DEAR EDITOR
Dear Editor Mozambique I recently came across a copy of Augustus Richard Norton's " Hunger and Carnage in Mozambique" (NL, November 16, 1987). As a freelance journalist who spent six months in...
...Catholics were harassed, Moslems insulted...
...The resistance hasn't anything approaching the administrative capacity to run the country...
...Alas, that has been far more popular—or rather, populist—than postponement...
...The greatest shortcoming in Norton's article is his failure to explain why Mozambique has become the tragic place he accurately describes...
...It is worth pointing out, however, that grisly incidents are reported only in the south, where RENAMO is poorly represented ethnically and government-oriented Shangaan speakers dominate...
...In any event, there is little international support for the sort of "dialogue and reconciliation" that Levy apparently favors...
...The majority left, however, well before they had a chance to sample the new government's policies...
...RENAMO has gained ground and popular support not principally because of South African help, which it gets, but because peasants perceive it as, at least, less malign than FRELTMO...
...I am even more surprised to hear someone who follows events in Mozambique as carefully as he says he does assert that "grisly events" are only reported in the South...
...Public finance economists have repeatedly urged that such arrangements be used with regard to the tax liabilities of the elderly, especially property taxes on owneroccupied houses: Postpone the taxes and collect them at death...
...Sam Levy Augustus Richard Norton replies: Apparently I was not sufficiently shrill in my criticisms of of the FRELIMO government to accommodate Sam Levy's version of Mozambican history...
...The bishops had the courage to declare what Western observers generally can't see through the apartheid-distorted lens they train on southern Africa: that the conflict in Mozambique is a civil war, without a military solution, and that Mozambicans alone can solve it, through dialogue and reconciliation...
...New York City Dick Netzer Senior Fellow Urban Research Center New York University...
...More disturbing still are implications that the guerrillas have committed their share of atrocities against civilians...
...Their system of private land tenure was ended, their ethnic traditions denounced and banned as "obscurantism...
...The impetus for my visit was to see what further could be done by the international community to at least ameliorate these circumstances...
...Cambridge, Mass...
...The massacres Norton ascribes to the guerrillas may or may not have been done by them...
...His "more accurate interpretation of events, though, is actually a skewed interpretation that leaves many revealing questions unanswered...
...Western observers miss this...
...Having clearly stated in my article that RENAMO is not the perpetrator of all outrages, I am surprised that Levy seems not to understand what I wrote...
...The key issue, which we should not allow to get lost in this minor exchange of views, is that millions of people are living in wretched hunger and deprivation in Mozambique...
...We spent very little time with members of the government, and we literally saw anyone we chose without interference, including aid officials, diplomats, private citizens, and priests...
...Simple Solution To my mind, George P. Brockway is not often right in his assaults on economics and economists...
...The fact-finding team of which I was a member was The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words...
...Many died of hunger and, in mountainous Niassa, of exposure...
...The author of the preceding sentences is Sam Levy ("Mozambique Isn't About to Sever Ties with Moscow," Wall Street Journal, January 30, 1986), who apparently has modified his analysis over the last two years...
...This is simply false...
...In this case, the alternative has been tax preferences that forgive, rather than postpone, taxes—an obvious way of enriching heirs...
...But such theorists forget that, unlike the self-regarding destructive behavior of the prodigal son, the other-regarding destructive behavior of governments harms and antagonizes millions of subjects...
...Based on these interviews—all of them offthe-record—1 saw little evidence to support the view that the RENAMO organization is a viable political force, presents a feasible political program, or enjoys a wide base of popular support...
...The school buildings and clinics the rebels have attacked have a more ambivalent quality than Norton understands: They are most often the focal points of the collective villages that people were forced to live and work in...
...As a freelance journalist who spent six months in that long-suffering country and remains deeply interested in its fortunes, I feel compelled to offer an alternative and, I believe, more accurate interpretation of events there...
...Given RENAMO'S questionable moral and political credentials, this position is quite defensible...
...Since FRELIMO fought a bloody and brutal war against the Portuguese, it is hardly surprising that most colonists fled...
...Most of them won't, but the false hopes can defeat Brockway's good solution...
...But it should also be noted that such talks were held in 1984, and failed when the RENAMO representative withdrew...
...Moreover, in the months preceding independence the settlers engaged in what one American scholar has described as a "massive reign of vindictive destruction," thus exacerbating the problems of the incoming regime...
...Collectivization of villages wasn't merely "unhappy...
...I would find Levy's tone more palatable if he even hinted in his letter that RENAMO engages in widespread killing, mutilation, kidnapping, and forced labor...
