wheels within wheels

It was Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky who famously and caustically remarked that “[you] may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you” (or words to that effect: I am quoting from memory). And, as far as Southern Africa is concerned, war is here.

I am of course referring to the conflict in Cabo Delgado, the most northeasterly province of Mozambique. Now, Cabo Delgado may seem a long way away from South Africa, and indeed it is, for the distance (not ‘as the crow flies’ but as the hiker would hike) from Mozambique’s southernmost town to the northeast border with Tanzania, is more than 2 600 km. This compares to the equivalent distance between Cape Town and Beitbridge, of about 1 950 km. Or, to put it differently, it is slightly more than the distance between Cape Town and Harare.

On the other hand, Mozambique is a direct neighbour of South Africa. The Mozambican capital, Maputo, is only 550 km from Johannesburg, only 204 km from Nelspruit and less than 100 km from the border crossing at Komatipoort. Any violent destablisation of Mozambique poses, to use the American term, ‘a clear and present danger’ to South Africa.

But what to do about it? Firstly, it is necessary to understand what is happening in Cabo Delgado. All the evidence is that the driving ideology of the rebels is islamism (not Islam; most of the victims of islamism have been Muslims). Although Muslims apparently represent only 18% of the Mozambican population (Christians total 56%) they form the majority in the northern provinces of the country, and particularly in the coastal regions, and form minority communities elsewhere in the country (just as there are Christian minority communities in Cabo Delgado).

Cabo Delgado has enormous symbolic importance because it was there that the first shots of the Mozambican War of Independence were fired, in 1964. According to Joseph Hanlon, in his ‘Mozambique News Reports & Clippings’ (no. 469 of February 27 this year), local leaders have long felt that their communities’ role in the conflict has been disregarded, and support for Frelimo waned long ago. Islamic fundamentalist preachers were first noted in 1990, just south of the Tanzanian border. By 2005, there were Mozambican fundamentalist preachers active in the province. Apparently, by 2015, the most radical of these preachers and leaders were supporting ‘militant’ action.

And Cabo Delgado was a tinderbox. Over the years, education had improved and many young people had graduated from primary school or equivalent. But there were no jobs, and incredibly few further education opportunities, available to them, creating frustration and anger. “Cabo Delgado . . . is not the poorest province, but it has the highest inequality, highest illiteracy rates, highest school malnutrition, lowest access to health facilities, worst housing, and fewest children in school. There is severe poverty”.

From 2015, important land concessions were made to mining and oil and gas companies, and the first impact of the arrival of these enterprises was the compulsory resettlement of communities – land dispossession, in other words. Although the companies built good new homes for the displaced, the people who received them could not pay the water and electricity bills because so few jobs were created by the new operations, artisanal mining was suppressed (sometimes violently) and there was a shortage of good farmland to share among the displaced, so many couldn’t resume farming. Separately, but in parallel, events since the 1990s, including both violent riots and violent suppression of peaceful protests over various issues, resulted in the people of Cabo Delgado coming to see the Mozambique government and Frelimo as not only uncaring, callous and corrupt, but as the active enemies of the people.

Thus, when the armed conflict erupted in October 2017, with an attack on the small town of Mocímboa da Praia, it was the outcome of a process of years, if not decades, of alienation and radicalisation. On the one hand, the Islamist or jihadi ideology justifies the violence, and gives the insurgents the belief that they are part of a great and global movement. It also opened the way to international support (propaganda, but perhaps also instructors and maybe even some weapons supplies, and certainly advice via the Internet). On the other, the conditions in Cabo Delgado make a sustained insurrection possible.

As both Hanlon and South African security expert Jasmine Opperman stress, this combination of local and international factors is crucially important and both must be addressed in order to counter the insurrection. Mozambique clearly has no control over its border with Tanzania, its navy is minute, its air force also tiny and it has no means of stopping the infiltration of extremists and weapons into Cabo Delgado, by land or by sea. Thus, external forces can keep the fire burning, as long as there is fuel for it. And if the local factors are not addressed, there will be plenty of fuel for the fire, and cutting off the flow of foreign support won’t stop it.

There is another key factor to note, namely the time lag between the start of radicalisation and the start of the revolt. This suggests that, by accident or design, the jihadis in Cabo Delgado are replicating the Maoist method of insurgency, albeit with a different ideological content. The Maoist approach involves years of political agitation and propaganda among the target population before the first armed attack is made. In the most recent significant and genuinely Maoist insurgency, that of Sendero Luminoso in Peru, the party militants spent ten years agitating among the poor rural communities in the marginalised Ayacucho department of Peru before launching their ‘armed struggle’. It took more than 12 years, and major socioeconomic and political changes, to defeat Sendero.

If this is the case, then the apparent war zone, that is, the area in which fighting is taking place, is only a fraction of the size of the actual war zone, which is the area within which radicalisation is taking place.