Chronicle Editor
MAPUTO. – Everyday, about 250 refugees trudge into Malawi from Mozambique’s Tete province, joining the more than 11 000 others who have already fled.
In Kapise, a refugee camp 1km from the border, there are only 14 functioning latrines. Despite its woeful inadequacy, the Mozambican government has tried to prevent the reopening of a second, better-equipped centre that was used to house refugees during Mozambique’s 1977-92 civil war.
The government is attempting to convince observers that there is no crisis – and no real threat from which people are escaping.
In January, Jorge Jasse, the head of local government in the border town of Zobue, claimed that people crossing the border were not refugees but Malawians returning home.
A few weeks later, Deputy Justice Minister Joaquim Verissimo blamed opposition movement Renamo for the exodus, saying it was “responsible for the fear instilled in the community”.
But refugees offer a different story. “The soldiers wanted us to disclose the whereabouts of the Renamo soldiers,” one told United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees staff last month.
“When you tell them you don’t know, they torture you. So, most of us fled to Malawi for safety.”
Others told Human Rights Watch that government soldiers had sexually abused girls and women that they accused of feeding Renamo combatants.
In 2013, Renamo’s disgruntled leader, Afonso Dhlakama, tore up the peace agreement he had signed just more than two decades earlier. His men started ambushing vehicles.
A second ceasefire was signed in August 2014, but collapsed after Dhlakama’s defeat in the September 2014 elections. The March 2015 murder of Gilles Cistac in Maputo didn’t help, coming not long after the Franco-Mozambican constitutional law expert had suggested that Mozambique’s constitution did not rule out Renamo being allowed to govern the provinces where it had received a majority of votes. – BDLive
Online Reporter