We have been in contact with SADC and Mozambique,” recalled the former Chad foreign minister, who is at the end of his term of office and is the only candidate to stand in the elections scheduled for February.

The Portuguese foreign minister, Augusto Santos Silva, said on Monday in Brussels that he hoped that, “in the coming weeks,” a “framework for enhanced cooperation” between the European Union and Mozambique would be achieved to tackle the “dire situation” in Cabo Delgado.

Speaking in Brussels, where he attended a meeting of EU heads of diplomacy, Santos Silva said that he had explained to his counterparts the “political mission” he had carried out last week to Maputo, “to express European solidarity with the dire situation Mozambique is facing in its fight against terrorism and insurgency in Cabo Delgado province.

Recalling that he carried out this mission “as representative of the high representative for foreign and security policy of the EU,” Josep Borrell, the Portuguese minister reiterated that “the objectives of this political mission have all been met […] and I was able to gather the very clear priorities of the Mozambican authorities, who want more cooperation from Europe in the area of humanitarian action, in the area of development support and the area of security,” he said.

In the latter area, Mozambique wants above all “support for training and education of special military forces, as well as through the provision of equipment and logistical capacity,” Santos Silva said.

“At the same time, the technical teams on both sides have started to work, and I expect that we can reach a framework of enhanced cooperation with Mozambique in the next few weeks,” he said.

The armed violence in Cabo Delgado province, in northern Mozambique, where the largest private multinational investment in Africa is taking place, for the exploitation of natural gas, is causing a humanitarian crisis with more than 2,000 deaths and 560,000 displaced people, without housing or food, which has led the Mozambican authorities to ask the EU for help.

Source: Lusa