Mozambique updates
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Rwandan soldiers have joined the fight against Islamist insurgents in Mozambique’s far north, as Maputo turns to regional armies for help in a conflict that has imperilled its development of multibillion dollar gas reserves.
In late July a thousand-strong brigade of police and soldiers dispatched by Rwanda’s president Paul Kagame entered combat in the province of Cabo Delgado, where local forces have failed to stem a conflict that has killed more than 3,000 people and displaced about 800,000 since 2017.
Mozambique’s president Filipe Nyusi has been under pressure to accept regional military aid since March, when the insurgents killed dozens in the coastal town of Palma and forced France’s Total to shutter a nearby LNG project.
The insurgents have loose ties with Isis but are fighting to impose their own local brand of Islamism and capitalise on discontent in the country’s poorest region where few jobs are available for a frustrated young population. The elite of Frelimo, the ruling party that has controlled Mozambique since independence in 1975, dominated the province’s resource wealth, such as mining concessions, even before the natural gas developments of the last decade.
A multinational force from the Southern African Development Community of Mozambique’s neighbours has also begun to deploy in recent days — but the separate force from Rwanda, which is outside SADC, garnered most of Nyusi’s praise in a speech in July.
“We solicited support from Rwanda for its experience and its immediate availability in a situation where, with every day that passes, more innocent Mozambicans die and many families live with pain in Cabo Delgado and in Mozambique generally . . . Rwanda’s participation is under the principle of solidarity for a noble and common cause, and because of that it is priceless, because it’s about saving lives,” Nyusi said.
But there are questions about how the various regional forces will work together on the ground and how they will be paid for, as they enter what will be a complex counterinsurgency effort that has so far proven beyond Mozambique’s poorly equipped forces. The Rwandan and SADC brigades have their own commanders and areas of operation, and co-ordination by Mozambique’s army is yet to be fleshed out, analysts say.
South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa told parliament that up to 1,495 troops will be sent to Mozambique. Even South Africa’s relatively limited deployment will cost nearly 1bn rand, or $66m, or almost twice Rwanda’s annual defence spending according to the military expenditure database of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
The Kagame government has not disclosed details of the funding of the force, which has deployed near Afungi, where Total’s project is based. The government said “this deployment is based on the good bilateral relations between the Republic of Rwanda and the Republic of Mozambique, following the signing of several agreements between the two countries in 2018”.
Rwanda’s army is “playing a game way beyond their weight” with such an open-ended deployment, said Jasmine Opperman, an independent security analyst. Mozambique is far from Rwanda’s traditional security concerns such as the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda, larger nations that border the landlocked country. “The force deployment for me is linked to French interests, to Total and Afungi,” Opperman said.
A person briefed on the issue said Total had never dealt with the Rwandans and it was an issue between the Mozambique and Rwandan governments. Total declined to comment. A French official made clear that they were not financing the Rwandan effort. President Emmanuel Macron had visited Kigali in May to mend ties. Kagame is also keen to “project a power image in the region”, Opperman said.
Last week, Rwandan troops appeared to have retaken a strategic road junction after an offensive that killed several insurgents, according to Cabo Ligado, an observatory watching the conflict and the Rwandan army itself. That could open up an opportunity to retake Mocimboa da Praia — a major town that has been out of government hands for nearly a year.
“Cabo Delgado is not the DRC” and it presents a “foreign environment, a foreign language, and a foreign culture” for Rwanda, Opperman said. “The concerns of an endless war in Cabo Delgado are coming to the fore.”