Cabo Ligado Monthly: April 2021
April At A Glance
Vital Stats
ACLED records 20 organized political violence events in April, resulting in 45 reported fatalities
The vast majority of incidents and fatalities recorded took place in Palma district, where the contest for control of Palma town and outlying areas continued throughout the month
Other events took place in Pemba, Macomia, and Muidumbe districts
Vital Trends
Over a month after the initial insurgent attack on Palma town on 24 March, the area around the town is still under threat from insurgents, with clashes reported on 30 April and into May
Attacks on the Macomia coast also continued in May, targeting fishermen pursuing their livelihoods in the area
Concern about expanding insurgent capabilities manifested as violence in Pemba, with three incidents of violence against civilians recorded in the city resulting from government security forces overreacting to suspicions of insurgent infiltration
In This Report
Analysis of the Tanzania’s role in the Cabo Delgado conflict in the wake of late President John Pombe Magufuli’s death and Samia Suluhu Hassan’s ascension to the Tanzanian presidency
Evaluation of child vulnerability in Cabo Delgado following the first confirmed sightings of children under arms in insurgent operations
Update on international involvement in the Cabo Delgado conflict with a focus on the proposed Southern African Development Community intervention that leaked in April
April Situation Summary
April 2021 was a relatively quiet month in the Cabo Delgado conflict, as both sides appeared to pause to evaluate their positions following the insurgent occupation of Palma town that ran from 24 March to 4 April. From the government’s perspective, the occupation was a disaster. By the end of the month, the United Nations had counted 31,136 civilians displaced by the occupation, a number which does not include people who remain displaced within Palma district, nor those in Tanzania nor those still in transit to safety. By the most recent count on 14 May, civilian displacement from Palma has reached 49,600, 43% of whom are children. Beyond the immediate civilian toll, the long-term economic cost of the attack could be extremely high. Total declared force majeure on its liquified natural gas (LNG) project in Palma district, saying the company would suspend work on the project for at least a year while the security situation is sorted out. The project, which is crucial to the Mozambican government’s political and economic plans, appears to be more in jeopardy than it ever has before.
From the insurgents’ perspective, the Palma occupation was a qualified success. Insurgent fighters were able to take control of the town relatively easily and conducted widespread looting and kidnapping. Though they no longer maintain control, they withdrew without suffering major casualties and have continued to demonstrate their capacity to threaten the town throughout the month. The attack also served as occasion for the insurgents to publicly renew their association with the Islamic State (IS), although, even a month since the initial attack, IS media channels have not managed to publish any images of the attack itself or its aftermath.
The most important developments in April happened on the international front. Spurred on by the Palma attack, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) moved forward with planning a regional military intervention in Cabo Delgado by sending a technical team to Mozambique to offer recommendations. The team’s work and the regional response to it is covered in depth in this report.
Also on the international front, relations between the Mozambican government and international aid organizations seemed to suffer in April. Aid organizations have been unable to reach the large number of displaced civilians -- initially as many as 23,000 -- stranded at Quitunda, the resettlement village outside the Total LNG project, although some have since escaped. The inability for international aid organizations to deliver aid to Quitunda appears to come from a combination of the government’s inability to guarantee security in the area and a bureaucratic standoff over whether it would be the government or aid agencies doing the actual distribution of aid. With other issues like humanitarian visas and allegations of local government corruption hindering food aid delivery still unresolved, dissatisfaction in the aid community is rising.
At the end of the month, the Mozambican government appointed Cabo Delgado provincial secretary Armindo Ngunga to lead the country’s Northern Integrated Development Agency, which is set to be the recipient of significant funding from the World Bank and other donors to improve development and social cohesion in Mozambique’s northern provinces. Ngunga had a strained relationship with international aid groups as provincial secretary, but he now becomes one of the main intermediaries between the Mozambican government and donors interested in events in Cabo Delgado. It remains to be seen whether he can repair those relationships in his new role.
