LIVING WITH LANDMINES
Mines of Mozambique by Bruce Cockburn
The road from Quelimane to Nampula winds prettily between lines of mango and cashew trees planted by the old colonial masters to draw people to where their activities could be monitored. It takes a long time to do the drive. The road rolls and heaves like a rough sea. A lot of rainy seasons have come and gone without anyone working on its repair. During the long years of war much of the countryside was emptied of people. Those who remained in Mozambican National Resistance-controlled zones were put to work, not maintaining the road, but cutting shallow trenches in rows across the paved portions in order to slow vehicular traffic to where it would be vulnerable to ambush. Even though, since the peace accord was signed in October 1992, scrap metal dealers have been busy, you can still see the twisted remains of convoyed trucks here and there along the roadside.
While scavengers sort out the physical detritus of war, Mozambicans in general are trying to sort out its psychic debris. What was the true course of the war? There was virtually no communication between people caught on opposing sides--and it's only now that one can grasp the real shape of recent history.
In 1975, Portugal surrendered its East African colony to the Mozambican people. Not willingly. After a number of years of struggle for independence waged by the Mozambican Liberation Front (FRELIMO) and parallel wars in its other African colonies, Portugal found itself exhausted. A coup by young army officers against the decades-old Salazar dictatorship brought democracy to the European nation and freedom to its last few overseas possessions. These weren't the only such struggles going on at that time. The neighbouring country of Rhodesia was the scene of fighting between a white racist government and black nationalist guerrillas who found sympathy in Mozambique. Ken Flowers, who was then head of the Rhodesian Central Intelligence Organization, includes in his memoirs an account of his involvement in the recruiting and training of Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO). This was a group of disaffected Mozambicans led by one Alfonso Dhlakama whose function was to destabilize that country and keep it from effectively supporting Robert Mugabe's rebels.
This activity continued from 1975 to 1980, then Rhodesia became Zimbabwe and Robert Mugabe became president. At this point the reins of RENAMO were handed over to the South African military.
Apartheid South Africa moved to maintain its own security partly by controlling the exports of its land-locked neighbours, Botswana, and the new Zimbabwe. Open seaports in Mozambique and Angola would interfere with this agenda. RENAMO became the instrument of South African foreign policy, completely destroying whatever vestigial infrastructure existed in post-Portuguese Mozambique, almost succeeding in closing the ports at Nacala, Beira and Maputo. RENAMO also became famous for atrociously brutal tactics with respect to forced recruitment and the treatment of prisoners.
By the end of the 1980s, the horrors of civil war and the ill will engendered by FRELIMO's questionable economic policies had been compounded by an extended period of drought. RENAMO was starving. South Africa was undergoing major change. FRELIMO had no more money to put into the war effort. The Soviet Union, its principal backer, was extinct. Under these conditions, with the involvement of the UN, an end was negotiated to the war. The peace accord provided for the creation of democratic institutions and the holding of elections which took place a year ago.
When I was in Mozambique in 1988, there was no evidence that RENAMO had a political platform or anything like legitimacy. They were simply "the Bandits." So it came as quite a surprise to me, and I think to others, when they emerged from the elections with something like 40% of the vote. There was plenty of evidence in 1988 to support the former characterization of RENAMO, evidence which still abounds. I talked with the nurse in charge of a rural health post at Luala, in Zambezia province, who was blind in one eye because RENAMO soldiers had driven a pin into it. Nevertheless, that picture didn't tell the whole story.
In its attempt to replace colonial structures with a Marxist social order, FRELIMO had gone out of its way to humiliate and render powerless the traditional village leaders who had previously been supported by the Portuguese as a means of controlling the population. This, among other things, alienated large numbers of people. RENAMO turned this alienation to its own advantage by presenting itself as the friend of the traditional leaders. It seems, too, that peasant communities, when threatened by the war itself, had to choose between fleeing toward RENAMO or toward FRELIMO bases, and their choice then led to a similar choice at election time. There was an understandable feeling of exhaustion with war and the sense that if RENAMO didn't do well, the fighting would continue. Angola is currently providing an example of that scenario.
So where are we now? After 500 years of colonialism and 25 years of war, we have democracy in a country which for the most part does not value or even recognize any community larger than the village. Even at that level you don't see the acknowledgment of interdependence among people that you find in some other places. To what extent this is a mentality spawned by the war is not clear, but there's no doubt that the sauve qui peut concept is what prevails.
