Civil War ‘Deslocados’ Suffer : Mozambique Refugees Struggling to Survive

Madih Asmani had a straw bed mat on his head and his legs were swollen from two nights of hiking when he first laid tired eyes on this oasis. Power lines hung limply over a highway turned to weeds, coconuts rotted beside trees felled out of spite and sunlight poured into hundreds of roofless stores and houses.

But the sight of government soldiers in a ring of bunkers, shouldering AK-47 rifles to protect what little was left here, lifted his spirits.

“We came because we are suffering; now we are finding a home,” the 12-year-old boy said as he played with a small, wishbone-shaped stick. A girl’s blouse was his only piece of clothing.

Lost Everything

Every day, 10 to 20 more people trudge in from the scrubby bush of central Mozambique, and they find refuge in this plundered village surrounded by guerrilla activity.

Mozambique has more than 1.5 million of these deslocados --dislocated people who have left behind houses, farms, cooking pots, blankets and clothing in their rush to escape areas infested with bands of the right-wing Mozambique National Resistance, or Renamo.

A massive international relief effort, the likes of which has not been seen on this continent since the 1983-85 famine in Ethiopia, has begun to help the dislocated Mozambicans, as well as 3 million people the government says are unable to feed themselves because of drought or the decade-old civil war.

Large-scale starvation is no longer imminent, but relief officials say the margin of safety remains very small for this war-ravaged country on the southeast edge of Africa. Mozambique has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world; two of every 10 children die before their first birthday.

“The relief work here requires more than just feeding people,” said Richard Morgan, program director for the U.N. Children’s Fund in Mozambique. “We must try to rebuild a society.”

Insurgents Steal, Destroy

The Renamo insurgents, known locally as bandidos, have ravaged the countryside, attacking and terrorizing civilians, stealing food and clothing, burning fields and destroying everything from factories to relief projects.

Most of the rail lines, roads and rivers are unsafe for travel, a quarter of the nation’s meager health system has been wiped out by the rebels in the last year, and half of the schools have been destroyed since 1982.

Renamo land mines, planted on beaches and near watering holes, have maimed or killed dozens of children and mothers. Renamo soldiers routinely hold up rural buses, killing dozens of civilians in the process, and they were blamed for the massacre last month of several hundred people in the southeastern town of Homoine and last week’s attack on Manjacaze, which left more than 80 villagers dead.

Renamo’s goal, military analysts say, is to destabilize this Marxist country of 14 million people, not rule it. Most analysts and diplomats believe that Renamo receives substantial support from South Africa, Mozambique’s neighbor, but South Africa denies it.

Vila de Sena was a tidy, flourishing town of 12,000 people when Renamo guerrillas seized it more than a year ago. The army of Mozambique’s ruling party, known as Frelimo (the Portuguese acronym for the Mozambique Liberation Front), retook it last February with the help of forces from Zimbabwe but found only 600 people here.

Fields of maize and other food crops had been burned, and even the coconut trees had been chopped down to deny the invading government troops any scrap of food. Every structure in town had been looted, then damaged or destroyed. Goats and cows, even dogs and cats, had been slaughtered by the departing guerrillas.

The population of Sena has risen to 2,400 in recent months. Newcomers to this settlement along the southern bank of the Zambezi River are given a small plot of land and a hoe, but no seeds are available.

Rations Reduced

Daily rations of food here have been cut in half since relief flights stopped a month ago. Clothing and blankets are scarce. Three boxes of medicine arrived the other day; it was the first time the nurse, had seen so much as an aspirin in six months.

Maria Jairo, her husband and three children left an area controlled by Renamo last month and walked 12 miles to get here. The guerrillas took their food and clothing and forced the men, at gunpoint, to carry heavy loads of supplies from camp to camp, she said. Women and young girls, she said, were raped.

“We finally got away,” Jairo said. “But if we ever return, we will be killed.”

People suspected of collaborating with government troops have had ears and noses cut off by the guerrillas as a warning to others. Such atrocities have long characterized this war on both sides. Allegations of torture and other atrocities have also been made against government soldiers.

Sena, guarded by nearly 100 government troops, is still not immune to Renamo’s attacks. A few months ago, Renamo blew up a section of the three-mile-long Zambezi River bridge, which links the Indian Ocean port of Beira to the south with the inland province of Tete to the north.

Then, a few weeks ago, a band of 20 guerrillas slipped past the sentries about sunset. Inacio Dinga and his young wife, a basket of clothing on her head and their 18-month-old daughter on her back, made a run for the cover of the bush.

“We thought they were taking over the town; we thought it was time to leave again,” said Dinga, the town nurse, who had brought his family here from Renamo-held areas north of the river.

Bullet Killed Wife

The rebels fired. A bullet stuck Dinga’s wife in the back, barely missing the infant. She died in the twilight as the guerrillas disappeared back into the countryside.

The guerrillas seem never to be very far away. Manuel Pires, a charter pilot who ferries soldiers to Sena and nearby Caia, says he always makes a pass high over town before deciding whether to land.