...Our conversations were conducted in French, English, Spanish, or Portuguese, depending on the preference of our interlocutor...
...It is the capacity of RENAMO to terrify and to horrify that would seem to be the most salient...
...Now, early adherence to what Norton calls "an unfortunate model" may be easily corrected in the eyes of Western development theorists by new-found enthusiasm for free markets...
...Incidentally, should the reader have any questions about the origins and purposes of RENAMO, he or she might find it useful to consult the memoirs of Ken Flower, the late Chief of the Intelligence Service of Rhodesia, who created the organization and passed it on to South Africa in 1979 (Serving Secretly, London: John Murray, 1987...
...He cites the "unhappy experiment" of the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO) with state farms and collective villages...
...For instance, he notes that 225,000 Portuguese settlers departed en masse in 1974 and 1975, leaving the newly independent nation less than "poorly prepared for self-government...
...after all, everyone loves a prodigal son returned, chastened by experience...
...it handed over power to FRELIMO without any elections or guarantees for the political minorities that were quickly dumped into "reeducation camps...
...it is a fundamentally indigenous force, with its own political aspirations...
...But RENAMO is not a South African proxy...
...and other governments should do is prevail upon FRELIMO and RENAMO to sit down and negotiate a cease-fire...
...There is no earthly reason to strip elderly people of their assets before allowing them to qualify for Medicaid payment of nursing home care...
...Even so, Portuguese and Mozambicans of Portuguese descent now play an important role in the country's economy, and today there is little or no evidence of animosities or discriminatory policies...
...Contrary to Norton's suggestion of international security assistance for FRELIMO, which would merely escalate the level of violence, what the U.S...
...I have Little doubt that, as Norton says, the South Africans favor RENAMO as a means of keeping Mozambique a chaotic place...
...alien on those assets, exercised at death, is the obvious, humane and workable alternative...
...Legislatures and voters in referenda have decisively rejected liens exercised at death...
...I suspect that this will be unpopular with regard to Medicaid as well, with many would-be heirs figuring " I will be able to find a way to transfer Mom's assets to me, and beat the system...
...Portuguese skilled workers didn't leave Mozambique willingly...
...in my experience, the chaos in the bush is so complete that it is impossible to tell whether RENAMO, FRELIMO or freebooters are responsible for any given attack...
...it was a frontal assault on the way of life of millions of rural Mozambicans and the traditional tribal authorities who held local sway under the colonial government...
...The Maputo government refuses to recognize RENAMO, a position that is supported by an array of Western governments, including theU.S...
...Note that foreign journalists have attended classes and clinics, although they be crude, in RENAMOheld areas in Sofala and Zambezia provinces...
...It is true that the April 1987 pastoral letter called for FREIIMO-RENAMO talks...
...In the center and north of the country, locally recruited RENAMO guerrillas are welcome among the peasants...
...The report will be published in the next few weeks...
...But he was very much on target—and in agreement with the point of view of mainstream American economists—in his "simple solution" for eliminating pauperization as a requirement for Medicaid nursing home payment ("Pauperization and Medical Care," NL, December 28...
...In 1983, some 20,000 city dwellers were declared "unproductive" and deported overnight to rural work camps in the far north...
...In my view, the following assessment of RENAMO is apt: "There is little to recommend the [RENAMO] rebels as a practical alternative to FRELIMO...
...Does he speak Portuguese or only English...
...free to make its own schedule...
...Lisbon didn't "concede sovereignty to Mozambique...
...A series of concrete recommendations are contained in a report I have helped write for the International Peace Academy...
...The suggestion is not original: It is what the Catholic bishops of Mozambique prescribe in their pastoral letter of April 27,1987.(1 wonder, did Norton talk with churchmen and average folks in Mozambique or only with government officials and foreign aid types...
...I hope that Sam Levy and many readers of The New Leader will take the time to examine it...
...I recite this incomplete litany not to condemn the FRELTMO government but to explain, in part, why the Mozambique National Resistance (RENAMO) rebels are so active in the country: They operate in fertile recruiting grounds, prepared for them by FRELIMO policies sympathetic Westerners may forgive yet average Mozambicans won't...
...Thousands of people disappeared into prison for long periods without charges, victims of anonymous denunciations...
...In those areas, remote from the capital and not covered by the Western press, it is the Zimbabweans, regarded as foreign occupiers, who take no prisoners...
...they were driven out by blanket nationalizations and incendiary politics...
Vol. 71 • February 1998 • No. 2
