Mozambique--No End Seen to Hit-and-Run Guerrilla Attacks

Thirty miles north of Maputo, on the main road to Xai-Xai, the capital of Gaza province, rightist guerrillas ambushed an army-escorted civilian convoy a few days ago, killing 40 people and wounding 95 others.

At Chicualacuala, on Mozambique’s border with Zimbabwe, the guerrillas overran the military barracks, killing or wounding 20 soldiers and taking all the weapons and supplies, while the rest of the garrison was at an Independence Day parade in town.

Beira, Mozambique’s second city, has been without electricity or water for most of the past two months because of a guerrilla blockade, and its population of 250,000 exists largely on food shipped or flown in by relief agencies.

Across Mozambique, a country nearly twice the size of California, with a population of 14.2 million, the rebels of the Mozambique National Resistance appear able to strike almost at will at district towns, at military convoys, at villages within sight of government offices in provincial capitals and frequently in the outskirts of Maputo itself.

Conflict Seems Endless

And the Marxist government of President Samora M. Machel, whose Front for the Liberation of Mozambique, known as Frelimo, came to power 10 years ago after a long guerrilla war against Mozambique’s Portuguese colonists, now finds itself fighting an elusive group of insurgents in a conflict that often seems interminable, if not unwinnable.

A year and a half ago, the insurgents, numbering perhaps 12,000 to 15,000, operated only in five or six provinces, but now they are in all 10, including far northern areas on the Tanzanian border that were Frelimo strongholds in the war with the Portuguese. Increasingly, their targets are civilians--refugees getting food, rural health clinics, market towns, convoys of buses and trucks--rather than military or government installations.

A year ago, the government expected its controversial nonaggression pact with neighboring South Africa to end the flow of foreign arms and supplies to the insurgents, who had been supported first by the old Rhodesian regime of Ian Smith and then by Pretoria. But the attacks have proliferated, and the rightists may have gained even wider support abroad.

And nine months ago, Frelimo believed that South Africa had arranged a “cessation of hostilities” with the rightists--the government calls them “armed bandits”--that recognized the government’s authority and Machel’s leadership and promised some share of power to the insurgents. But those negotiations collapsed the day after a broad “agreement in principle” was reached, and both sides now say they will never again talk to the other.

Regrouping Its Forces

But the government professes not to be discouraged and is regrouping its forces for what is now recognized as a very tough fight, one that will determine the country’s future.

“The bandits are pursuing a more desperate and dangerous strategy now,” Jose Luis Cabaco, Mozambique’s information minister and a top Frelimo official, said in an interview here. “They are not looking for a long struggle. As a result, the strategic military situation in the country is better, though paradoxically the security situation has worsened.”

Cabaco’s point is that the insurgents now operate in small, largely uncoordinated bands, striking hard at civilian targets to demonstrate the government’s inability to protect the people, and appear to have abandoned their previous military strategy to take and hold territory since they could not win against the army’s superior firepower.

“From the military point of view, we are on the offensive,” Cabaco said. “That is why they are making such tremendous massacres that have such a big psychological impact, such a big propaganda impact within the country and abroad.”

Hundreds Reported Killed

Both the government and the insurgents regularly claim to have killed hundreds of each other’s men, but there is no way to verify these assertions. Nor is there any other meaningful measure of the war’s growth over the past year and a half--except its spread into provinces and districts that were previously quiet.

“All the country is destabilized at present,” a top international aid official said here. “Only the provincial capitals and the district towns are safe. Much of the countryside is not occupied by either side, but the guerrillas are seen to be everywhere and the government is seen to be nowhere. . . . There is no prospect, in my judgment, for a significant improvement before the end of this year, and maybe not even next year. The situation could get worse before it gets better.”

Neither the major north-south highway nor any major east-west road is fully secure from ambushes and mines, according to well-informed Mozambicans and diplomats here. Nearly 100,000 refugees have fled to neighboring countries to escape the fighting. Districts that are likely to produce a bumper harvest this year after almost five years of drought are finding they cannot ship their crops to market, and international relief organizations are frustrated by their inability to take food to pockets of famine that are often within sight but surrounded by insurgents.