Tanzania and Cabo Delgado after Magufuli
With just two months in office, Tanzania’s President Samia Suluhu Hassan’s actions suggest that Tanzania will be much more open to international engagement than under her isolationist predecessor, the late President John Pombe Magufuli. In less than three months, President Samia has been abroad three times, and has been receiving ambassadors, ministers, and heads of United Nations agencies. Her predecessor was more notable for expelling diplomats than receiving them. Both the Country Director of the United Nations Development Programme and the European Commission representative were forced out in his time.
Despite being the member most directly threatened by the insurgency in Cabo Delgado, Tanzania has kept a low profile in Southern African Development Community (SADC) discussions of potential intervention in Mozambique while other SADC members, most notably South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Botswana, have pushed for military deployments. Some change can be expected in how Tanzania engages in solving the Cabo Delgado crisis, if only in response to the inevitable pressure from Western powers and SADC partners.
Tanzania’s security response in southern Tanzania follows that taken in Tanga Region between 2015 and 2017, and against an armed group in Pwani Region in 2017. For years, Tanga had been riddled with armed groups, as well as supply and recruitment networks with links to Somalia. A 2015 clash with an armed group at the Amboni Caves near Tanga town sparked joint Task Force operations between the Tanzania People’s Defence Forces (TPDF), Tanzania Intelligence and Security Services (TISS), and the police. This ranged from military operations to clear out camps, to targeted arrest, disappearance, and detention of suspects. One prominent activist, Sheikh Ponda Issa Ponda, claimed in the weekly An Nuur newspaper that in Maweni Prison in Tanga city there are seventy detainees facing terrorism charges, some on remand for up to seven years. Operations in Kibiti and neighboring Districts in Pwani in 2017 saw the disappearance of hundreds, and suspected killing of many. The leaders of the armed group then made their way to Democratic Republic of Congo and Cabo Delgado.
In Mtwara, Task Force operations have been ongoing for at least three years, identifying and detaining -- or worse -- those suspected of involvement in networks that support the Cabo Delgado insurgency through recruitment, supply chains, and provision of safe houses. Inspector General of Police Simon Sirro has repeatedly stated publicly to “those who want to join an Islamic State” that they will meet the same fate that befell those in Kibiti.
Throughout the month of April, refugees have been making their way to Tanzania across the river and by sea in order to escape ongoing insurgency activity in Palma district. Tanzanian authorities try to prevent crossing, while those who manage to get across are trucked to the Unity Bridge, over 200kms west of the Namoto/Kilambo border crossing to be refouled to Negomano, in Mozambique. Tanzania’s fear is the establishment of permanent refugee settlements close to the conflict zone, and the long term security risk they may present. The international community hopes that a planned United Nations joint agency mission to the border will catalyse a more open humanitarian response from Tanzania. Yet if the joint agency mission is undertaken, it is unclear what the outcome might be. If Tanzania were to open its border, as the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) has suggested it should, it would be reliant on the international community to fund the response. This is unlikely, given that just 23% of UNHCR’s funding needs for this year in Cabo Delgado have been met.
The insurgency has hit Mtwara hard, and at all levels. Communities in Cabo Delgado and Mtwara are deeply intertwined through marriage, language, trade, and commerce. These links stretch up the coast, and are particularly strong for Zanzibar. Traders in Mocimboa da Praia, Palma, and Pemba depended on Mtwara, Dar es Salaam, and Zanzibar for goods, while for Mozambican farmers and fishermen, Mtwara was an important market. Two of northern Mozambique’s most prominent bus companies have Tanzanian interests. Maning Nice is owned by Zanzibaris, while Nagi Investimentos is jointly owned by a Tanzanian in partnership with Florindo Nyusi, Mozambican president Filipe Nyusi’s son. Zanzibar’s Zan Fast ferry contributed to the evacuation of Palma following the March attack.