We have a government with virtually no funds, which has, in the years leading up to the peace and those since, been compelled to restructure the country's economy at the behest of the World Bank and friends, opening the way for unfettered capitalism. We can now witness the spectacle of drastically underpaid teachers finding it necessary to charge students for the release of their marks; of thousands of demobilized soldiers without work or other support falling back on banditry to survive, who sometimes rent their weaponry from underpaid police who themselves frequently resort to mugging passers-by to augment their wages. (About this I can speak with great authority, having been held up by two cops outside my hotel in Maputo.)
All this in contrast to a feeding frenzy on the part of international business and its local agents. There are oil companies, mining companies, logging companies, Japanese trawlers, entrepreneurs of all sorts, many of them Portuguese and South African. The irony is inescapable. Even the HIV virus, kept at bay by Mozambique's relative isolation during the war, is appearing as a colonizer.
Economic restructuring, to be fair, created an incentive to produce, and this has led to an improved situation for some people. It has also, though, provided massive incentives for corruption. There are consumer goods in the country, but the minimum wage is about $17 a month: not enough to buy a 50 lb. bag of flour. The cost of importing such goods is whatever you can negotiate with the nearest crooked customs official. Social spending is gone: sound familiar? Yes, but the effects in a place like Mozambique are beyond our worst nightmares.
The central hospital in Nampula City used to be decent, if poorly supplied. Now its a cesspool of misery. The mentally ill wander the hallways stinking of urine and raving. The walls are filthy. People who can, bring their own brightly patterned cloth rather than put themselves in contact with the hospital bedding. The gurney used to transport patients who can't walk is an old blood stained stretcher rigged with wheels. Fecal-smelling wards are crammed with people, most of whom seem to be in for treatment of infections acquired while undergoing operations at this very institution. If you need an IV, you have to pay. If you need blood, you have to buy it. If you need medicine, your family has to comb the pharmacies in town because all the drugs have been sold off long since by the hospital staff.
The closest thing to a bright spot in the whole scene is a cop who's there because he shot himself in the foot while chasing a "suspect." He complains because his superiors haven't come to visit. The government can't raise salaries for fear of losing the support of the World Bank. So you have people producing in a modest way, but no money to buy anything and no means of carrying produce to market.
The field against which this is happening is one of near total destruction of transportation, schools and stores in the wake of war, drought, and, in the north, a disastrous hurricane last year. The war killed all the cattle, drove away or killed the wildlife, destroyed nearly all the trucks, wrecked rail lines, left all but the major cities in ruins--left rural access roads and fields polluted with landmines.
With respect to this latter, Mozambique is typical of many Third World countries which have been the scene of wars, especially civil wars, in recent years. Over the past two decades the presence of anti-personnel mines in such places has come to constitute a major epidemic. The UN estimates that there are around 2,000,000 mines in Mozambique. Although people involved in the process of removing them feel that number is a little bit high, there are plenty to go around. There are plenty of dead and maimed Mozambicans--10,000 dead from mines during the war, and at least 500 in the last two years. These numbers don't include the injured, or those deaths occurring in remote areas which largely go unreported. The injured are generally disabled and become a burden to their families, and, to what health care resources do exist. They are likely to further swell the numbers of urban beggars, contributing to the instability of society, and they look forward to a very poor quality of life. Victims of mine accidents are most likely to be civilians; rural people who depend on a degree of physical fitness for their survival.
The one-armed, badly scarred and blinded kid whose sister leads him around to beg from the foreigners at the river front cafe in Quelimane is representative: he hit a mine with his mattock while working his family's machamba, or garden plot--well after hostilities had ended.
When you talk to the technician in charge of the prosthetics workshop support by the French NGO Handicap International, he tells you that probably 60% of his customers are mine victims. The workshop is part of an orthopaedic clinic where patients come for consultation and fitting of artificial limbs, as well as physiotherapy aimed at helping them adjust to their prostheses. In one room they are navigating between parallel bars, getting used to walking without their `Canadianas.' Canadianas are the short metal crutches which are braced against the forearm. Nobody knows why they're called that, but we got a laugh from the bystanders when we explained that where we come from, women are Canadianas.
Landmines come in many shapes and sizes, but they can be loosely divided into "anti-tank" and "anti-personnel." Anti-personnel mines can be further differentiated as "blast" and "fragmentation." Blast mines, as the name implies, work by simply blowing off parts of the body. Fragmentation mines work like a big grenade, sending shrapnel over a wide radius. There are various methods of triggering explosions, the most common being foot pressure, or a trip wire.
