Maputo, Mozambique – When Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi was visiting some of the areas in the gas-rich northern province of Cabo Delgado that were affected by an escalating conflict last month, he was approached by a man who had an urgent request.
“We are not asking for assistance,” the man said after Nyusi pointed out that humanitarian aid was being provided to hundreds of thousands of people forced to leave their homes due to the deadly fighting between an ISIL (ISIS) affiliated armed group Government troops.
“We want the war to end.”
However, the war has not stopped. Instead, it appears to be entering a particularly gruesome new phase when reports of dozens of recent beheadings in the Muidumbe district of Cabo Delgado turn out to be true.
Less than two weeks ago, when Muidumbe got back on its feet after overflowing its main villages in April, ISIL fighters launched another attack on the district.
In a few quarters, the attackers reportedly met fierce resistance from a local militia led by Mozambique war veterans of the 1960s and 1970s. However, according to a retail outlet, Pinnacle News, they took revenge through mass beheadings at a football stadium in the village of Muatide, based in northern Mozambique, with a network of correspondents across Cabo Delgado.
The head of the United Nations expressed his shock at “the reports of massacres … including the reported beheading and kidnapping of women and children” and called the Mozambique authorities to investigate the incidents.
Muidumbe is further inland than the places hardest hit by the escalation of violence that began in October 2017 when members of a shadowy armed group that later pledged allegiance to ISIL attacked police stations in the main port city of Mocimboa da Praia.
It’s also uncomfortably close to the city of Mueda, which is home to the main Mozambican military base in Cabo Delgado.
Mueda itself has not yet been attacked, but the military stationed there has also failed to retake Mocimboa da Praia, which was out of control four months after it was captured by the militants after fierce fighting with Mozambican marines supported by South African mercenaries the government remains.
The port of Mocimboa da Praia is of strategic importance for liquefied natural gas projects led by Total and ExxonMobil, which are being developed on a fortified peninsula just off the coast near the city of Palma.
These gas projects should transform Mozambique’s economy and help lift Cabo Delgado – a province where development and poverty reduction are dramatically behind that in the south of the country – out of poverty.
That dream seems further away than ever, however, since news broke in early November that a flagship project to use part of the gas in the country had been canceled. Norwegian fertilizer giant Yara told the government last month that it would not start up any proposed facility that would use gas from the Cabo Delgado projects to make fertilizers, local business news website Zitamar News reported, as the Government could not guarantee gas to Yara at a sufficiently low price.
The failure of the Yara project is, according to Joseph Hanlon, a seasoned journalist who has been writing about Mozambique since the 1970s, “a classic of what caused the uprising”.
“In five years the government has done nothing to use the gas for domestic development. Nothing, ”he said. “If they had Yara on board, they would have changed Mozambique’s agriculture. But they just didn’t care. “
Failure to regain control of Mocimboa da Praia could prove to be a major strategic mistake, according to Jasmine Opperman of the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED).
“We’ve seen new recruits come to them freely and willingly,” Opperman warned during a webinar by the Institute for Security Studies on November 4th.
The fighting in Cabo Delgado has killed 2,283 people since it began more than three years ago, according to ACLED, and 355,000 were forced to leave their homes, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said at the end of last month.
According to human rights groups, the fighters in Cabo Delgado 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 grave human rights abuses during operations in the province, including arbitrary arrests, torture, abuse of force against civilians and extrajudicial executions.
Last month, fighters apparently cleared a coastal area known as the mucojo of Cabo Delgado. According to reports, young people were kidnapped, men killed and survivors fled to nearby islands and ultimately to the provincial capital, Pemba.
Paquitequete Beach, Pemba’s most densely populated neighborhood, welcomed well over 10,000 internally displaced people who arrived by dhow in the second half of October – most of them children.
Since Saturday, over 2,000 people have arrived on a beach in Pemba from villages in Cabo Delgado, where insurgents are killing people, torch houses and chasing 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 such boat capsized on October 29 and drowned 54 people.
Encouraged, the fighters have also expanded their area of operations north to Tanzania and crossed the Rovuma River, which marks the border between the two countries, to raid villages in the Tanzanian region of Mtwara.
The first such raid took place two weeks before the presidential election in Tanzania last month when, according to the Tanzanian police chief, 200 fighters attacked the city of Kitaya.
Since then, further attacks have been reported – despite a strong reaction from the Tanzanian security forces, who have also deported around 1,000 refugees back to Cabo Delgado in recent weeks.
Mozambique’s Prime Minister Carlos Agostinho do Rosário traveled to the Tanzanian capital Dodoma for the inauguration of President John Magufuli on November 5 and had a private meeting with him to discuss the situation at the border.
The government of Mozambique is aware that not only will the conflict have a military solution, but has also set up a new economic development agency in the north of the country, which is focused on Cabo Delgado.
The Northern Integrated Development Agency’s first role is to help manage the humanitarian disaster. In the long term, however, the development that creates urgently needed jobs in the region should be promoted.
With the fighting spiraling out of control and investors leaving, a solution seems further away than ever.
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