‘Behind Lines in Mozambique’

I read with great interest Sharon Behn’s article (Opinion, March 29), “Behind Rebel Lines in Mozambique,” on the South African supported Mozambique National Resistance (MNR).

I am the only American pediatrician to work in Mozambique since independence in 1975. From July, 1982, to July, 1984, I was stationed in Beira, the strategic port city, which at the time was under siege by the MNR. I worked under contract for the Frelimo revolutionary government, mortal enemy of the MNR.

Behn’s one-month excursion accompanying MNR guerrillas or “armed bandits,” as the Mozambicans call them, might be compared to my two years service living and working in Mozambique. I could charge Behn with seriously distorting reality and telling untruths about the situation in Mozambique. But charges and countercharges will achieve nothing. Instead, permit me to share a few of my firsthand experiences with the MNR.

It is difficult to convey two years of watching more than 700 children die from starvation and lack of medicines mainly due to South African-MNR attacks against the people of Mozambique. My first day on the job was spent treating dozens of children machine-gunned at point-blank range by the MNR when it stopped a train carrying families going to visit husbands working on a rural plantation.

On other occasions, I assisted in the care of a schoolteacher whose ears had been cut off by the MNR, treated a young woman shot through both breasts at close range by the MNR, and attended more than 30 farm workers with their feet blown off or multilated when their truck hit an MNR land mine.

I held the hand of a small child as he died from starvation and dehydration shortly after arrival to the hospital after he had been carried for 60 miles on the back of a government health worker. The child’s peasant parents had been executed by MNR “freedom fighters.”

Finally, there was the time I tried to stabilize a wounded MNR prisoner who lay dying after taking a hit from government shellfire. His legs were grotesquely twisted and shrapnel had pierced his belly from which feces oozed. I asked him how old he was and he said he was 15. No doubt he had been one of the many MNR “soldiers” who are pressed into service under threat of having their families killed or home destroyed.

It is not easy for me to share these memories in such a public way. But I believe that the American public deserves to hear the truth behind the lies and propaganda of the MNR and the South African regime.

STEPHEN F. TARZYNSKI MD

Santa Monica