DAVID PRATT ON THE WORLD: How Mozambique’s ‘forgotten’ Cape is cursed by rich resources

Just such a headline appeared last week when several news outlets reported how children as young as 11 years old were being beheaded by Islamist insurgents in the Cabo Delgado region of Mozambique in East Africa.

For those of us in the journalistic community tasked with covering foreign affairs, what is happening in Mozambique’s northernmost province is a story we have been monitoring for some time.

But because of both the Covid-19 pandemic and restricted access to international media and the intimidation or imprisonment of local reporters, piecing together exactly what has been going on in Cabo Delgado has proved challenging.

Gradually, however, a picture is emerging of this complicated crisis and the violent chaos that grips the region, which the UN has called “a perfect storm of instability”.

That said, even now views differ as to what motivates the insurgents – jihadism, or local grievances?

The answer is a bit of both, but it comes against a backdrop of big money, multinationals, and control of the oil deposits, natural liquefied gas fields and gemstones which as far back as a decade ago were estimated to be worth billions of dollars.

This, after all, is place with the world’s largest known graphite deposits, a highly sought-after key component in the development of lithium-ion batteries used for electric and hybrid vehicles.

Cabo Delgado, too, is the place where you will find 40 per cent of the world’s known ruby reserves. That oil and gas, according to some projections, will make Mozambique the third-largest exporter of natural gas in the world after Qatar and Australia from 2022.

Those growing attacks by insurgents in Cabo Delgado occur in the shadow of the largest investment project in sub-Saharan Africa, a $20 billion gas project run by Total with investments from France, Japan, the US, and the UK.

“Only a mixed explanation can bring us close to the real motives, causes and reasons for the uprising. says Enio Viegas Filipe Chingotuane, head of the department of peace and security at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Mozambique’s capital, Maputo.

Speaking a few months ago to South Africa’s Mail and Guardian newspaper, he described Cabo Delgado as “an ungoverned territory”.

“Mozambican security forces are in bad shape due to many years of low funding and neglect ... none of its arms are up to the task in Cabo Delgado,” Chingotuane explained.

It’s perhaps because of these shortcomings within the country’s military that, more recently, the security and human rights implications of this volatile mix have been further complicated by the “privatisation of the conflict” through the Mozambican government’s use of mercenaries.

Such hired guns, in particular former soldiers from apartheid South Africa and the former Rhodesia, have a long history in the region. But more recently Russian mercenaries from the Wagner Group have also been known to have a presence.

In 2019, an estimated 160 contractors from the Kremlin-linked Wagner Group, flew into Cabo Delgado, but they quickly withdrew after at least seven Wagner personnel were killed by the insurgents.

It’s in all this recent history that the story of Cabo Delgado’s current crisis has its real roots, for it was the end of Mozambique’s decades-long civil war in 1992 that left a new generation frustrated and feeling ignored by the country’s political elite in the south.

Extremists recruit

Like much of Mozambique, unemployment in Cabo Delgado has long been high. Some young artisanal miners worked in the area before the arrival of massive global corporations who moved in, shoving aside those locals who became disgruntled and in turn were easy recruiting fodder for Islamist extremist groups in this predominately Muslim province of 2.3 million people in what is mainly Christian Mozambique.

Through time, this recruiting drive has become more organised and often from outside the country by global jihadist groups. The local insurgents now mainly known as Ansar al-Sunna or al-Shabaab, as Mozambicans now refer to them, share the same name with their Islamist counterparts in Somalia but are not known to be related. Al-Shabaab means “The Youth” in Arabic.

Last week, the US state department designated the insurgents as a terrorist organisation dubbed “Isis-Mozambique” – a reference to the franchise arrangement that the Islamic State group (IS) is believed to have set up with the local Cabo Delgado faction.

But while IS has claimed responsibility for some of the attacks carried out in the region, there remains little hard evidence of them supplying weapons shipments or providing training.

The premise that the rebellion in Cabo Delgado is, at its core, part of a global jihadist movement has been given credibility by the militants themselves, who publicly swore allegiance to IS last year, but some of the insurgency’s leaders have suggested it has more to do with discrimination.

“We occupy the towns to show that the government of the day is unfair. It humiliates the poor and gives the profit to the bosses,” says a tall, unmasked man in khaki uniform, surrounded by other fighters who delivered his message in a video filmed last year and circulated widely on WhatsApp in Mozambique.

As reported by the BBC at the time, the man spoke frequently about Islam, and his desire for an “Islamic government, not a government of unbelievers”, but he also cited alleged abuses by Mozambique’s military, and repeatedly complained that the government was “unfair”. While Mozambicans make up most of the insurgents’ numbers, some are also known to have come from Tanzania and Somalia.

These fighters, who are now estimated to have grown to thousands, have tried preventing people from going to hospitals or schools as they consider them secular and anti-Islamic.

The insurgents’ recruitment campaign, while often a process of coercion, has also found willing volunteers angered by Mozambican troops who when sent to the region to protect communities have reportedly extorted citizens instead.

Eyewitness accounts given to human rights groups also tell of the military going into hiding when insurgents attack villages, removing their uniforms, or dressing as women to escape.