“Only if I see people moving do I know it’s safe,” he said.

Caia is 35 miles southeast of Sena, on a major trucking route that is now too dangerous to travel. It was a bustling trading center of 29,000 people when it was overrun by guerrilla forces in 1985.

When Mozambican and Zimbabwean troops forced Renamo out of Caia last February, they found a ghost town. About all that was left unscathed by the departing guerrillas were the rows of thorny acacia trees along an empty main street.

Now more than 5,000 people have moved into Caia, and the population grows by 40 or so a day. Grain is distributed only to children and the sick these days, and even so the stock will last only about a week.

The government’s emergency relief agency, which coordinates all donations, has promised to resume the food airlift to Caia and Sena sometime this month. The DC-3 that delivered tons of grain to this region in June was diverted temporarily to another province, officials said.

“People are alive here, but they are in trouble,” said Francisco Semo, district administrator for Caia and Sena. “They have nothing. We can no longer give them food or clothing. Only protection.”

Bleak Future

Even with food aid, the future doesn’t seem very bright. Although fertile farmland in the area is plentiful, little of it can be worked safely because it is not under the army’s control.

New arrivals, like Luciana Fundisie, build houses out of pieces of tin and rubber salvaged from the burned-out buildings in town. A Mozambican soldier, bazooka slung over his shoulder, stood near the Fundisie family construction project one recent afternoon, watching the tall brush on the outskirts of town.

Since their arrival two days earlier, Fundisie and her family had been living on masanica, a wild fruit that resembles a miniature green apple. Her husband was out foraging for wild sweet potatoes.

“We’re not sure what we’re going to eat,” said Fundisie, who, like the rest of her family, wore a grain sack wrapped around her waist. “Unless food comes in time, we will have to move on.”

Orphans, Widows in Shack

Behind the city’s administrative office, about 10 orphans and half a dozen elderly widows live in a two-room shack. Eight-year-old Mboi Paulino showed up in Caia one day last March, all alone. Her father had been killed by the guerrillas, and her mother had disappeared.

“The bandits were very mean to me,” Mboi said.

Her friend, Anita Domingos Ferro, also about 8, was found by troops while they were patrolling the outskirts of Caia a few months ago.

“I hate the bandits,” Anita said. “I wish they’d go away and leave us alone.”

Dealing with these people on the run, in a country where the ground transportation network has all but collapsed, has been the biggest challenge for relief agencies in Mozambique. More than half a million people cannot be reached by road; half of those are inaccessible by air as well.

Since an international call for emergency relief last year, aid has poured into this country. In all, 42 private relief agencies and 30 governments have pledged to spend $240 million here this year. The United States is spending $85 million, $75 million of it on food aid.

The size of the staff at some relief agencies has quadrupled since last year, and Mozambique’s capital, Maputo, is dotted with new and expanded offices to coordinate new and expanded budgets.

Some See Overreaction

Some relief workers say privately that international aid agencies overreacted to Mozambique’s predicament, cranking up their operations as if this were a disaster on the scale of Ethiopia’s famine, which it is not.

“Relief agencies are stepping on each other’s necks around here,” one foreign relief worker complained not long ago. She had come to Mozambique from southern Sudan, where reports of mass starvation a year ago turned out to be untrue.

But many other relief experts credit the world’s prompt response with saving hundreds of thousands of lives here.

“There was a bandwagon effect, but there was also a genuine need,” a Western diplomat here said recently. “Something catastrophic was averted here. And if these areas do not get their next airlift, they will still be in trouble. It’s a continuing struggle.”

Keeping people from starving is only part of the battle, said Manuel Nogueira, director of the Mozambique emergency relief office for the province that includes Caia and Sena.

“We still have to feed these people, but we must help them become self-sufficient, with tools and seeds and safe land to farm,” Nogueira said.

Mozambican officials say that as long as the war continues, suffering and dislocation will increase. The war shows no signs of ending anytime soon.

Mozambique’s 50,000 troops, supported by Soviet military aid and advisers, made significant gains against Renamo in the Zambezi River region earlier this year.

But in recent weeks Renamo’s forces, estimated to number 25,000, have begun a potent new offensive in southern Mozambique, which the government says is fueled by stepped-up support from South Africa.

Simple Survival

Independent political analysts in the country say the Mozambican people show little allegiance to either side in this long-running civil war.

The 400,000 Mozambicans who have fled to Malawi, Zimbabwe and Swaziland, and the larger number of uprooted people who have sought refuge within the country in such places as Sena and Caia, are just trying to survive.

For many months Rui Cesar, his wife and their 9-year-old son hid in the bush about six miles outside Caia, fearing that if they were caught by the guerrillas, “they’d make us suffer again,” Cesar said.

But three months after Cesar’s wife, Doka, gave birth to twin girls, they walked into Caia. They accepted the grain sacks offered as clothing and began thinking of building a small hut.

“We don’t have much food, and there are no clothes,” Cesar said. “But living in this place with nothing is still better than being forced to work for the bandits.”