Mozambique: PM calls on all Mozambicans to stand up against terrorist threats – AIM

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Mozambique: PM calls on all Mozambicans to stand up against terrorist threats – AIM

4:51 CAT | 28 Oct 2020

File photo:AIM

Mozambican Prime Minister Carlos Agostinho do Rosario on Wednesday called for “the cohesion of all Mozambicans in the relentless fight” against the terrorists who are waging war against the Mozambican state in the northern province of Cabo Delgado.

Responding in the Mozambican parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, to requests from the two opposition parties, Renamo and the Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM), about the situation in Cabo Delgado, Rosario said the terrorist actions “are committed by foreign citizens and some Mozambicans recruited locally, many of them coercively, or enticed through false promises of well-paid jobs”.

The Mozambican jihadists are now aligned with the group that calls itself “the Islamic State Central African Province” (ISCAR), and among the islamists arrested and brought to trial have been some Tanzanians, Somalis and Burundians.

Rosario stressed that the terrorist actions have displaced more than 435,000 people from their homes, fleeing to safer areas within Cabo Delgado or in other provinces. The greatest influx of displaced people had been in the last few days, when over 10,000 people, 4,000 of them children, arrived in boats on the Paquitequete beach in the provincial capital, Pemba.

The Prime Minister accused the terrorists of spreading “disinformation and propaganda, seeking to denigrate the defence and security forces, by publishing on social media audio-visual material showing alleged images of the defence and security forces committing human rights violations”.

“We should all condemn vehemently this behaviour of the terrorists, seeking to discredit the defence and security forces who, with enormous sacrifice, are defending the population and the territorial integrity of our country”’ he stressed.

Rosario took a very different position towards the Renamo dissidents who call themselves the “Renamo Military Junta”, and who are continuing to stage ambushes against vehicles using the main roads in the central provinces of Manica and Sofala.

Despite their lethal attacks, President Filipe Nyusi last Saturday offered the Junta a seven day truce, and Rosario made it clear that, while the government will fight to the end against the jihadists, it hopes to bring the Junta into the current demobilisation of the Renamo militia.

“The government”, he said, “will continue to implement the disarming, demobilisation and reintegration of Renamo’s residual armed men”, under the peace agreement that Nyusi and Renamo leader Ossufo Momade had signed in August 2019.

The government, Rosario added, is willing to enter into dialogue with “all live forces in society, including the Renamo Military Junta”. The truce showed Nyusi’s “commitment to peace and reconciliation of the Mozambican family”.

Interior Minister Amade Miquidade told the Assembly that the security situation in the central provinces “is the responsibility of an opposition political party. Some of the people who are fighting against the Mozambican state have close ties to this party”.

He was talking about Renamo, and during the debate deputies from the ruling Frelimo party recalled that in 2019, Renamo parliamentarians had dismissed the emergence of the Military Junta as a family quarrel that would be resolved inside Renamo.

Miquidade insisted that Renamo “has the patriotic duty to hand over all the information it has about the Junta, how many men it has, where its bases are, etc”.

Renamo had asked about the Mozambican government’s hiring of “private military contractors” (the polite term for mercenaries) in the fight against the Cabo Delgado jihadists. Miquidade defended this because “the fight against terrorism requires expertise that we don’t have, and it requires resources we don’t have”.

He did not regard the military’s use of foreign assistance as fundamentally different from Mozambique Airlines (LAM) hiring foreign-owned aircraft and foreign crews.

Miquidade declined to make public details of the military strategy used in Cabo Delgado, since that might be of assistance to the terrorists. But he confirmed that the armed forces have been fighting alongside veterans of Mozambique’s war for independence.

“We have put some terrorist leaders, including foreigners, out of action”, he said, and had undertaken operations against a series of terrorist camps and bases. As if to flout the origins of the group, the jihadists in Cabo Delgado called their main base “Base Syria”.

Miquidade urged the deputies to visit the positions of the defence forces in Cabo Delgado “to express your solidarity and encouragement. They are our forces, and they are your forces”.

Source: AIM