via RENAMO still refusing to hand over list of names 5 November 2014
The dialogue between the Mozambican government and the former rebel movement Renamo is once again deadlocked, this time over the integration of Renamo gunmen into the armed forces (FADM) and the police.
The key problem here is that Renamo has not yet given a list of those members of its militia whom it wishes to place in the army and the police, and those who should be demobilised and returned to civilian life.
The government points out that, if it does not know exactly how many men Renamo has under arms, their ranks, and where they are located, little or nothing can be done to include them in the defence and security forces or to demobilize them.
Last week, the government said it was willing to recruit 300 of the Renamo men – 200 into the police and 100 into the FADM. But Renamo has neither confirmed nor denied this figure.
For the past two decades, it has been generally believed that the Renamo militia (also referred to as its “Presidential Guard”) is no more than a couple of hundred strong. But recently there have been reports of demobilised Renamo fighters gathering at old Renamo bases.
If these people are to be included in the total, it would mean demobilizing the same people twice. Those demobilised in 1994, after the end of the war of destabilisation, both from the old government army, the FAM/FPLM, and from Renamo, received 18 months demobilization pay, half provided by the government and half by the international community.
At the latest round of dialogue, on Monday, the head of the Renamo delegation, Saimone Macuiana, justified the latest delaying tactics on the grounds that there should be a “model” for the integration of the Renamo men into the army and police.
He claimed that this was envisaged in the agreement on a cessation of hostilities, signed by President Armando Guebuza and Renamo leader Afonso Dhlakama on 5 September. But the paragraph cited by Macuiana does not mention the word “model”. It does, however, say that the teams of government and Renamo military experts should present a document to a plenary session of the dialogue “which contains all the questions concerning the integration of the Renamo residual forces into the FADM and police”.
Macuiana told a press conference, at the end of the dialogue round, that this paragraph clearly meant there should be a framework to allow integration to go ahead. He accused the government of “going against the spirit of what was achieved. The teams should present the proposal so that we can put this model into practice and allow the work to advance”.
As for the question of numbers, Macuiana said “it’s one thing to count people and another to draw up a model of how these people can be integrated”.
He insisted that the “model” was a pre-condition, and threatened that “without this there will be no advance with integration”. Macuiana proposed that the two sides should meet again on Wednesday to discuss solely the “model” of integration.
However, the head of the government delegation, Agriculture Minister Jose Pacheco, said the government had given a model to Renamo and it was now up to Renamo to study it and bring a reply.
Meanwhile, the team of international observers that is to monitor the agreement on cessation of hostilities (known by the acronym EMOCHM) has deployed its delegations to the central provinces of Sofala and Tete, the northern province of Nampula and the southern province of Inhambane.
But if Renamo fails to deliver its list of names, there will be precious little for the observers to observe.
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