Mozambique

Welcome to “Women Around the World: This Week,” a series that highlights noteworthy news related to women and U.S. foreign policy. This week’s post covers May 4 to May 10.  

The government’s heavy-handed response to recent local elections may spell trouble for Mozambique’s security and democracy prospects. 

Mozambique is at a moment of peak international leverage, but faces significant domestic challenges. 

The practical consequences of the U.S. Department of State adding five terrorist leaders operating in Africa to the list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists is likely to be limited.

As the insurgency in northern Mozambique continues to escalate, not only is the humanitarian crisis deepening, but the instability’s ripple effects are being felt far beyond Mozambique’s borders.

On April 8, the leaders of Botswana, Malawi, South Africa, and Zimbabwe met with Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi to consider next steps with respect to the crisis in Cabo Delgado. They decided to send a team of experts to the battle zone to make recommendations. The leaders also agreed to meet again in three weeks’ time. The meeting fell under the purview of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), a sixteen-member regional bloc. SADC is not moving quickly on this crisis, and, in the past, it has failed to address major regional crises, especially in Zimbabwe. It remains to be seen whether that pattern will be repeated with respect to Mozambique.

Jihadi attacks in Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province are accelerating, with heavy fighting breaking out around the town of Palma. In response, South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa sent South African troops to evacuate South African nationals. The French oil and gas company Total has evacuated its employees from its Afungi gas facility and suspended construction on a $20 billion project. The Maputo government has, for much of the insurgency, routinely declined international help. But with the jihadi group Ansar al Sunna (ASWJ) increasing in strength, international assistance is now being accepted with greater regularity. Thus far, the Biden administration has sent a special forces detachment to provide counterinsurgency training to Mozambican forces. Portugal and the European Union are offering assistance as well. Maputo has requested military assistance from South Africa, but Ramaphosa declined on the basis that the insurgency is too big for a bilateral response. Meanwhile, the contract with South African private military contractor Dyck Advisory Group will not be renewed. The relevant multilateral security pact in the region is the Southern African Development Community (SADC), which will meet on Thursday to discuss the situation in northern Mozambique but apparently lacks the necessary funding to provide significant assistance. Further potential outside financial assistance from the European Union, South Africa, or the United States should not be ruled out, though it is unclear at present what the method of providing such assistance would be. SADC has not been particularly successful at conflict resolution and donors may well seek a different vehicle for providing their assistance.