Mtwara port has received considerable public investment in recent years to expand with a view to serving the SADC region as a hub in the Mtwara Development Corridor. It has been used since 2019 for supply of the liquified natural gas (LNG) projects in Palma. In this regard, Total’s declaration of force majeure on 26 April did not favour Tanzania’s LNG prospects, as has been widely speculated in Mozambique. It immediately affects port traffic and draws attention to insecurity in the region, just when Tanzania is reopening negotiations with Equinor and Shell to develop its own, much more costly, LNG project.
Tanzania’s domestic security response to the insurgency will not change, and involvement in direct military intervention is unlikely. Military engagement would have unpredictable consequences given how intertwined communities are in Cabo Delgado and Mtwara and the extent of the insurgency’s support networks across Tanzania. Yet a more engaged approach should be expected. President Samia is from Zanzibar, and will likely more intuitively appreciate the impact of the insurgency on Tanzania -- and the region -- than her predecessor.
Child Vulnerability in Cabo Delgado
In December 2020, Cabo Ligado reported that “the warning signs are there” that Cabo Delgado insurgents could employ child soldiers in their attacks. In March and April, that prediction became a clear reality. During the 24 March attack on Palma and the contest for the town that has followed, multiple sources reported seeing children as young as nine armed and participating in insurgent operations. A security guard who escaped during the initial insurgent assault described armed pre-teens among the attackers, and other survivor accounts included seeing children under arms. Since then, reports of evening confrontations between insurgents and government troops in the northern areas of Palma town have sometimes referred to child soldiers among the insurgents. At least around Palma, insurgents are definitely using child soldiers.
The timing of the use of child soldiers in the conflict is notable. The insurgency has had the capability to employ child soldiers for some time. Insurgents have focused on indoctrinating children since before even the first attacks of the conflict, and eyewitness reports of children in insurgent custody receiving military training date back to at least July 2020. Women who escaped insurgent custody and were interviewed by researchers with the Observatório do Meio Rural (OMR) reported that some boys who were kidnapped in 2017, in the early days of the insurgency, had been undergoing military training since that time.
Yet the run up to the Palma attack was a uniquely fraught time for the insurgency. Due to the privations of the lean season, which were compounded by the lack of available resources to loot in the largely depopulated conflict zone, insurgents struggled to maintain their manpower in the high summer months leading up to the occupation of Palma. Some hostages were released and some adult fighters were even encouraged to temporarily leave the group in order to lessen the resource strain in insurgent bases. It seems that children were brought into the ranks to fill the manpower holes left by this long fallow period. The need for fighters in the first major insurgent operation of 2021 must have been acute, as the insurgent operational plan for the Palma attack clearly did not take into account children’s involvement. Insurgents infiltrated the town wearing the uniforms of the Rapid Intervention Unit of the Mozambican police, a disguise that was undermined by the presence of pre-teens among the supposed police special forces contingent.
Child soldiers in action have not yet been spotted outside of the Palma context, but the insurgents are unlikely to remove the children who fought successfully at Palma from the battlefield. Instead, now that insurgents have seen that they can achieve battlefield success with child soldiers, the practice is likely to expand. Indeed, the infrastructure for forcibly recruiting and training more child soldiers is already in place. As the OMR report makes clear, insurgents have long prioritized kidnapping children in their operations. One woman who escaped insurgent custody recounted, “What I've watched is that, when they [insurgents] come... they capture underage boys and girls.” Another recalled “In Quirimba they kidnapped 37 minors; to this day, only five children returned, who managed to escape, three boys and two girls. The others, to date, have not yet returned."
