Tanzania will not set up a refugee camp for Mozambicans, “for security reasons”

By Our Correspondent, MAPUTO Mozambique 

The government of Mozambique has said that Tanzania will not set up a refugee camp for Mozambicans fleeing armed violence in Cabo Delgado province for security reasons.

The spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation of Mozambique, António Muchave, told a press conference in Maputo. "Tanzania has taken the decision not to create a refugee camp on the border with Mozambique for security reasons."

Muchave was answering journalists’ questions on the accusations that Tanzanian authorities are deporting Mozambicans who enter the country fleeing armed violence in Cabo Delgado province.

The MNEC spokesperson stated that the two governments had agreed that Mozambican citizens fleeing to Tanzania would be transported, under the protection of the Tanzanian authorities, to Negomano in Niassa province, northern Mozambique, with a view to their repatriation.

“What we agreed with Tanzania is that they are going to protect our citizens whenever they enter there. What they do is transport them, with Tanzanian protection, from the Namoto border 250 or 300 kilometres to the Negomano border in Niassa, where it is believed that the situation is safer, and they are returned to Mozambican territory,” he explained.

The authorities of both countries, he continued, would continue to work together to find the best way to protect the displaced.

On June 4, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees accused Tanzania of refusing asylum to around 3,800 Mozambicans fleeing armed attacks in Palma, Cabo Delgado, during the month of May.

Armed groups have terrorised the northern province since 2017, with some attacks claimed by the ‘jihadi’ group Islamic State, in a wave of violence that has already, according to the ACLED conflict registration project, killed more than 2,800, and displaced 714,000, according to the Mozambican government.

The number of displaced people increased with the attack on the town of Palma on March 24, an incursion that left dozens of people dead and injured, with no official results announced.

The Mozambican government also revealed yesterday that the disappearance of a journalist from Rwanda who was a refugee in Maputo [Inhaca] was being handled by the Criminal Investigation Service. “We also learned of the disappearance of this Rwandan citizen,” the MNEC spokesman said.

However, said Muchave, The matter, however, is outside the Ministry’s purview, he continued. “We don’t have much to say, because it is a matter that is being dealt with by the National Criminal Investigation Service,” and authorities were carrying out operations aimed at locating the journalist.

Ntamuhanga Cassien, who was living on the island of Inhaca, in Maputo province, was escorted away on May 23 “by eight unknown individuals who introduced themselves as officers of the Police of the Republic of Mozambique”, a group that included another citizen of Rwanda “who spoke the same dialect as his target”, according to the Association of Rwandan Refugees in Mozambique, which reported the case.

The event revives fears of the campaign of persecution carried out by the government of Paul Kagame against political opponents in exile following the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the association’s president, Cleophas Habiyareme, told Lusa.