Mozambique looks less loveable after attacks

BOBOLE - At Bobole a bustling refreshment stop on Mozambique’s north-south highway, brightly-painted kiosks lined with bottles offer drinks to thirsty travellers while hawkers sell bananas, paw-paws and carrots in a typical African roadside scene.

But memories remain fresh of when Bobole lay in the ‘death corridor’ of a civil war that cost nearly one million Mozambicans their lives until it ended two decades ago.

This year, a series of hit-and-run raids by opposition Renamo gunmen about 600 km further north has rekindled fears of a return to all-out conflict in what has become one of Africa’s economic growth stars, where international investors are developing multi-billion-dollar coal and gas discoveries.

‘What we saw here, we don’t want our children to see,’ said Rogeria Mabjaia, who owns a kiosk in Bobole, an hour’s drive north of the capital Maputo. She remembers hiding in the bush from the ‘bandidos’, the name Mozambique’s Frelimo government gave the Renamo guerrillas during the war of 1975-1992.

Back then, motorists and residents at Bobole faced ambushes day and night by armed raiders who stole livestock and food, burned homes and vehicles, and killed without mercy.

By comparison, the raids this April and June in central Sofala province look minor, although at least 11 soldiers and police and six civilians were killed.

Nevertheless they caught the Frelimo party government and its international backers by surprise, forcing a temporary suspension of some coal exports to the coast by rail, reducing north-south road traffic and causing tourist cancellations.

Unrest before local elections in November and a presidential vote next year could dislodge the former Portuguese colony from its pedestal as a ‘donors’ darling’, showered with foreign aid. It could also derail the expected resources investment bonanza in a country that remains desperately poor.

Renamo was formed as an anti-communist rebel group in the 1970s by the secret service of neighbouring Rhodesia, in retaliation for Mozambique sheltering guerrillas fighting the white-minority government of what is now Zimbabwe.

It was later adopted by the apartheid-era South African military but abandoned the war in a 1992 peace pact to become Mozambique’s leading opposition party.

Renamo has lost every election to Frelimo since then, but accuses President Armando Guebuza and his ruling party of hogging political and economic power through a one-sided electoral system and by harassing its opponents.

Mozambique needs some kind of accommodation, said Leopoldo Amaral, human rights programme manager for the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (OSISA) in Johannesburg, a pro-democracy network founded by financier George Soros.

‘They are at a crossroads. If they don’t reach a deal, things are likely to degenerate,’ he said. ‘You don’t want a militarised country that will scare businessmen, investors.’

Brazil’s Vale, London-listed Rio Tinto, Italy’s Eni and U.S. oil firm Anadarko are among the major investors in Mozambique looking to develop some of the world’s largest untapped reserves of coal and gas.

-Nampa-Reuters