Spectator's JournallMozambique Pique
Roberts, Andrew
Mozambique Pique by Andrew Roberts 4G evs ered heads on shop shelves after Renamo massacres a thousand," read a headline in the Independent last summer. When the story was checked, the real...
...But as Dlakama says of Frelimo, "Of course if they are dependent on British and American aid they are likely to drop the name 'Marxists,' but it doesn't make them feel any differently about real multi-party elections...
...Actually, the nearest I came to death that trip," he told me after I had been frisked and admitted to his room on the twelfth floor of the Altis Hotel in Lisbon, "was when I was being driven across Rome by an Italian taxi driver...
...That's just for the white man,' they said...
...United in their condemnation of Dlakama are the British Foreign Office, Mr...
...Of course, propaganda campaigns in the region leave something to be desired: some years ago, the South African InformaAndrew Roberts is the author of The Holy Fox: A Biography of Lord Halifax, published in London by Weidenfeld and Nicolson...
...Just why the British government is providing military support for a non-Commonwealth African state where no vital British interests are at stake has never been adequately explained...
...Johnson's phrase, like "trying to settle the precedency between a louse and a flea...
...Whether or not Renamo is winning the land war—it claims to control 85 percent of the country—it has definitely lost the propaganda battle...
...Dlakama, whose long-professed pro-Western, anti-Marxist stance dovetails well with an admiration for Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, is understandably nonplussed...
...With enemies and friends like that, Dlakama was someone I had to meet, and I did during his visit to Portugal last November...
...It's a war...
...Now it's beginning to look as if they could be proved wrong...
...Officials in the Bush Administration and the State Department argue that the regime is now officially distancing itself from this sort of ideology...
...Pik Botha, Tanzania, Robert Mugabe, the Commonwealth, Malawi, and the U.S...
...They clearly had a degree of popular support...
...The civil war has cost around a hundred thousand lives and left nearly a million homeless...
...It is not easy, when speaking to this personable fellow, to remember that he is regarded by those few people who have heard of him as Africa's Ceausescu...
...Botha "likes small children, furry animals, and nice, hot custard...
...tion Bureau issued a video announcing that then South African president P.W...
...But for every tale of an atrocity on our side there is another of one committed by Frelimo or Zimbabwean troops...
...We know where 48 The American Spectator March 1992 they are in Nacala, Chimoio, and Maputo...
...These, along with Frelimo soldiers, receive training from British army "advisers...
...Two years ago, he told his Naparama followers that a vaccination he had concocted would make them immune to bullets...
...Still, Western officials tend to be swayed by such documents as the State Department's Gersony Report, which was presented to Chester Crocker in April 1988, accusing Renamo of numerous atrocities in the Mozambiquan civil war...
...We're no angels," admits Renamo's Adelino Pires, a white former big-game hunter whose farm was confiscated by Frelimo...
...It seems to make no difference that, in private, the Swiss Red Cross has distanced itself from the one-sided report...
...Choosing between Frelimo and Renamo may seem, in Dr...
...Since 1977 they have been dedicated to overthrowing Mozambique's Frelimo government...
...Now that peace has come to Namibia and Angola and Cuban troops have been removed, Dlakama believes American policy-makers have lost what interest they had in the ideological struggle in southern Africa...
...These foundations and the class composition of the Party guarantee that the Frelimo Party expresses and embodies the highest legitimate aspirations of the people...
...In order to keep open Zimbabwe's only connection with the Indian Ocean, Robert Mugabe has stationed 15,000 troops in Mozambique...
...he asks...
...It shows democracy may be on the way in southern Africa," he smiled, "if such an astute politician as Kaunda can lose an election...
...it recently shot down a plane they believed he was on...
...Renamo is the acronym of the anti-Marxist insurgents in southern Africa's longest running civil war...
...No one knows much about the Renamo leader, Alfonso Dlakama, but all you hear is bad...
...They are targets...
...The only people with a good word for him are the Marquis of Salisbury and Auberon Waugh...
...Frelimo has made several attempts on Dlakama's life since he started coming to Europe...
...He is thought to be in hiding...
...The United States also gives Mozambique millions of dollars a year in development aid...
...Why should America, which defended the same principles of justice and human rights in Grenada and Kuwait that we are fighting for in Mozambique, support Frelimo...
...Should he come to power in Maputo—his forces operate regularly in its suburbs—he says he would refuse all aid except for training and teaching programs...
...0 The American Spectator March 1992 49...
...According to Cecil, "Vicious, murderous acts of banditry are often the work of unpaid, unfed Frelimo soldiers trying to scratch themselves a living...
...Having seen what collectivism and state farming have done to his country, Dlakama has been in regular contact with several Western free market academics...
...When the story was checked, the real figure turned out to be less than fifty...
...That makes it all the more mystifying why the West should be mixed up in Mozambique's miseries, especially on the Marxists' side...
...As in Yugoslavia today, and even America in the last century, civil wars tend to produce a peculiar viciousness, and there can be no doubt that—as in the Afghan, Angolan, and Nicaraguan conflicts—horrific things have been done on both sides...
...Armed only with spears and bows and arrows, they attacked the Renamo guerrillas and through sheer fanaticism and force of numbers won a couple of early victories...
...That is why Washington provides aid to Frelimo—to a government that still proclaims in Article 3 of its constitution that it is "guided by the synthesis of the experience of the Mozambiquan people's revolutionary struggle with the universal principles of Marxism-Leninism...
...Dlakama is 39, good-looking, and drives a motorbike around his headquarters in the bush...
...There are quite a number of British soldiers operating in Mozambique," said Dlakama, seemingly more in sorrow than in anger, "and of course they are in danger...
...Extraordinarily for an African leader, he also accepts economist Peter Bauer's theories about the debilitating effects international aid has on its recipients...
...State Department...
...Despite its long struggle against a corrupt former Soviet puppet regime, Renamo has somehow never managed to attain the level of cachet among the right enjoyed by the contras, Unita, and the mujahedeen in the 1980s...
...Manuel Antonio is a 32-year-old mystic who traces his descent from Christ, sleeps in cemeteries, and claims to have returned to life after dying of measles...
...Ever since I went into opposition in 1977, African friends haveasked me why I want a multi-party state in Mozambique...
...Even Erich Honecker enjoys greater international acclaim...
...He was in a jovial mood, having just heard of the fall of Zambia's Kenneth Kaunda...
...He is a devout Catholic and speaks twelve of the Mozambiquan dialects...
...It did not take long before the villagers saw through Antonio's claim that the vaccination worked only for those who had abstained from sex the night before...
...Lord Michael Cecil, who spent ten weeks in the bush with Renamo in 1988, found the guerrillas "well-disciplined, if ill-equipped...
...The long jungle struggle is still able to produce some gniesome stories, not to mention a few remarkable characters...
Vol. 25 • March 1992 • No. 3
