August At A Glance

Vital Stats

• ACLED recorded 58 organized political violence events in Cabo Delgado province in August, resulting in 63 reported fatalities

• Reported fatalities were highest in Ancuabe district, where insurgents carried out attacks on civilians and clashed with state forces

• Other events took place in Nangade, Muidumbe, Macomia, Meluco, Mocímboa da Praia, Chiure, and Palma districts in Cabo Delgado

Vital Trends

• Concentration of organized political violence events in Muidumbe and Nangade districts in the north

• Concentration of fatalities in Ancuabe district in the south

• First attacks in Nampula province since June

In This Report

• Mining and the insurgency in southern Cabo Delgado

• Research on the insurgency in Mozambique

• Civil war, what civil war?

August Situation Summary

The uptick in incidents of political violence over August compared to July was notable. Within the overall figure there are some interesting variations, on which this month’s edition may shed some light. 

Firstly, the concentration of attacks was in Muidumbe and Nangade districts in the north of the province, which each suffered 16 incidents of organized political violence over the month. In Muidumbe there were 11 fatalities related to these, and just five in Nangade. On the other hand, the greatest concentration of fatalities by district, 20, was in Ancuabe district, bordering Nampula province. Yet only seven incidents account for these fatalities, while over half of these came in one incident. 

One should not draw hard conclusions from just one month’s data. However, this pattern of events and fatalities highlights some interesting issues. Muidumbe and Nangade districts, being sparsely populated and difficult to access, make safe havens for insurgents on the run from operations against bases previously established in Macomia district. The population that remains is scattered, and often vulnerable when foraging for food in small groups. Southern districts such as Ancuabe are more densely populated and therefore perhaps more likely to have a greater number of victims. They also have denser formal and informal communications networks. These range from private security operations engaged by the private sector, such as mining concerns, to traders moving across the territory and sharing news.  

This has implications for conflict response. Those with commercial interests in southern Cabo Delgado within and outside Mozambique and threatened by the insurgency may be tempted to see the south prioritized over the north. Understanding the interests behind this, and allowing  researchers and media access to as much of Cabo Delgado as is safely possible will be essential to understanding just what sort of conflict is being faced, and in deciding where resources are spent.

Mining and the Insurgency in Southern Cabo Delgado

By Peter Bofin, Cabo Ligado

August saw Australian mining company Triton Minerals in talks with government of Mozambique over security issues around its Ancuabe graphite project, as well as ongoing issues related to other mining licenses it claims in the south of Cabo Delgado. The company had declared force majeure on its Ancuabe operation on 4 July following the killing of two of its workers at the site during the insurgents’ initial push into Ancuabe in June. Triton, which operates in Mozambique through its wholly-owned subsidiary Grafex Limitada, is not the first firm to have declared force majeure. TotalEnergies’ more famous, and more impactful, declaration in April 2021 is considered by some to have precipitated international military intervention. Both declarations are still in place. While they highlight the centrality of natural resources management, and extractive industries in particular, to the conflict, resources differ in type, the scale of investment, and the range of interested parties. From small-scale and mostly illegal ruby mining to the liquefied natural gas projects (LNG) at Afungi in Palma district, and the offshore Coral Sul project, extractive industries involve a range of interest groups with influence on the conflict, its resolution, and future rebuilding.

LNG’s growing global importance, whether driven by climate or by geopolitical considerations, is well known. Graphite’s role in decarbonizing power production is less obvious. Mozambique has a key role to play in developing US supply chains for lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles (EV).  Reserves being worked by Syrah Resources at Balama in the southwest of the province are 80% ‘fine flake’ graphite, critical to the production of the active anode material (AAM) used in such batteries. With graphite production in Mozambique, and a planned AAM processing facility in Vidalia, Louisiana USA, Syrah has attracted a loan of over $102 million from the US Department of Energy for expansion of the Vidalia plant to full commercial operations. Syrah will therefore have the only vertically integrated AAM production facility outside China.

