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Maputo, Mozambique When Mozambique President Filipe Nyusi visited some of the areas in the gas-rich northern province of Cabo Delgado last month that have been affected by escalating conflict, he was approached by a man who had a lawsuit. urgent.
“We are not asking for support,” the man said, after Nyusi noted that humanitarian assistance was being provided to the hundreds of thousands of people who were forced from their homes due to deadly fighting between an armed group linked to ISIL ( ISIS) and government forces.
“We want the war to stop.”
However, the war has not stopped. Instead, it appears to be entering a particularly gruesome new phase, if reports of dozens of recent beheadings in Cabo Delgado’s Muidumbe district turn out to be true.
Less than two weeks ago, just as Muidumbe was recovering after its main villages were invaded in April, ISIL-linked fighters launched another assault on the district.
The attackers reportedly faced stiff resistance from some sectors of a local militia led by veterans of Mozambique’s war of independence in the 1960s and 1970s, but have retaliated by carrying out mass beheadings at a football stadium in the village. from Muatide, according to Pinnacle News, one outlet. based in northern Mozambique with a network of correspondents in Cabo Delgado.
The UN chief expressed dismay at “reports of massacres … including reports of beheading and abduction of women and children” and called on Mozambican authorities to investigate the incidents.
Muidumbe is farther inland than the places that have been mostly affected by the increase in violence, which began in October 2017 when members of a shadow armed group, which later pledged allegiance to ISIL, attacked police stations in the key port city of Mocimboa da Praia.
It is also uncomfortably close to the town of Mueda, home to Mozambique’s most important military base at Cabo Delgado.
Mueda itself has not yet been attacked, but the military stationed there also failed to retake Mocimboa da Praia, which remains out of government control four months after it was captured by fighters after fierce battles with aided Mozambican marines. by South African mercenaries. .
The port of Mocimboa da Praia is of strategic importance for the liquefied natural gas projects led by Total and ExxonMobil that are being developed on a fortified peninsula just offshore, near the city of Palma.
Those gas projects should transform Mozambique’s economy and help lift Cabo Delgado out of poverty, a province where development and poverty reduction have lagged far behind what is seen in the south of the country.
But that dream seems more distant than ever since it became known in early November that a flagship project to use part of the gas in the country was canceled. Norwegian fertilizer giant Yara informed the government last month that it would not go ahead with a planned plant that would have used gas from projects in Cabo Delgado to produce fertilizers, local business news website Zitamar News reported, as the government did not could guarantee gas. to Yara at a fairly low price.
The failure of the Yara project is “a classic of what the insurgency has sparked,” according to Joseph Hanlon, a veteran journalist who has written about Mozambique since the 1970s.
“In five years, the government has done nothing to use gas for internal development. Nothing, ”he said. “If they had included Yara, they would have transformed Mozambique’s agriculture. But they just didn’t care. “
Meanwhile, the inability to regain control of Mocimboa da Praia may prove to be a major strategic mistake, according to Jasmine Opperman, of the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED).
“We’ve seen new recruits go and join them freely and voluntarily” in town, Opperman warned during an Institute for Security Studies webinar on Nov. 4.
Paquitequete beach has become one of the main arrival points for people fleeing the violence in Cabo Delgado [File: Ricardo Franco/EPA]
The clashes in Cabo Delgado have claimed the lives of 2,283 people since they began more than three years ago, according to ACLED, and 355,000 have been forced to flee their homes, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said at the end. United. of last month.
Human rights groups say that fighters in Cabo Delgado have carried out summary executions, beheadings, raids on villages, looting and destruction of infrastructure, including schools and medical facilities. Government forces have also been implicated in serious human rights abuses during operations in the province, including arbitrary arrests, torture, misuse of force against civilians, and extrajudicial executions.
Last month, the fighters apparently cleared an area of the Cabo Delgado coast known as Mucojo. The youths were abducted, the men were killed and the survivors fled to nearby islands and eventually to the provincial capital of Pemba, according to reports.
The beach of Paquitequete, the most densely populated neighborhood in Pemba, received more than 10,000 internally displaced people who arrived by dhow in the second half of October, most of them children.
Since Saturday, more than 2,000 people have reached a beach in Pemba, from towns in Cabo Delgado, where insurgents are killing people, burning houses and driving away villagers. Many used their own clothes to pay for the boat trip, they had no money. This beach is all they have now. pic.twitter.com/i918ccysYT
– Zenaida Machado (@zenaidamz) October 21, 2020
One of those boats capsized on October 29 and 54 people drowned.
Emboldened, the fighters also expanded their sphere of operation north into Tanzania, crossing the Rovuma River that marks the border between the two countries to carry out raids on villages in Tanzania’s Mtwara region.
The first such raid came two weeks before Tanzania’s presidential elections last month when 200 fighters attacked the town of Kitaya, according to the Tanzanian police chief.
Since then, more attacks have been reported, despite a robust response from Tanzanian security forces, who have also deported some 1,000 refugees to Cabo Delgado in recent weeks.
Mozambique Prime Minister Carlos Agostinho do Rosário traveled to the Tanzanian capital of Dodoma on November 5 for the inauguration of President John Magufuli and had a private meeting with him to discuss the situation at the border.
Aware that the conflict will not only have a military solution, the government of Mozambique has created a new economic development agency for the north of the country, focused on Cabo Delgado.
The first task of the Northern Integrated Development Agency is to help cope with the humanitarian catastrophe, but in the long term, it aims to promote development that will create much-needed employment in the region.
Yet as the fight spirals out of control and investors leave, the solution seems more distant than ever.
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