Nolan Quinn is a research associate for the Council on Foreign Relations’ Africa Program. The revelation that a Kenyan member of al-Shabab was charged with planning a 9/11-style attack on the United States has served to underline the Somali terror group’s enduring presence in East Africa and the region’s continuing relevance to U.S. national security. Shabab has terrorized the northern reaches of the Swahili Coast, which runs from southern Somalia to northern Mozambique, for well over a decade. More recently, a brutal jihadi insurgency has emerged on the Swahili Coast’s southern tip. Ansar al-Sunna (ASWJ), known among other names as Swahili Sunna, ramped up its violent activities in Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province in 2017 before spreading more recently into Tanzania. The risk of a further rise in jihadism along the Swahili Coast is serious—and growing. The Swahili Coast has long been recognized as having a rich, eclectic culture shaped by interactions with predominantly Arab traders. (Much of the coast once fell under the rule of the Sultan of Oman.) The region has been strongly influenced by Islam, in contrast to the Great Lakes region further west, which is predominantly Christian. Additionally, much of the mainland is dominated by Bantu ethnic groups, while many coastal residents maintain an identity distinct from their continental peers. As in much of Africa, arbitrary borders drawn during the period of European colonialism separate the region, lumping coastal and mainland residents together across several states. The separation of the Swahili Coast laid the foundations for a re-emergence of pre-independence feelings of marginalization. Many coastal residents, who chafe at government institutions and economic policies seen as favoring Christians and wabara (“people of the mainland”), have called for decentralization of power and even secession from their respective states. Separatist fervor—particularly strong in the Mombasa-Zanzibar corridor—has been stoked by groups such as the Mombasa Republican Council (MRC) and Uamsho (“awakening” in Kiswahili). While both have been defunct or dormant following crackdowns on their leadership, a purported effort to reinvigorate the MRC—already met with a spate of arrests by Kenyan police—illustrates that discontent is still very much present along the coast. In this context, the growing popularity of Salafist ideology in East Africa is worrying. The trend, facilitated by the historical exchange of people and ideas with other littoral states in Africa and the Middle East, has resulted in the displacement of the tolerant, Sufi-inspired Islam that has long been predominant on the Swahili Coast. Salafis’ strict textualist approach raises several objections to Sufism that have been used to motivate attacks by ASWJ in northern Mozambique [PDF] and al-Shabab in Somalia. Less violent—but still occasionally violent—Sufi-Salafi competition has also been on the rise in Tanzania. Several factors suggest that disgruntled wapwani (“people of the coast”), especially youth, are at increased risk of Salafi radicalization. To start, unemployment is widespread on the coast. Joblessness is concentrated among youth and the well-educated—the demographics that have most enthusiastically subscribed to Salafist teachings globally. In Cabo Delgado, ASWJ fighters have clashed with Sufi elders seen as heretical by the Salafi-jihadi group. Yet financial rewards [PDF], such as small loans to start a business or pay bride prices, also appear to be important recruitment incentives. While al-Shabab and ASWJ have gained international notoriety for their insurgent activities, allied groups focusing on youth recruitment in East Africa play a sinister role in enabling their success. Islamist groups such as the Muslim Youth Centre (MYC)—later renamed al-Hijra—in Kenya and the Ansaar Muslim Youth Center (AMYC) in Tanzania have both sent fighters to Somalia and offered refuge [PDF] to returning jihadis. And in Tanga—the coastal region of Tanzania where AMYC was founded and reports [PDF] of small-scale attacks by Islamists have occasionally surfaced—police have in the past uncovered Shabab-linked child indoctrination camps. Swahili’s function as a lingua franca in East Africa is also helping Islamist groups grow in the region. MYC leader Aboud Rogo Mohammed, a radical Kenyan imam who was sanctioned by the United Nations for his support of al-Shabab, targeted Swahili speakers with his repeated calls for the formation of a caliphate in East Africa. Tapes of Rogo preaching in Swahili allowed disaffected youth in Cabo Delgado—many of whom speak Swahili but have a weak or no understanding of Arabic—to access extremist viewpoints, accelerating their radicalization. The jihadis now take advantage of Cabo Delgado’s linguistic, cultural, and business links to coastal communities—in Tanzania in particular—to recruit and expand ASWJ’s operations. Meanwhile, al-Shabab and the Islamic State group, to which ASWJ has been formally aligned since June 2019, utilize Swahili in original and translated media publications. Many of the responses to such activities have been counterproductive. Between 2012 and 2014, Rogo and two of his successors were killed in three separate, extrajudicial shootings blamed on Kenyan police. The killings caused riots in Mombasa, and Rogo’s posthumous influence points to the futility of a “whack-a-mole” approach that tries to silence firebrands. Several mosques and homes in Mombasa were also controversially raided, with hundreds arrested. Yet according to the International Crisis Group (ICG), a shift in strategy since 2015 from heavy-handed policing to community outreach has successfully reduced jihadi recruitment along the Kenyan coast. Tanzania and Mozambique, however, appear to be repeating Kenyan mistakes. The overly militarized response to ASWJ has failed to quell a fast-intensifying insurgency. And in Zanzibar, where some researchers have argued electoral competition has forestalled Salafis’ embrace of jihadism—despite Uamsho’s evolution from religious charity to secessionist movement to nascent militant Islamist group—worsening repression and the ongoing detention of Uamsho leaders ensure the situation remains volatile. Even mainland Tanzania, seen as more pacific than Zanzibar, has seen a recent uptick [PDF] in terrorist violence; Tanzanian security forces, according to ICG, have responded with arbitrary arrests and forced disappearances of coastal Muslims. The threat of rising support for Islamist militancy in East Africa should not take away from efforts to address calls for secession: separatist movements can, of course, turn violent. However, in areas where separatism is rife, ham-fisted clampdowns on Muslim preachers and their followers risk strengthening radicals’ hand. As UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres—speaking in Nairobi—warned, the “final tipping point” to radicalism is often state-led violence and abuse of power. A shift from separatism to endemic radical Salafism would re-frame narratives of coastal exclusion along more explicitly religious lines, causing new problems for governments. While calls for autonomy and independence draw strongly on questions of identity, they remain political—and therefore open to conversation and compromise. A growing Islamist movement, meanwhile, would recast such debates in rigid, ideological terms, thus giving rise to a zero-sum scenario in which dialogue is nigh on impossible.