Triton is targeting a different segment of the graphite market in China. The resource at Ancuabe is 56% ‘large flake,’ a grade used in the production of fire retardant materials, and furnace and crucible lining. Triton has recently attracted over $5 million in private Chinese capital with one partner, and agreed an off-take contract with another Chinese firm. Triton’s projected production will be at best 6% of global production. Over 68% of global graphite production comes from China, giving it a significant control over the resource. Ancuabe is an opportunity for Chinese capital to marginally control production outside China. The strategic importance of Syrah Resources’ ‘fine flake’ for US government policy priorities on the other hand is considerably greater.

The range of stakeholders in ruby mining is much greater, encompassing illegal miners in Montepuez, political elites in Maputo, and international buyers. At the center of these interests is Gemfields Group Ltd, registered offshore in the UK, and controlling 75% of Montepuez Ruby Mining Limitada (MRM), which has the concession at Namanhumbir, Montepuez district.

The state has developed a preference for large-scale mining projects as opposed to supporting artisanal operations, as they allow central government to capture rents through taxes, royalties and permit fees, as argued by the International Growth Centre. It also provides an opportunity for political elites to benefit; 25% of MRM is held by Mwiriti Limitida, a company controlled by Raimundo Pachinuapa, liberation war veteran, and senior Frelimo figure. Another prominent figure, Deputy Attorney-General Taibo Mucobora has a 20% interest in another Gemfields controlled license holder, Eastern Ruby Mining Limitada, which has not reached the production stage yet.

This approach has consequences. Firstly, the illegality of ruby mining may have contributed to the involvement of some miners in supporting the insurgency in its early days at least, as has been alleged locally. Secondly, the accrual of benefits from resources found locally to elites in Maputo, along with violent actions to prevent illegal mining, as occurred at the site in 2017, likely contributes to continued alienation from the state and its authority.

The significant interest held by elites in ruby mining may act as a blockage to the development of an artisanal and small-scale mining sector, but it is now on the policy agenda. Joao Feijo of the Rural Environment Observatory (OMR) recently called for “attribution of licenses to small-scale miners.” Perhaps more significantly, after citing the 2017 Namanhumbir clearances, Frelimo veteran Dr. Hamo Thay similarly recommended that small-scale miners be recognized and supported. Such moves would not be easy.

Doing so for rubies is easier said than done. Alongside the license operated by MRM, Gemfields controls seven more tenements in the area. Five are pre-exploration, and of the remaining ones, just one is producing, and at low levels. Rescinding all or part of this territory would be expensive, and open up the possibility of re-negotiations of existing terms for MRM.

Thus far graphite and ruby mining operations have not been badly hit by the extension of the insurgency into southern Cabo Delgado. Triton’s force majeure declaration is still in effect, but the project is not yet producing, so impact is limited. Production at Syrah Resources and MRM continues, with tighter security on logistics operations.

Though killings at the Ancuabe site seem not to have been a deliberate attempt to target the business by the insurgents, the Islamic State Media Bureau has noted the reactions of what it deems “crusader companies” since the first attacks in the south in June. Al Naba’s 23 June edition noted how a new war zone now “threatens the economy.” On 12 August it noted that companies which had suspended operations were reluctant to resume operations, despite government urging.

Attacks in January and March 2021 that led to the TotalEnergies pullout reflected the insurgency at its height in terms of numbers of fighters and capacity to organize large formations. In its current configuration of small mobile groups operating in the south, albeit with limited supply lines, the risk to mining operations is heightened. In the short term, sustained security measures will be needed to prevent them organizing and developing greater capacity. In the longer term, a reconfiguration of regulation and investment will be needed to ensure that the resources in the province bring some benefit to its people. The decisions around this of interested parties involved in the province prior to the insurgency from Namanhumbir and Maputo, to Washington DC, will shape conflict resolution and rebuilding. Other powers who have arrived since, such as from Rwanda and Tanzania who both have established interests in minerals, may also want to get involved. 

