Mozambique: Renamo wants its former guerrillas fighting in Cabo Delgado – Lusa

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Mozambique: Renamo wants its former guerrillas fighting in Cabo Delgado – Lusa

6:04 CAT | 26 Apr 2021

Photo: Sala da Paz

Ossufo Momade, president of the opposition Mozambican National Resistance (Renamo) party, on Friday urged the sending of ex-guerrillas of the party’s armed wing to the military front in Cabo Delgado.

“We have already delivered a list of 362 of our ‘rangers,'” as Ossufo Momade described them, eligible for reintegration into the Mozambican Defence and Security Forces (FDS) within the scope of the demilitarisation, disarmament and reintegration (DDR) process underway after the signing of the 2019 peace agreement.

“They are there. It would be an opportunity for the authorities to integrate them”, to “do a job in Cabo Delgado” reinforcing the fight against the armed rebels who have been plaguing the north of the country for three and a half years, Momade said.

“Why are these 362 not qualified?” Momade asked, reaffirming that the Renamo ex-combatants could join the FDS groups “going to Cabo Delgado”, but are instead “there at the bases” awaiting the outcome of the DDR process, he said in statements broadcast by the television channel STV.

Momade was speaking to journalists in Nicoadala, Zambezia province, in the centre of the country, during a visit in which he donated food to a community of displaced people from Cabo Delgado.

Armed groups have terrorised Cabo Delgado since 2017, with some attacks claimed by the jihadist group Islamic State, in a wave of violence that has already caused more than 2,500 deaths, according to the ACLED conflict registration project, and 714,000 people displaced, according to the Mozambican government.
The most recent attack, on March 24, was carried out against the town of Palma, causing dozens of deaths and injuries in numbers yet to be ascertained.

Mozambican authorities regained control of the town, but the attack led oil company Total to indefinitely abandon the main construction site of the gas project scheduled to start production in 2024 and on which many of Mozambique’s expectations for economic growth in the next decade are based.

Source: Lusa