‘They Pose No Threat’

“These bandits cannot oust Frelimo, and they pose no threat to Machel,” a West European diplomat with lengthy experience in Mozambique commented. “Yet the government is not capable of crushing them, of ending the insurgency, of restoring security to the country and returning to its development priorities. This is not a true stalemate, but sometimes it seems close to it.”

Cabaco and other government officials, while disputing the suggestion of a stalemate, did acknowledge what Aquino de Braganca, director of the Center of African Studies at Eduardo Mondlane University here, called the “psychology of paralysis.”

“Militarily, we may be on the offensive, achieving some important victories, but we have to recognize that the deterioration in security for most of the people paralyzes everything else we want to do,” De Braganca said. “Until we can improve security, we cannot expect economic development--we are at the subsistence level now and heavily dependent on foreign assistance--nor can we bring into full effect our plans for further improving education, health care and living standards.”

Machel, who met with his top military commanders last month to assess the deteriorating security situation, is now developing a broad strategy that the government hopes will bring a rapid improvement in security.

Training for Guerrilla War

This strategy, Mozambican sources said, involves the creation of commando units to hunt the guerrillas, the retraining and re-equipping of a considerable portion of the country’s 25,000 regular soldiers for counterinsurgency operations rather than conventional warfare, the strengthening of village defense militias, which will get more arms, and the replacement of many top commanders, veterans of Frelimo’s war against the Portuguese, with younger officers.

“We want to reinforce the government’s presence everywhere and to reinforce the population’s capability for self-defense,” Cabaco said, denying widespread suggestions here that the regime was preparing to yield some areas temporarily to the insurgents and concentrate its overextended forces on the economically most important regions where scattered peasants could be safely resettled.

“We are on the offensive, and we will show that the initiative is with us, not with the bandits,” he went on. “But this is not an easy task, unfortunately, as much greater organization and training and additional arms are needed.”

Mozambique, which has relied largely on the Soviet Union and East Germany for military assistance over the past decade, expects help from Portugal and Britain in training its men in new counterinsurgency tactics, some arms and other materiel from Yugoslavia and Romania and perhaps other weapons from France.

$1.1 Million From U.S.

The Reagan Administration, in a gesture of support for the Machel government and recognition of a “new era” in relations between Mozambique and the United States, has promised $1.1 million this year in “non-lethal” military assistance, including trucks, communications equipment and uniforms, and an additional $3 million next year plus American training for some Mozambique officers, but this has been held up by congressional objections to aiding a Marxist regime.

The most important assistance, however, will come from neighboring Zimbabwe, which last month doubled to more than 4,000 the number of soldiers it stations along roads, railways and pipelines that run through Mozambique to the coast, carrying goods in and out of landlocked Zimbabwe. That force will be doubled again in the next two months, according to diplomats here and in Harare, the Zimbabwe capital, and it could grow to as many as 20,000, including Zimbabwe militia members guarding lines of transport and some towns, by the end of the year.

“The Zimbabweans, at the very least, will buy Machel time to reshape his army, and their numbers may allow him to make some progress,” a West European ambassador remarked. “If you take the normal staff college ratio of 10 to 1 for fighting an insurgency, the government needs at a minimum 50,000 troops to deal with 5,000 full-time guerrillas, and if that 5,000 is really 15,000. . . .

‘Quick to Withdraw’

“There are other serious problems with the army, too. It is trained and armed for a conventional war against South Africa, yet it is led by former guerrilla commanders who have not mastered the weaponry, tactics and logistics of a regular army; ironically, they seem to have forgotten what they knew so well when they were in the bush. Morale of the troops is low--they are three-quarters conscripts--and they are slow to take to the field and quick to withdraw.”

Although the insurgents, who lack a clear ideology beyond a broad opposition to Frelimo and Marxism, appear unlikely to oust the Machel government, most observers here believe that time is not on Frelimo’s side.

“We are a very poor country, not even able to feed ourselves in recent years, and we are squandering tremendous resources on this war against the armed bandits,” a senior Foreign Ministry official said. “What is worse is that all the things we should be doing for our people, the goals for which the revolution was fought, are being left undone.”