While uncertainty over motives for the insurgency continues, what’s not in dispute is that since Cabo Delgado’s conflict really began to ratchet up in October 2017, some 2,700 people have died, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), a consultancy that tracks political violence.

In the past 12 months alone more than half a million people have been driven from their homes and 900,000 are short of food.

War crimes

UK-based human rights group Amnesty International found earlier this month that war crimes and abuses against civilians were being committed by all sides in the conflict – insurgents, mercenaries and government forces – a charge the government has denied.

“The people of Cabo Delgado are caught between the Mozambican security forces, the private militia fighting alongside the government and the armed opposition group locally known as ‘Al-Shabaab’ – none of which respect their right to life, or the rules of war,” said Deprose Muchena, Amnesty International’s regional director for East and Southern Africa.

“All three have committed war crimes, causing the deaths of hundreds of civilians. The international community has failed to address this crisis as it has escalated into full-blown armed conflict over the last three years,” Muchena added.

Last week, the humanitarian agency Save the Children said it had spoken to displaced families who described “horrifying scenes” of murder committed by the insurgents, including mothers whose young sons were killed. In one case, the woman hid, helpless, with her three other children as her 12-year-old was murdered nearby.

“We tried to escape to the woods, but they took my eldest son and beheaded him,” the 28-year-old, who Save the Children called Elsa, is quoted as saying. “We couldn’t do anything because we would be killed too,” the woman added. As the insurgency has grown, Mozambique’s president Filipe Nyusi has turned to private contractors – mercenaries – to help bolster the country’s demoralised and ill-disciplined army, and tighten security around gas-related projects that could transform the economy of one of the world’s poorest countries.

Security analysts say Nyusi and his ruling Frelimo Party are reluctant to depend on support from regional and Western governments, deciding instead to turn to the private sector to overhaul and bolster his forces.

According to the Financial Times, Paramount Group, the South African defence and aerospace company, reportedly has a contract to provide vehicles and training to the Mozambique army. The group told the newspaper it was “restricted from commenting on the nature and scope of its customer contracts”.

Meanwhile, the paper also detailed how Burnham Global, a Dubai-based contractor staffed by British military veterans, announced last month that Paramount had acquired a stake in the company and that together they had “a multimillion-dollar contract with an African government to provide a range of military training and advisory services ... to effectively counter an ongoing insurgency within its borders”.

The FT says Burnham Global declined to comment on whether the client was Mozambique, pointing out that other African countries from Nigeria to Mali are also fighting internal insurgencies.

But it is the role of another private military contractor, the Dyck Advisory Group (DAG), that has proved openly controversial, with Amnesty International in a report accusing the group of committing war crimes, indiscriminately shooting into crowds of civilians, and attacking a hospital in “a pattern of repeated, reckless targeting”.

One witness told Amnesty she was trapped inside her home for six days last June as mercenaries from DAG “shot everything and everyone” in the northern town of Mocimboa da Praia, as they targeted militants hiding in a local hospital. “For them it was no longer possible to know who was who,” she said.

The head of DAG, Colonel Lionel Dyck, 76, denied Amnesty’s claims and said he would be sending his own legal team to investigate, and hire outside lawyers to assess Amnesty’s allegations.

“All my men sign contracts with strict human rights clauses,” he told The Times in London. “We have been in this game a long time and know what we can and cannot do,” said Dyck, himself a former commander of the Rhodesian African Rifles and Zimbabwe Parachute Battalion.

Many observers say the privatisation of the conflict is becoming a major problem. Among them is Adriano Nuvunga, director of the non-governmental organisation Mozambique’s Centre for Democracy and Development.

Local grievances

He was cited by new outlets as saying the growth and presence of private military security contractors “makes governance more difficult” in a war he believes has more to do with local grievances than transnational Islamist terrorists.

The United States, however, would appear to disagree with such an assessment and is now convinced that Cabo Delgado’s insurgents are linked to IS and has imposed sanctions on its leader, named by the Americans as Abu Yasir Hassan.

Washington has also added its own boots on the ground, albeit in the modest shape of a dozen or so US Army Green Berets who will train Mozambican marines for the next two months, signalling the entry of America’s military into a counterinsurgency effort.

But whatever the scale and threat posed by Cabo Delgado’s insurgency it’s hard to ignore the fact that so much of the activity in the region coming from outside Mozambique is inextricably connected to the vast profits to be made from the natural resources available in this otherwise impoverished country.

Many say the time is long overdue for the needs of those people living in the affected areas of Cabo Delgado to be prioritised over profit.

“The richest resource that Mozambique has is not its oil or rubies, it’s the people,” insisted Zenaida Machado, Mozambique researcher in the Africa division at Human Rights Watch speaking to the Mail and Guardian last year as the crisis in the region escalated.

“There is no point in defending multinationals and all the wealth that they are bringing when those villages will be completely abandoned either because the residents have died, or because they ran away,” he explained.

Up until last week the plight of those civilians caught in this complex, and in every sense mercenary, struggle had rarely if ever made global headlines.

Now, as reports of terrible abuses surface in a region largely off limits, the world is slowly wakening up to just what is happening in Cabo Delgado. Whether it heeds that appeal to prioritise people over profits is another matter. Such are the riches to be gleaned it’s hard not to see it falling on deaf ears.