Research on the Insurgency in Mozambique

By Tomás Queface, Cabo Ligado

Fundamental questions about the origin, essence, and dynamics of the insurgency in northern Mozambique continue to generate enormous interest and have been the subject of heated debate among academics, researchers, politicians, journalists, and even military circles in the country. The interest grows as the insurgency spreads to new places previously spared by violence, and as it strengthens its links with transnational networks. The insurgency's leadership and objectives remain largely unknown, which poses enormous challenges to both scholars seeking to understand the insurgency and those implementing Preventing/Countering Violent Extremism (P/CVE) strategies. 

The insurgency in Cabo Delgado has embraced extreme violence against military and civilian targets, destruction of public and private property, and forced displacement. For President Filipe Nyusi, the armed insurgency in Cabo Delgado represents a threat to the country, as it jeopardizes not only the stability of the northern region, but also undermines territorial and regional sovereignty and integration. Nyusi even stated again last month that the conflict in the north is driven by external actors.

Speaking last month, as the fifth anniversary of the insurgency’s outbreak approaches, Minister of National Defense Cristovão Chume complained that “the academy” has generated a lot of information on the insurgency, without contributing to greater understanding. Even today it is difficult to know the motivations of the insurgents, he argued. He questioned how the insurgent group managed to expand to other provinces and succeeded in establishing links with transnational networks of international terrorism. Chume’s dismissal of the contribution of academia to understanding the conflict was made without acknowledging the obstacles placed in the way of researchers and journalists seeking to work in Cabo Delgado. Despite this, considerable progress has been made in understanding the driving factors, including the failure of public policies, the absence of the state, extreme poverty, unemployment, youth vulnerability combined with the porousness of the borders, and repression by the country’s Defense and Security Forces (FDS).  

Two state academic institutions have sought to analyze the factors behind the conflict in Cabo Delgado. At the Scientific Conference on Defense and Security, which took place at the Higher Institute for Defense Studies (ISEDEF) in August, military academicians listed a number of factors, among them internal factors that made the province vulnerable to attacks and insurgent recruitment networks. They highlighted how weak state representation, underdevelopment, and the lack of local knowledge, undermine the relationship between the FDS and the local populations. 

In 2021, Rovuma University, a higher education institution based in Montepuez district, sought to explore the causes of violence from the perceptions of local people. Their research corroborates the study by Habibe, Forquilha, and Pereira published in 2019 by the Institute for Social and Economic Studies (IESE). Both studies established relationships between armed violence and religious extremism, arguing that the conflict is inspired by a fundamentalist ideology, which by taking advantage of the outcomes of government policy failures such as poverty, exclusion, high unemployment rates, and ethnic issues, has managed to recruit many young people and expand its attacks across the province and beyond.

IESE was a pioneering institution in the study of insurgency in northern Mozambique. The 2019 study carried out by researchers from IESE and the Mechanism for Support to Civil Society Foundation (MASC), a donor supported funding body, represented an initial milestone in the attempts to analyze the insurgency from the academic point of view. The study on "Islamic Radicalization in Northern Mozambique: The Case of Mocímboa da Praia" highlighted, among other aspects, the religious factor as crucial for the emergence of armed insurgency. Eric Morier-Genoud in a study published in 2020, examined the influence of jihadism as being at the origin and expansion of the insurgency. He argued that the roots of the armed insurgency go back to 2007 with the emergence of a radical sect that wanted to impose a social regime ruled by sharia law, and that its expansion was possible through the establishment of ties with international jihadist organizations. 

Liazzat Bonate, a Mozambican researcher who has contributed much to the understanding of the insurgency in Cabo Delgado, drew attention to the innumerable inconsistencies in the approaches that link the insurgency to international jihadism, or even to radical Islamism, arguing for instance that fundamentalist religious sects have always existed in Mozambique since independence. Bonate advocates a historical analysis of the development of insurgency in the perspective that allows one to look at the phenomenon in a multifaceted way, including the socio-economic factors that characterized the insurgency as a form of resistance against state authority. Sérgio Chichava of IESE has also examined socio-political factors behind the insurgency, particularly through profiling leadership, and the impact of the insurgency on democratic processes. 

