JOHANNESBURG, South Africa
South Africa’s supply of weapons and training to Mozambique is under scrutiny as violence increases in Cabo Delgado and the United Nations reports targeted attacks against civilians in Palma.
The insurgency in Mozambique began in 2017 and
since then has killed thousands and displaced more than half a million. The
Mozambican authorities have turned to South African private companies to assist
with security, while the United States and Portugal have agreed to provide
limited training.
Since April 2020, Dyck Advisory Group (DAG) has
been assisting the Mozambican police, and using light helicopters helped rescue
many people from besieged Palma over the weekend. However, Amnesty International
has accused it of indiscriminate attacks against civilians and its contract
with Mozambique expires on 6 April.
Paramount Group is supplying a number of
Marauder armoured personnel carriers to Mozambique as well as refurbished Mi-17
and Mi-24 helicopters and pilot training.
With regard to the weapons from South Africa
being authorised by the South African government and Pretoria looking the other
way regarding private military contractors, according to Khadija Sharife,
Senior Editor for Africa at the non-profit Organized Crime and Corruption
Reporting Project, “unless a country is flagged by way of sanctions or other
issues, arms trading is a largely private affair”.
Sharife said that “South Africa approved over
half a billion rand in weapons exports to Mozambique during 2020. The conflict
in Cabo Delgado justifies the export as it does in many other countries where a
sovereign government can claim they are under duress from non-governmental
armed forces”. That, in her view, is “an old trick”.
She is not the only one who worries about the
role that arms flows are playing in what can only be described as a rapidly
deteriorating situation. Amnesty International’s newest report, released in
March of this year, is focused on Mozambique.
The global NGO, based in London, says that its
researchers have found war crimes committed by three key actors: armed groups,
government forces, and private military contractors. Their independent study
lays out to the world some of the key facts, including hundreds of people
killed as conflict continues to rage in Cabo Delgado; indiscriminate attacks
carried out by Dyck Advisory Group; and more than half-a-million civilians
displaced to date.
According to Brian Castner, Amnesty
International’s Senior Crisis Advisor, “We have no evidence that SA has
licensed DAG for operations in Mozambique. This is why one of the
recommendations in the report is for SA to investigate whether DAG is complying
with the Foreign Military Assistance Act.”
Castner pointed out that “Paramount is active
in Mozambique, providing armoured vehicles and helicopters to the army. There
may be others, but this was not an object of our research.” He added that
Amnesty doesn’t have specific evidence of specific South African weapons
systems provided to the Mozambique government.
According to Dewa Mavhinga, Southern Africa
Director at Human Rights Watch, his organization “is aware that officially,
South African authorities announced last year that they are providing weaponry
to Mozambique to help end the insurgency in Cabo Delgado province.
However, they did not provide further details.
Having documented allegations of serious human rights abuses in Cabo Delgado by
both the insurgents and Mozambique security forces, including killings,
kidnappings, ill treatment of detainees and arbitrary detentions which are
happening with impunity, we urge the SA authorities to ensure that their
support will not result in further abuses.”
Mavhinga said that SA should “seriously
consider” coordinating within the Southern African Development Community (SADC)
to help ensure technical, training, and capacity support to Mozambican security
forces to ensure they respect the rights of civilians and prohibit summary,
extrajudicial, or arbitrary executions, and torture and other ill-treatment of
people in Cabo Delgado. According to Mavhinga, support to Mozambique “should
consider the need to protect civilians and prevent abuses and barbaric criminal
acts.”
The South African National Defence Force does
not appear to be involved in the conflict as Mozambique appears reluctant to
call in international assistance, although this month the United States began a
two-month training course for Mozambican forces, and Portugal has announced it
will send 60 soldiers to Mozambique. Portugal has in the past provided security
assistance (including equipment such as FTB-337 aircraft) to Mozambique.
The South African Air Force did send a C-130
Hercules transport to Mozambique this week, but that was to repatriate South
African citizens. The SANDF’s Operation Copper anti-piracy deployment remains
restricted to warship patrols in the Mozambique Channel.
Last month International Relations and
Cooperation Minister Naledi Pandor said South Africa had offered to assist
Mozambique fight the insurgency but the Mozambicans have not been very
forthcoming. “And we said, we are ready to [assist], but we must know, [play] a
key role in what?” she said, repeating an earlier complaint that the Mozambican
government had not yet indicated concretely what it needed.
“What do they need? You know, do they need
helicopters? Do they need, you know, vessels on the sea? Do they need training?
It’s a puzzle for us. Why they don’t actually tell us what it is they need,”
she said in mid-February.
A weekend Department of International Relations
and Cooperation statement had it that the South African mission in Maputo was
going to be “reinforced with additional staff to handle the work of locating,
identifying and responding to the respective needs of the affected”.
Darren Olivier, African Defence Review (ADR)
director, notes the SANDF is capable of intervention, as was shown in its surge
after the Battle of Bangui, but lacks sufficient budget to sustain one without
additional funding from national budgets.
Meanwhile, fighting continues in Cabo Delgado,
with the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) on 30
March saying dozens of people were killed by insurgents in Palma at the
weekend.
“The violence has not stopped. What happened in
Palma is an absolute horror inflicted on civilians by a non-State armed group,”
the OCHA’s Jens Laerke said.
“They have done horrific things, they are still
doing so, we reported continued sporadic clashes and are talking about
expectations of thousands moving from the Palma district to other areas of the
country and toward the Tanzanian border.”
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