Nolan Quinn is a research associate for the Council on Foreign Relations’ Africa Program. On October 14, the Islamist insurgency focused in northern Mozambique spilled over into Tanzania, with an estimated three hundred militants carrying out an attack on Kitaya village in the region of Mtwara. Since then, Ansar al-Sunna (ASWJ)—the Mozambican jihadi group with apparent links to the self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS)—has claimed at least three more attacks in Mtwara. This comes despite Tanzania sending troops to the region earlier this year to tighten border security and its military’s security operations in areas near the Mozambican border. The widening scope of ASWJ’s attacks is indicative of the shortcomings of the current approach to combating the group. The response to the Islamist insurgency has, thus far, been primarily military in focus. In September 2019, the Wagner Group—a private military contractor with links to the Kremlin—was deployed to Cabo Delgado, Mozambique’s worst-afflicted province and site of the largest private investment in Africa. By November the same year, the mercenaries were evacuated after sustaining losses; another security contractor, the South African Dyck Advisory Group (DAG), remains in Cabo Delgado but has been unable to subdue the insurgency. An (unlikely) intervention by South African government forces has been considered, and Zimbabwe’s ruling party has argued the Southern African Development Community should invoke its mutual defense pact and enter the conflict. The European Union, meanwhile, agreed last month to provide training as well as logistical and medical support to Mozambican forces. The military response has been hampered by its unprofessionalism. Tensions between Tanzanian and Mozambican forces were already high before the former allegedly fired rockets into the latter’s territory, injuring civilians. Mozambican forces were implicated in a horrific extrajudicial killing last year and have been credibly accused of various other abuses. DAG helicopters have, on multiple occasions, killed Mozambican civilians in counterinsurgency operations. Amid the climate of insecurity, Mozambique’s government has begun arming militia groups, which have publicly tortured and beheaded suspected insurgents. Government forces and militia groups have accidentally attacked one another several times, highlighting a lack of coordination. Concerted efforts to improve governance and economic opportunity in Cabo Delgado have been largely absent from any existing counterinsurgency strategy. Instead, in a peripheral region blighted by persistent poverty and inequality [PDF], government officials have prioritized the interests of multinational energy companies, large-scale ruby miners, and heroin smugglers [PDF] at the expense of local workers—all while enriching themselves [PDF] through corrupt practices. In Tanzania, President John Magufuli has shown slightly more concern for Mtwara’s economic fortunes by promising government purchases of cashews, a local staple. This, however, has not stopped residents of the region—an opposition stronghold—from crossing into Cabo Delgado to join the insurgency. Government corruption and economic stagnation, coupled with security forces’ penchant for human rights violations, help strengthen ASWJ. While the Islamist group is notorious for gruesome killings, it also employs tactics to win local support. The group has warned civilians to flee before attacks, distributed food in areas under its control, and offered loans to potential recruits. This “hearts and minds” approach bears the imprint of IS, which advocated a similar tactical shift in the Lake Chad Basin, where the Islamic State in West Africa (ISWA) began providing services and split from Boko Haram due to the latter’s more indiscriminate targeting of civilians. It appears that ASWJ, which has been formally aligned with IS since June 2019, has increased cooperation [PDF] with foreign jihadis. By implementing some of their operational practices, ASWJ is finding success in undermining the Mozambican government’s already tenuous claims to legitimacy. A first step in improving the counterinsurgency effort should be to formalize militia groups’ participation. A major impediment to the military response has been the makeup of troops deployed to Cabo Delgado: most soldiers do not speak the local languages and, being underpaid with little personal attachment to the area, often retreat when attacked. Both the military and militia groups need training in human rights—from the European Union or a regional body—and a clear indication that violations will be punished. To date, Mozambique’s government has not taken any steps to investigate abuses. This makes it difficult for government forces to win local cooperation in fighting ASWJ. Better regional partnerships—especially with the Tanzanian government, with whom joint police operations are set to begin—are needed to push back on ASWJ’s expansion, particularly its growing maritime prowess. A military-first approach cannot cure a failing state. The government and its partners should equally focus on restoring—or, in some areas, establishing for the first time—provision of basic services. Encouragingly, after years of delay, the government appears to have recognized the need for a development strategy. As renowned Mozambique scholar Joseph Hanlon recently documented [PDF], President Filipe Nyusi has put one of his most trusted, effective officials in charge of development agencies—with a remit focused in the country’s north—controlling more than $2.8 billion. The World Bank, meanwhile, has set aside $700 million for initiatives “to address the underlying causes of fragility and conflict.” Hanlon also points to a cash transfer program, starting in Cabo Delgado but later scaling up to the entire country, as a plausible way to share resource wealth. These measures are not preordained for success: hollow institutions and rampant corruption are at the core of Mozambique’s problems and will complicate the rollout of economic stimulus programs. Building a more effective state will amplify military and economic approaches to counterinsurgency and improve the chances of achieving lasting peace. The process of doing so will be long and arduous. But after years of neglecting—even actively harming—many of its citizens, Mozambique’s government has no alternative.