Anti-tank mines are designed to blow the track off of 60-ton armoured vehicles and generally require a substantial weight to set them off. The front wheel of a jeep will do it--or a road construction vehicle--and there won't be much left afterward. Fortunately, anti-tank mines are present only in small numbers in Mozambique. The real obstacle to development is the anti-personnel mines, and the perception of them. It's worth pointing out here that unlike other weapons, mines are activated by the victim. Nobody is aiming them. Classically, mines are used by soldiers to deny access to an area--e.g., to create a defensive perimeter around a base or town, or to prevent ambushes by laying them along the shoulders of a road. This application is one seen commonly in Mozambique.
During the war of independence, the Portuguese laid mines in this way. In the late 1970s, the Rhodesian forces mined the border areas of Mozambique to deter guerilla incursions. FRELIMO laid strings of mines around towns, hydro lines, military bases and key industrial sites. Private companies mined their own operations as well. The Canada Dry mineral water bottling plant at Namaacha near the border with Swaziland, is surrounded by 4 different rings of anti-personnel mines. For all that, RENAMO still was able to capture and destroy the plant. Classically, too, records are kept of the location and number of mines, and the minefields are marked with signs and/or strands of wire. In practice very little documentation survives. Wire and sign posts are removed by people in need of building materials and years later nobody remembers where the mines are.
Now, when you are the guerrillas, you don't have large installations to defend, so your use of mines is different. And you don't keep records at all. RENAMO proved itself very effective at using its South African-supplied ones as a terror weapon. Put a couple on the trail where you might expect the enemy to walk, but maybe lay some near the local health post or in the schoolyard, or maybe don't lay any, but say you did. RENAMO used a lot of forced labour. In one case, a primary school teacher was put to work for several days carrying boxes of mines from one of their camps to an area where they were to be laid. He told his acquaintances what he was doing, and the word spread that the area was now unsafe. After the war, it turned out that he was only carrying crates of rocks--that it was all a trick. It served the purpose though--area denial--and I wonder if anyone's farming that land even now? When you've seen what these things do, you're not inclined to take chances.
Problem is, when you are a subsistence farmer, you have to farm or starve. So what do you do? You learn to live with the threat. You start to mythologize it. If your child decides to play with a fragmentation mine and is suddenly reduced to a few bloody scraps of clothing, it's because somebody's offended the ancestors. It's not because someone in Russia or Italy or China or the US manufactured a lethal device and sold it for five dollars so your low budget armies could put it in your field. It isn't obvious to you that the manufacturers' government will give its taxpayer's money to the UN, so that the UN can hire that same manufacturers' expertise to remove the thing for a thousand dollars.
A lot of effort is going into mine awareness training in Mozambique. A lot of effort and expense is going into de-mining operations, not all of them of the kind just referred to. The UN has a major program in place in the south of the country, training former soldiers from both sides in the location and destruction of mines.
A couple of NGO's are also working in other regions. Halo Trust, a British group and the first NGO to have de-mining as its express purpose, is at work in Zambezia province, one of the worst infested areas. Norwegian People's Aid has a similar program in Tete province using trained dogs to sniff out mines where the soil is too high in iron for metal detectors to be effective. There is a reasonable hope that the problem of mines in Mozambique can be solved--because of the relatively small numbers and because in many cases they can be worked around. Even though the things can remain deadly for as much as 50 years, given the money and the will to keep on clearing, and to build alternative roads to those that are most heavily mined, we can eventually expect to ease the situation to the point where life can be something like normal.
This may be true of Mozambique, where the war is over and no new mines are being laid. It's not so true elsewhere. In Angola, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, and a host of other places, there is no short term solution.
There is, however, a long term one. Only one. Anti-personnel mines must be placed in the same special category under international law as chemical weapons. They have to be banned.
Mozambique is facing a frightening array of difficulties. Who will rein in the police? Where will transportation come from? Can it remain sovereign in the face of so much international economic involvement? How do you move a nation from a nearly pre-industrial state into the age of the microchip without being buried by the avalanche of change?
In some respects, this is a country which is still at the tourniquet stage of recovery. It must be kept from bleeding to death long enough for it to get on it's feet. It's hard to know where to start to address the situation. One point might be this: I asked an activist for the disabled, himself crippled by a mine, what message he would like carried to the outside world.
His response:
'Tell them to stop blowing us up!'