In the last Cabo Ligado report on child soldiers, we highlighted three threat vectors through which insurgents can pursue child soldier recruitment and training: threats to displaced populations; kidnappings; and exploiting lootable resources. All three vectors have grown easier for insurgents to exploit in the wake of the occupation of Palma. Before the Palma attack, insurgents were of little direct threat to internally displaced persons (IDPs) once they had been displaced. Insurgents have not organized effective cells in resettlement camps, and in the past have generally been content to let people flee the conflict zone. The Palma attack, however, created a large, vulnerable displaced population at Quitunda, where civilians are constantly under threat from insurgents and are much more vulnerable to insurgent coercion or inducements than they would be in Pemba or Metuge districts. When people have attempted to leave Quitunda, insurgents have sometimes targeted them in transit. Since the occupation, there have been killings and kidnappings of civilians along the northern, western, and southern routes out of Palma. The Mozambican government’s failure to protect displaced Palma residents has vastly increased insurgents’ access to vulnerable children.
The insurgents have exploited that failure by stepping up their kidnapping operations. The insurgent focus on kidnapping youth has continued in Palma, although the scale of the kidnappings will not become clear until there is a proper accounting of displacement from the town. Groups of civilians that have reached Nangade from Palma, many of whom escaped insurgent custody along the way, report that during the attack on Palma, “young people were taken away by [insurgents] at will.” Apparent kidnappings of girls have also been reported in Macomia town in the wake of the Palma attack.
Despite much speculation that insurgents were deeply involved in illicit mining, timber, and other resource trades in Cabo Delgado, a new report from the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime has clearly refuted those allegations. Most illicit trade flows are moving around insurgent territory, not going through it. Yet, as the OMR report makes clear, insurgents are recruiting children to help in trafficking one lootable resource: the children themselves. Women who escaped insurgent custody reported that girls of 12 and 13 were sent to Tanzania to “learn English” -- a term both the women and the OMR researchers believe to be a euphemism for sex trafficking. Even if insurgents are not engaging in the types of natural resource exploitation that tend to increase child vulnerability in conflict, their access to human trafficking networks is still putting Cabo Delgado children at tremendous risk.
International Update
SADC moves towards regional intervention
After months of acquiescence to what appeared a distinct effort by Mozambique to avoid discussing the situation in Cabo Delgado, SADC’s Organ for Politics Defence and Security was able to lock Maputo into a dedicated meeting of the SADC Double Troika. The first of the two troikas in the Double Troika are the Troika member states -- the leadership triumvirate comprising the current SADC chair, Mozambique, the previous “outgoing chair” Tanzania, and the incoming chair, Malawi, who will take over in August. The second is the Organ Troika, currently chaired by Botswana, with outgoing chair, Zimbabwe and incoming chair, South Africa.
The Organ Troika met first in Maputo on 8 April and put together what its Chairperson, Preside Masisi, described as “a concise and decisive response,” a set of “concrete proposals” that they would present to the Double Troika that would enable the region to move “with speed and agility in our efforts to thwart this terrorism situation in our region.” Later that day, the five heads of state and the deputy president of Tanzania met and agreed to deploy a Technical Assessment Mission (TAM) to assess the security situation and make recommendations to an Extraordinary SADC Troika meeting that would meet again on 29 April.
Mozambican president Filipe Nyusi’s own statement following the meeting claimed they had “identified the best mechanism for mutual support.” Zimbabwean president Emmerson Mnangagwa, on his return to Harare, was more definitive, claiming that a decision had been reached to resuscitate the SADC Brigade for deployment. This appeared on face value to put the cart before the horse, as no explicit decision had been taken to deploy troops, at least not publicly.
Mozambique’s Security and Defence Council met on 16 April and issued a statement that “expressed satisfaction at the decision by SADC to send a technical team to Mozambique to coordinate with the government joint actions in the fight against terrorism.” There had already been a growing narrative from Mozambique’s leadership that deployment was not a foregone conclusion. Ahead of the 8 April meeting, President Nyusi publicly acknowledged the importance of regional and international help, but also highlighted the importance of respecting Mozambique’s sovereignty. His concerns were echoed by some senior Mozambican political players who poured cold water over the notion of foreign boots on the ground.