The OMR began its research around the insurgency in Cabo Delgado in 2019 with a contextual analysis of the socio-economic situation in Cabo Delgado province, arguing that the triggering of the insurgency was somewhat expected given the growth of discontent, asymmetries, and social tensions driven by the arrival of the mega projects. Other analyses focused on the socio-economic consequences of the conflict, the situation of the displaced, and also the dynamics of the insurgency, with a focus on the profile of the insurgents. 

Analysis of the insurgency in Mozambique has initially sought to describe the origins and causes of the insurgency, to understand the socio-economic dynamics of Cabo Delgado province, and to develop a framework that informs the profile and motivations of the insurgents. A future research agenda should include the impact of foreign involvement in the conflict, and the links between the Mozambican insurgency and Islamic State. Aspects of the relationship between Rwanda and Mozambique in terms of political cooperation and investment may also be worth examining. Finally, the impact of the conflict on ethno-cultural and social relations should be considered. Each of these issues will have an impact on possible post-conflict state reforms. Pursuing such an agenda will require the government to allow researchers access to the province and to exercise their activities with both freedom and autonomy.

Civil War, What Civil War?

Frelimo May Want to Deny it, but Mozambique is Again in Civil War

By Tom Bowker, Zitamar News

“Defining when violence is a ‘war’ can be politically very sensitive,” wrote Joseph Hanlon in his 2006 book, Civil War, Civil Peace. “Governments facing insurgencies tend to dismiss the violence as being merely caused by criminals or ‘armed bandits’ or ‘mindless terrorists’, and surely not a war.”

Sixteen years on, and 30 years since the end of Mozambique’s last civil war, those sensitivities are coming to the fore in Mozambique – including manifesting themselves through attacks on Hanlon himself by media controlled by Frelimo, Mozambique’s ruling party, due to Hanlon’s insistence that Mozambique is now, again, in a civil war.

“What civil war are you talking about?,” asked a recent edition of the newspaper Público, alongside a crude illustration of Hanlon, who writes a regular newsletter on Mozambique, receiving a blow to the head. “Is terrorism a civil war, for you?,” the columnist asks, before concluding with a violent threat: “I'm going to beat you very well, and don't you dare try to fight, because I'm going to squeeze your neck.”

One, Two, or Three Mozambican Civil Wars?

The debate, such as it is, over whether the conflict in Cabo Delgado (and now Nampula) is a civil war has many echoes of the argument over how to classify the war with Renamo, from 1976 to 1992.

In the introduction to their 2018 edited volume The War Within: New Perspectives on the Civil War in Mozambique, 1976-1992, Eric Morier-Genoud, Michel Cahen, and Domingos Manuel do Rosario write that “In Mozambique, the government still refuses today to use this term [civil war] and prefers to talk of a ‘war of destabilization’ (the term used during the conflict) or of the ‘sixteen years war’ (a more neutral term coined after the conflict ended).”

Their book is part of “a growing body of revisionist academic literature that emphasize Mozambican agency in the civil war,” according to another historian of that war, Alex Vines.

Both Vines and Morier-Genoud describe the war with Renamo as the civil war in Mozambique – suggesting there has not been one before or since (though it should be remembered that Morier Genoud et al.’s book came out in 2018, during the first year of the Cabo Delgado conflict). For Hanlon, however, the conflict in Cabo Delgado is Mozambique’s third civil war, after the war with Renamo, and the war of liberation from the Portuguese colonial administration before that.

All three of those conflicts meet the definition used by academic Stathis Kalyvas, who defines civil war as “armed combat taking place within the boundaries of a recognized sovereign entity between parties subject to a common authority at the outset of the hostilities.”

And while Morier-Genoud et al. do not define the war of liberation as a civil war, in the case of the war with Renamo they write that “there is no question that the war pitted from the start and in its overwhelming majority members of the same national community – Mozambicans against Mozambicans.”

The same is true of the current war in Cabo Delgado. “Despite the presence of foreigners, the overwhelming majority of the group's members are Mozambicans,” stated leading Mozambican researcher João Feijo in a landmark report into the identity of the insurgents in August 2021.

