via Frelimo callls for Renamo’s disarmament: Renamo refuses – The Zimbabwean 22 October 2015
At Wednesday’s opening session of the final sitting in 2015 of the Mozambican parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, the majority Frelimo Party called for the urgent disbanding of the militia operated by the former rebel movement Renamo, but Renamo rejected this appeal outright.
Margarida Talapa, head of the Frelimo parliamentary group accused Renamo parliamentarians of making “incendiary speeches, which are genuine declarations of war, and an insult to the constitutionally established order”.
The Renamo deputies “are confusing parliamentary immunity with impunity. They are deceiving themselves”, she warned.
The unilateral decision by Renamo in August to abandon its dialogue with the government, Talapa said, “falls into the logic of the militarization of Renamo which remains incapable of transforming itself into a democratic political party”.
For Frelimo, Talapa added, “dialogue is a fundamental instrument for cultivating the values of citizenship, peaceful coexistence, respect for differences, solidarity, social ethics, and the deepening of democracy”.
In that spirit the government had accepted Renamo’s request for a dialogue in April 2013, and that dialogue had continued, usually in weekly meetings, until Renamo leader Afonso Dhlakama abruptly broke it off.
The government made a series of concessions to Renamo in the dialogue including the complete rewriting, on Renamo’s terms, of the electoral legislation, including the politicization of the electoral bodies from top to bottom. Appointees of Frelimo, Renamo and the second opposition force, the Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM), were placed in the electoral apparatus at every stage, from the polling stations right up to the National Elections Commission (CNE).
When these laws were passed, Renamo announced that the elections scheduled for 15 October 2014 would be proof against any fraud. But when Renamo lost those elections, it changed its tune and claimed they were a gigantic fraud.
The dialogue also resulted in the 5 September 2014 agreement on a cessation of hostilities, and the establishment of a team, including foreign military observers, that would oversee the dismantling of the Renamo militia, and the integration of its members into the armed forces and police, or back into civilian life. Since Renamo refused to hand over a list of its militia members, this never happened.
Frelimo and the government made compromises, Talapa said, “because we were convinced that Renamo was genuinely willing to abandon its guns and participate in the establishment of an effective peace”.
But instead “we witnessed Renamo denying the letter and the spirit of the Agreement on the Cessation of Hostilities, thus illustrating that it is a group organised to sow panic and terror”.
Nonetheless, President Filipe Nyusi had invited Dhlakama to meet him face to face in Maputo. “and we hope the Renamo leader does not continue to exclude himself”, said Talapa.
She insisted “it is imperative that the Renamo men lay down their arms”, and urged them to follow the example of those who have defied the Renamo leadership and applied individually to join the army and the police.
It was not fair, she added, for Renamo leaders to live in the air-conditioned comfort of the cities, benefitting from parliamentary wages and privileges, while keeping other Renamo members captive in the bush “in compliance with an agenda they don’t even know about, since it is foreign to the interests of Mozambicans”.
Talapa hoped that Dhlakama’s acceptance of the disarming of his personal guard in Beira on 9 October “will be the start of Renamo’s disarmament and of its effective transformation into a genuine political party”.
But, judging from the speech by the head of the Renamo parliamentary group, Ivone Soares, Renamo does not have the slightest intention of disarming.
Soares justified the continued existence of the Renamo militia by citing a clause from the 1992 peace agreement which states “Renamo shall be responsible for the immediate personal security of its topmost leaders. The Mozambican government shall grant police status to the Renamo members charged with guaranteeing that security”.
She omitted to mention that this clause is a transitional guarantee only covering the period between the ceasefire and the first multi-party elections. Those elections were held in October 1994, and so this clause ceased to be valid 21 years ago. There is nothing in the peace agreement which envisages Renamo maintaining a private army decades after the agreement was signed.
Soares also claimed that “if the Frelimo government had implemented the Agreement on Cessation of Hostilities, which envisages the integration of the Renamo residual force into the police and the armed forces, so that the country would have a republican army, today the question of disarmament would have been overcome”.
Soares did not mention that, ever since the agreement was signed, the government has asked Renamo for the list of men it wishes to see recruited into the army and the police, and Renamo has never supplied the list. Instead, the Renamo delegation to the dialogue demanded that Renamo be given 50 per cent of the senior positions in the military – something that is not mentioned in the September 2014 agreement.
She declared that Frelimo has no right to demand that Renamo disarm because “Frelimo itself is armed to the teeth. How can an armed party demand the disarmament of its opponent?”
Since there are no Frelimo militias, and the Frelimo branches in the armed forces were dismantled decades ago, this can only be a repetition of the old Renamo claim that the police and the army only represent Frelimo.
Soares also recycled the familiar Renamo claim that “Frelimo never won elections”, and was only in power because of “successive electoral frauds”, claims which are not supported by any of the national and international election observation missions which have monitored Mozambican elections since 1994.
Lutero Simango, head of the MDM parliamentary group, declared that his party “does not believe in the use of force to implant democracy, nor in violence to guarantee peace. These manoeuvres endanger the construction of a democratic state ruled by law, and seek to revive political bipolarization in Mozambique”.
The MDM has placed on the Assembly’s agenda a bill on separating the state from political parties. At the last sitting of the Assembly, the matter was postponed, but Simango made it clear that this time the MDM will insist on discussion of the bill in the parliament’s working commissions, and then in the plenary.
He appealed to Frelimo and Renamo deputies “not to flee from the debate”. If the bill is passed, he said, “the State will be freed from the political party ideological burden, thus establishing the boundary between the State and the political parties”.
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