Christian Community Raises Alarm Over Mozambique Conflict

JOHANNESBURG (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 04th March, 2021) An umbrella group of Christian churches in southern Africa has sounded the alarm over a humanitarian crisis unfolding in the north of Mozambique, where a quarter of the population has been displaced by what the UN calls a perfect storm of fighting and natural disasters.

The Fellowship of Christian Councils in Southern Africa met by video this week to discuss the situation on Mozambique's Cabo Delgado, a resources-rich region that has been under siege by Islamist insurgents since 2017. The UN estimates that over 530,000 people have been displaced by December, many of them in the past few months. More than 1,300 civilians have been killed.

"The insurgency in northern Mozambique is not just a Mozambican problem, it is a southern Africa regional emergency, thus an African burden that cannot be globally ignored," the organization's senior clerics said in a joint statement.

Nearly half of the population in Cabo Delgado are Christians. The Islamist militancy, known locally as al-Shabaab despite having no connection to Somalia, is calling for a strict Sharia law across Mozambique. But Jao Elias, of the Church of Mozambique, insisted this was not a sectarian strife.

"People there are Islamic and many of them are dying... This is not a religious war. Cabo Delgado is rich in minerals. Mozambican people were not divided. We are one. This is not a Mozambican problem alone. It is a continental problem," he said.

Emmanuel Chikoya of Zambia warned that history had proven that smaller conflicts could easily blow up into genocide, despite the Mozambican government dismissing it as "not as serious as thought to be." He said the African Union needed to step up to the plate after all forms of lower-level diplomacy failed.

"The African Union has not been as active as it ought to be and we are making the call to say 'step up and engage the Mozambican government'," he said.

Kenneth Mtata, secretary general of the Zimbabwe Council of Churches, agreed that the UN and the African Union needed to address the issue, which he linked to a growing dissatisfaction and economic woes.

"This is not a provincial issue it is national, regional and continental. We must sustain communities to co-exist. Insurgents are taking advantage of Africa because the people of Africa are dissatisfied with how resources are not equitably distributed as well as economic injustices leading to instability," he said.

Anthoni Van Nieuwkerk, an associate professor at South Africa's Wits University school of Governance, echoed this in a comment to Sputnik. He accused Mozambique of ignoring the region's need for good governance and social services.

"The Mozambican government had long neglected Cabo Delgado in terms of service delivery and governance. Unlike Mozambican citizens, terrorists never had to travel far to get there," he said.

The government needs to address porous borders that promote an influx of extremists as well as an outpour of resources and drug smuggling, the expert said. He criticized the plan to send troops to Cabo Delgado in the coming weeks as reactionary and prone to generate more tensions.

"Soldiers can't bring governance and have no resources to bring stability in Cabo Delgado. We need a regional response as it spills over the borders of Tanzania, the Comoros and Malawi. We need a Southern African Development Community response and then a multilateral response," he stressed.