The worsening crisis in northern Mozambique is a case study in why governance matters. For years, the prevailing narrative about Mozambique was all about peace dividends, economic growth, and the promise of the country’s extraordinary natural resources. To be sure, there were warning signs about endemic corruption, and the growth was never inclusive. But now the headlines are dominated by the fighting in Cabo Delgado, where ISIS-linked insurgents have terrorized the population, killing over 1,500 people, displacing over 300,000, creating a food security crisis, and exposing the profound weakness of the state. That weakness has been exacerbated by international criminal networks that have been active for many years in the country, establishing deep roots and taking advantage of a political culture that allows the powerful to evade the law. Mozambican officials famously hid secret loans from citizens and international partners, leading to a sprawling scandal that still taints officials at the highest levels. Meanwhile, from the heroin trade to ruby smuggling, crime has become entwined with the state, leaving it both less capable and less trusted. That environment has proven fertile for violent extremists. Since 2017, attacks from insurgents, known as Ansar al-Sunna, have been growing in frequency and sophistication. The government’s response may well be making the problem worse. Human rights organizations have documented grotesque abuses committed by security services charged with protecting citizens, further alienating the population.  The failures of these forces has prompted Mozambique to turn to foreign mercenaries for help; the state simply doesn't have the capacity to provide basic security within its borders. Meanwhile, Mozambique’s neighbors and international partners are becoming increasingly uncomfortable. The Southern African Development Community, or SADC, has expressed concern but is presently more wary of involvement than of contagion. Multinational firms invested in Mozambique’s natural gas fields wish to secure their investments but find few desirable and capable partners in doing so. But the fragility of Mozambique has been evident for years. Perhaps if, a decade ago, the international community had expended more energy supporting the civil society actors who have been calling attention to these deep-rooted problems—and pressed harder to support solutions—Mozambique today might demonstrate more resilience, and the outlook would be less bleak.