The TAM assessment mission was a speedy affair. The mission was deployed to Maputo on 15 April and had already finalized its report by 21 April. It spent only one day in Cabo Delgado, where it received briefings from local security force commanders. Cabo Ligado has been told by several sources that there was general resistance from Mozambique for a more comprehensive assessment. The team, comprising representatives from every SADC Double Troika country except Mozambique, as well as a representative from Angola, which chairs the Organ’s Defence Intelligence Standing Committee, may well have felt it had seen and heard enough.
An unprecedented leak saw the main section of the TAM’s assessment report circulated widely on social media just days before the scheduled Troika meeting. This did not include the all-important details contained in the report’s accompanying annexures, but nevertheless provided some important insights into what the team had been told and concluded. The security assessment component contained some details that surprised long-time observers, such as the claim that only a small proportion of weapons used by the militants were captured from Mozambican forces. They repeated the assertion that funding “was said” to come from countries such as South Africa, Tanzanian, Burundi, DRC, and Uganda, and that income was derived from a variety of organized crime activities. The report pointed the finger at Islamic State support but acknowledged these remained suspicions rather than hard facts. They mentioned the use of satellite phones by the terrorists but did not mention drones, which the Mozambican government has specifically claimed elsewhere.
The assessment highlighted the weakness of government security forces and the major intelligence deficit in play, but gave only a perfunctory mention about the humanitarian situation and airbrushed out the significance of local grievances and their contribution to driving the conflict. This, and the fact that the report was compiled by the chiefs of SADC’s Defence and Security clusters, lent to the assessment an almost exclusively militarized set of recommendations in which the TAM set out three options for SADC involvement. These options include deployment of troops, training and logistical support, or a combination of the two. The mission recommended the combination option, and identified four key objectives with the overall goal of neutralizing the insurgency:
restoring law and order in affected parts of Cabo Delgado
providing air support
providing maritime support
helping FADM ground troops regain lost ground and putting in place a secure environment
The TAM also provided a framework of “proposed” resources to enable these goals with a force capacity of just under 3,000 personal, including three infantry battalions (1,860 troops) and two Special Forces Squadrons (140 members).
On 28 April, in his opening statement at the Ministerial Committee of the SADC Organ for Politics Defence and Security, Dr Lemogang Kwape, Botswana’s Minister for International Affairs and Cooperation, pointed out that SADC has a responsibility to defend the sovereignty of one of its member states and a duty to protect civilian life if threatened. He specifically invoked Article 6 of SADC’s Mutual Defence Pact, which allows for intervention, but that has only ever been used in terms of an external attack on a member state.
It was a new spin on sovereignty politics that is unlikely to find much traction in Maputo. Even before the meeting rumors were already circulating that the Extraordinary Troika meeting scheduled for the following day would be postponed in the face of Maputo’s bristling at the leaked report and its contents. SADC announced late on the 28th that the meeting was indeed postponed, pointing out that President Masisi had to quarantine himself after exposure to COVID-19 and President Ramaphosa was otherwise engaged. The statement did not set out a new date for the meeting (and no meeting date has been set at the time of this publication).
Any SADC deployment, even if embraced by Mozambique, would take time to put in place. Horse-trading over who would deploy what assets will itself take time. The TAM recommendations do not identify who would provide troops or logistical support and are little more than an opening wish list. Their report is silent on command structure; multilateral force deployments are notoriously challenging on that front and can get bogged down in the mechanisms and bureaucracy and rotational command and control.
There is some doubt, given the attrition of local security force capacities, as to what the region could actually sustain in terms of an armed presence even if it had the political support to do so. SADC’s Standby Force supposedly attained “full operational capability” in 2017, and is still in the process of laying the foundation for the construction of a “Regional Logistics Depot.” SADC has deployed in Lesotho, but this operation is relatively low-key compared to the security situation evolving in Cabo Delgado. Major counterinsurgency operations are new terrain for the regional body and what this means in terms of the practicalities for actual deployment is unclear. While some elements which may have particular relevance (i.e., Special Forces) could be more easily deployed than others, significant lead time would be required to put in place logistics and supplies, not to mention operational plans that could help Mozambique develop an effective integrated security strategy. This could take many months, if not longer.