The Frelimo View

The weekly newspaper Público is neither widely read nor particularly influential. But it is owned by the Frelimo holding company, SPI-Gestão e Investimentos, and is a propaganda tool of the ruling party. So it can be taken to provide a window onto the thinking of part, at least, of Mozambique’s ruling elite – and the narrative that it would like to impose on events in the country.

In its attack on Hanlon in August, Público condemns his description of the conflict in Cabo Delgado as a civil war, “contradicting what is known, that it is terrorism.” In fact, Público goes on, “the country has already suffered a civil war from which it freed itself 30 years ago” – clearly happy now to describe the ‘war of destabilization’ as a civil war. But what is happening in Cabo Delgado, Público says, is by contrast “a wave of threats to [Mozambique’s] national sovereignty and territorial integrity, protagonised by a group of terrorists of Islamic progeniture, with unknown motives.”

But what is playing out in Cabo Delgado has strong echoes of the situation which Público now calls a civil war, but whose reality was also officially denied for decades.

Those who would deny that the war with Renamo was a civil war point to the undeniable influence from outside Mozambique on both starting and fuelling the conflict – influence that itself is hotly contested. Hanlon insists it is best understood as a cold war proxy war between the US and the socialist bloc; Morier-Genoud et al. say “it is clear that was not the main reason behind the conflict.”

There was another international dimension to the war with Renamo – that of Mozambique’s apartheid neighbors Rhodesia and South Africa, who in turn founded and then continued to provide material support for Renamo. But, Morier-Genoud et al. caution, “this regional dimension should not obscure the fundamental dynamic and historicity of the conflict in Mozambique which had to do just as much, if not more, with the process of marginalization of certain regions, areas and populations” in Mozambique. “The civil war,” they write, “took roots rapidly and developed successfully because certain people and certain areas had been marginalized and felt like the coming war could help them redress their grievances and status.”

 Here the echoes of current debates on the nature of the war in Cabo Delgado are undeniable. Moreover, official recognition of the internal causes of the current war is increasing – though the government still prefers to talk of terrorism imported from outside the country, particularly in presidential pronouncements on the war. 

At a recent conference at Mozambique’s military university in Maputo, however, there was a recognition of the importance of internal factors in causing the conflict, including a weak state, poor public services, and imperfectly managed investments, Cabo Ligado’s Weekly report on 14 September 2022 notes.

The echoes continue in how the war is being prosecuted. As Vines notes in his review of recent literature on the war with Renamo, “there are many continuities from the civil war” in today’s Cabo Delgado, “such as weak government defence and security forces needing militia support and the help of foreign militaries, but also increased pressure for more accountable, better government that provides public goods, such as health and education, and increased political pluralism.”

It is no mystery why Frelimo would resist characterizing any of Mozambique’s three wars as civil wars. The war of liberation pitted Frelimo, representing Mozambicans, against the Portuguese colonizer; the second war pitted Frelimo, representing Mozambique, against ‘bandits’ armed by hostile neighboring states. The current war has the Frelimo government defending Mozambique from Islamist ‘terrorists’ coming from elsewhere in east Africa and affiliated to Islamic State, rooted in Iraq. Challenges to those narratives challenge Frelimo’s mythology as the legitimate representative and defender of the Mozambican people.

But the reality is that the insurgents in Cabo Delgado, like Renamo before them, were rooted in Mozambican society. Whether or not it is useful to insist on the term ‘civil war,’ denying the local roots of the conflict hampers the Mozambican state’s ability to tackle it – both militarily, and in terms of hearts and minds. 

Thirty years since the signing of the General Peace Accord which brought to an end the 16-year war with Renamo, the rebel group’s demobilization, disarmament, and reintegration is finally almost complete. But democracy remains a distant dream for Mozambicans. Despite the window-dressing of popular elections and decentralized power structures, many if not most Mozambicans are not satisfied with the way democracy works – particularly at the opposite end of the country from the capital. And a key lesson they may take from the outcome of Mozambique’s last civil war is that to make their voices heard, they must take up arms.