James Blake is an advisor, analyst, and journalist who focuses on conflict, humanitarian crises, and refugee issues. He is a member of the International Crisis Group's ambassadorial council.  As the world’s attention is fixed on the global COVID-19 pandemic, a brewing conflict in northern Mozambique is threatening to plunge the region into chaos. The conflict, which broke out in Cabo Delgado province in the fall of 2017, has since resulted in more than 1,000 deaths and forced 100,000 people to flee their homes. The details remain murky—not least because the government has banned researchers and journalists from covering it—but it is becoming clear that the so-called Islamic State is trying to capitalize on the insurgency. Along with the rising death toll, growing humanitarian needs, and brutal human rights abuses, there is concern among analysts that the conflict could spread into neighboring countries across southern and eastern Africa, not unlike the spread of jihadi violence in the Sahel.   Northern Mozambique has long suffered from high levels of illiteracy, poverty, child malnutrition, and alleged government discrimination. The region is primarily Muslim and features multiple languages, while the rest of the country is predominantly Christian. Cabo Delgado province in particular has long practiced Sufism, a mystical form of Islam. In recent years, new forms of Islam have been introduced to the region. In 2008, heavily influenced ideologically by Islamists in East Africa, a sect called Ahlu Sunnah Wa-Jamo (ASWJ) (“adherents of the prophetic tradition”) formed. Its primary sponsors were followers of Sheikh Rogo, who was sanctioned by the United States and UN in 2012 for providing support to al-Shabab. According to an ITCT report [PDF], following Rogo’s death, several of his followers moved to northern Mozambique.  Three mosques in Mocimboa da Praia, a district in Cabo Delgado province, adopted Rogo’s interpretation of Islam, which advocates for the formation of an Islamic State. Although the authorities have subsequently shut them down, many who studied at these three mosques as children eventually joined militias and recruited others to join their cause. Some who became members of ASWJ had been given money [PDF], which was likely the result of illicit economic activity, to attend madrassas in places such as Saudi Arabia and Sudan.  The majority of ASWJ are from the Kimwani tribe, which has suffered particular economic and social marginalization. In approximately mid-2015, the group adopted the name al-Shabab (“youth”), like the Somali-based insurgency, though it is also still called ASWJ. According to a local study [PDF], friends and marriages of members, and also the promise of monthly wages, helped ASWJ grow further.  The first registered attack took place two years later in Mocimboa da Praia in October 2017, when militants attacked a police station. ASWJ gradually increased its presence in the region and attacks continued sporadically through 2018. During this time and beyond, Human Rights Watch has documented the group beheading victims, burning entire villages to the ground, attacking schools, ports, and mosques, and raiding food supplies. By mid-August 2018, the World Food Programme started to distribute aid to the thousands of people who fled their homes and now live in IDP camps.  By summer 2019, the so-called Islamic State had announced that the group was part of its franchise, an affiliate of its Central Africa Province. It remains unclear exactly how much control IS has over the group. There are some indications of a connection; for instance, during some attacks the group has carried the black flag of Islamic State. Further, Jasmine Opperman, a security analyst, suggested the idea of temporarily occupying and looting towns, but not holding them, fits IS tactics. Recent journalistic reports suggest the group is recruiting and gaining weapons across the porous borders with neighboring countries, such as Tanzania and Congo. For its part, the Mozambique military lacks the necessary equipment and the language skills to implement a robust counter-insurgency strategy, though the African Union has offered to provide training and equipment. The number of attacks has risen significantly over the first quarter of this year. On March 23, ASWJ briefly took control of a transport hub close to one of Africa’s most significant gas projects. The fear among the business community, which includes large multinational organizations such as Total and ExxonMobil, is that the group will soon look to disrupt the gas projects and target foreign nationals for kidnapping. The government’s response has won few plaudits. Human rights agencies have accused them of detaining people without trial and arresting journalists for reporting on the conflict. In response to the growing atrocities, the government enlisted the shadowy Wagner Group, a Russian private security company with links to the Kremlin. It is currently operating in the Central African Republic and other war-torn countries Already, there are rising humanitarian needs and too little humanitarian support. The number of displaced persons has risen from 1,000 in March 2019, to more than 115,000 a year later. More than two million people are already in need of humanitarian support [PDF], according to ECHO. Such support should aim to address growing needs, boosting outcomes such as lowering malnutrition rates, and providing programs that result in more opportunities for education, and clamping down on government corruption. Northern Mozambique requires urgent international assistance to stem growing violence, armed attacks, and the likelihood of a more coordinated and lethal insurgency that is likely to outlast the coronavirus pandemic.

Southern Africa recently wrapped up two dramatically different elections. In Mozambique, presidential, parliamentary, and regional elections were characterized by irregularities and even violence, but not by suspense. The ruling FRELIMO party had ensured its victory in the pre-election period, in part through the presence of “ghost voters” on the voters’ roll, and through a campaign of intimidation aimed at challengers to its power. Election day itself was a box-ticking exercise with a pre-scripted outcome, as the carelessness of the tabulation process made plain. In contrast, in Botswana, attention was focused on the possibility that the ruling Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) might lose control of the government for the first time. In the end, the BDP and President Mokgweetsi Masisi emerged strengthened by the polls, but not because the fix was in. The outcome was a credible reflection of the will of the voters, at least some of whom appear to have distrusted an opposition coalition that included the former President Ian Khama, who was so incensed by the changes Masisi had been making that he abandoned the BDP in a fit of pique. Somehow, the Southern African Development Community’s official election observer teams saw little distinction between the two exercises, finding both of them in keeping with the organization’s Principles and Guidelines Governing Democratic Elections. Those Guidelines and Principles are admirable and thorough in their substance. But SADC lacks the courage of its stated convictions. Indeed, the Chair of the Organ on Politics, Defense, and Security Cooperation, the entity charged with deploying SADC observer missions, is Zimbabwe’s President Emmerson Mnangagwa, himself the beneficiary of a flawed electoral exercise. Of course, it is not as if Southern Africa is the only place where obvious gaps exists between stated political principles and actual practice; that state of affairs is very familiar to Americans and to many others. But acknowledging shortcomings is a necessary first step to closing the distance between reality and aspiration. In failing to meaningfully distinguish between the very different governance paths of Mozambique and Botswana, the SADC doesn’t appear to be aiming for anything in the region beyond avoiding steps that might make the powerful uncomfortable. Simply slapping a seal of approval on any electoral process, however shambolic, is not an act of regional solidarity or strength. It’s a self-defeating exercise in irrelevance. 

Welcome to “Women Around the World: This Week,” a series that highlights noteworthy news related to women and U.S. foreign policy. This week’s post, covering July 12 to July 19, was compiled by Mallory Matheson and Rebecca Turkington.