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Human rights activists in Mozambique have accused the ruling Frelimo party of orchestrating looting and violence, including organizing mass prison breakouts, as cover for a brutal crackdown they say has killed at least 130 people since Christmas Day.
“The strategy of Frelimo now is to create a state of terror,” said Quitéria Guirengane, a political activist and head of the Young Women Leaders’ Network in the capital Maputo. “Their tactic is the release of dangerous prisoners to create public panic. But we know they are the ones who opened the gates.”
The country is facing its worst political crisis — and the most serious threat to the ruling party’s power — since independence in 1975.
“People are worried that Mozambique is about to go back to civil war,” said Alex Vines, Africa programme director at Chatham House, a UK think-tank. “There is a climate of fear. Everybody is afraid and nobody knows where things are going.”
Mozambicans have been demonstrating since Frelimo declared itself the winner of presidential elections that took place on October 9. Independent observers say the elections were seriously flawed and many in the country believe they were stolen outright.
Protests reached a new level after December 23 when the constitutional council, the highest electoral body, confirmed the victory of Frelimo’s presidential candidate, Daniel Chapo, with what it said was 65 per cent of the vote. Violence escalated further after up to 6,000 prisoners, some from high-security jails, escaped on December 25.
Human rights activists say security forces have been going door to door to round up protesters in the guise of looking for escaped prisoners. “They say that these people who escaped are very dangerous and they are in neighborhoods robbing people,” said Edson Cortez of the Public Integrity Centre in Maputo. “But I think it is an excuse to distract people from the anti-government demonstrations.”
The Centre for Democracy and Human Rights said that at least 100 recaptured prisoners had been “massacred” by security forces. “This episode strongly underscores the gravity of human rights violations and the systematic brutality employed by the security forces during and after the mass escape,” it said in a statement.
Videos have circulated on social media of mainly young men being rounded up in pick-up trucks with subsequent images showing some of them turning up dead, according to numerous accounts from human rights activists.
Paula Cristina Roque, executive director of Intelwatch, said there was strong evidence that security forces had infiltrated the protesters and carried out “summary executions” and kidnappings. “I believe this is organized chaos that constitutes a false-flag operation justifying a clampdown,” she said.
Chapo, the president-elect, is due to be inaugurated on January 15. However, Venâncio Mondlane, the opposition candidate who claims to have won the election, has vowed to return to the country from exile on the same day to be inaugurated himself.
Mondlane, who ran his campaign in association with the Podemos party, has been leading various phases of protests through daily broadcasts on Facebook.
He has called for a new phase of the protests to begin on Monday. Known as “point of the spear”, it is believed to be code for a march on the presidential palace. “Point is also the name of the presidential palace,” said Roque. “Monday could be a turning point.”
Protests after the election began with the banging of pots and pans and the singing of the national anthem and have gradually escalated. Demonstrators have since blockaded roads, including border crossings with neighboring South Africa, and there has been looting of shops and burning of government buildings.
Civil rights leaders insisted that the most serious violence was the work of agent provocateurs.
“Frelimo is orchestrating this violence to distract and suppress dissent,” Mondlane said in a live broadcast on Facebook this week. “This is not the work of protesters. It is manipulation by those in power to shift the narrative from electoral fraud to terrorism.”