There remains a distinct impression that Maputo is holding the region at bay. Ultimately, Mozambique, as the host country, must agree to whatever configuration of support is recommended. They ideally will want to play the leading role, or at least be seen to be in the cockpit leading operations. The government’s own capacity challenges are bluntly identified in the TAM report, both from an operational point of view and in terms of the huge intelligence deficit that will hamper any intervention.
Maputo is also understandably keen to continue developing its bilateral options, both in terms of its longer-term plans to retool the security forces, but also in terms of shoring up its capacity to counter the immediate security threats from militants in Cabo Delgado. Some of these efforts within the region may be included in a broader SADC initiative, perhaps in the arena of intelligence sharing, law and order cooperation, and border security. However, Mozambique continues to look outside the SADC region for support for its counterinsurgency effort. President Nyusi visited Rwandan president Paul Kagame on 29 April in his latest efforts to secure bilateral support. A subsequent Rwandan assessment mission is reportedly in Mozambique, while Rwanda’s Inspector General of Police Dan Manyuzu and Chief of Defence Staff for the Rwanda Defence Force Jean Bosco Kazura stopped in Dar es Salaam for meetings with their counterparts the week of 10 May.
Mozambique is also continuing to build up its training support options. The support program from Portugal will be integrated into a larger training force from the European Union (EU). US Special Forces training of Mozambican marines will also be extended for a further round in July. How this relates to addressing the immediate and pressing security challenges in play -- and the support SADC may provide in this regard -- remains unclear.
Then there is the question of who would underwrite a SADC operation. The region does not have resources to pay for the proposed intervention, with many member states forced to trim defense expenditure radically, especially in the context of economies damaged by the coronavirus pandemic. Some militaries, such as the Zimbabwe Defence Force, have been in a longer-term trajectory of degeneration. South Africa’s National Defence Force, which is seen as a major potential contributor to any SADC force, was described by the country’s Department of Defence in 2020 as being in a “critical state of decline.” Financing from the outside is seen by some as the only way of keeping certain assets operational. Financing will thus have to come from outside, with expectations that the EU may step up to the plate. A blank check from the EU is unlikely, though.
SADC has recognized its responsibility to provide support to Mozambique, but it will not be a rapid intervention as this is simply not the nature of the regional bloc, nor in sync with its modus operandi and the prerequisites of seeking consensus decision-making. It remains to be seen how SADC can expedite its decision-making and implementation processes while ensuring it develops a wider-angle lens to promote sustainable solutions to the interlocking human security challenges in play.
The African Union watches with increasing angst from the sidelines
In response to the Palma attack, the African Union (AU) has also tried with varying success to turn its attention to the deteriorating situation in Cabo Delgado. On 31 March, AU Commission chair, Moussa Faki Mohammat, issued a statement calling for “urgent and coordinated regional and international action to address this new threat to our common security” and confirming its support for action from the regional mechanism (i.e. SADC). The AU’s Special Envoy on Women, Peace and Security, Benita Diop, subsequently issued a statement on 30 April profiling the “spiralling humanitarian crisis,” especially with respect to the targeting of women and children (who constitute over 70% of IDPs). She also urged Maputo to “conduct an in-depth investigation into reports of women’s human rights violations, declare zero-tolerance to any form of sexual and gender-based violence and reinforce efforts to bring those responsible for these crimes to justice.” A day or so later, however, Mozambique, with the backing of SADC, was able to remove a discussion on the situation in Cabo Delgado off the provisional program of the AU Peace and Security Council scheduled for 4 May. In the context of subsidiarity politics, this was not surprising, especially as Mozambique is one of the Council’s current members.