Remembering a warlord democrat

My view was that, despite his reputation for brutality and multiple human rights abuses during the war, he had signed a peace agreement and kept to it. He reminded the audience that I had co-authored a report that had also documented government abuses.

ALTHOUGH I was Renamo’s fiercest critic of its human rights record during the last years of the civil war, I always appreciated that, at its core, Renamo was a response to injustice and inequality in Mozambique as much as it was about being an instrument of Rhodesian and later apartheid South African destabilisation.

Nonetheless, Renamo was addicted to covert support from Rhodesia and South Africa. It was only in the late 1980s that Afonso Dhlakama really started to define Renamo’s own political identity — as the grip of apartheid South Africa weakened, it had to survive largely on its own.

At about the same time, Renamo began to lose its main tactical advantage. South Africa had provided Renamo with specialist radio equipment, which neither the Mozambican nor the Zimbabwean governments could intercept. But, by 1989, the batteries and handsets had degenerated and this compromised Renamo’s military effectiveness.

Communications became so difficult that, in 1991, the provision of a satellite phone by Italian mediators was enough of an incentive to persuade Dhlakama to sign a key protocol that led to the Rome General Peace Accord.

It was this very satellite phone that he used for our conversation.

Unlikely democrat Later in 1992, Dhlakama and Mozambican President Joaquim Chissano signed the accord, ending the 16-year civil war. A transitional process of disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration kicked in, along with the creation of a new national army.

I spoke to Dhlakama many times during that period but only met him for the first time in 1994. He was preparing for the country’s first multi-party elections and I was an election observer.

I remember him telling me that the election result would show that my book was wrong, and that Mozambicans loved him. He was partly right: those 1994 election results proved that Renamo had a strong following in some regions of Mozambique.

They also showed that post-conflict Mozambique was fragmented and voters prioritised regional loyalties and war experience.

Dhlakama visited London only once, in 1998. I chaired his speech to the Royal African Society, to which only three people turned up because of a boycott over his human rights record.

My view was that, despite his reputation for brutality and multiple human rights abuses during the war, he had signed a peace agreement and kept to it.

He reminded the audience that I had co-authored a report that had also documented government abuses.

By the late 1990s, Renamo became an opposition party and Dhlakama almost won the 1999 presidential elections (some believe he did). The 1999 election result focused Frelimo’s attention on the threat that Renamo posed, and it responded by more aggressively countering Renamo while also seeking to contain it, including offering Dhlakama provincial governorships in 2000.

Frelimo hardliners and Renamo’s internal incoherence undermined this particular effort. After Armando Guebuza was elected president in 2004, he embarked on a strategy of total Frelimo domination across the country, which was rewarded in the short term by a landslide victory over Renamo in the 2009 elections.

Longer term, this humiliated and marginalised Renamo, and convinced Dhlakama that Frelimo was disingenuous and would always thwart Renamo at the ballot box.

Back to the bush The last time I met Dhlakama was at his home in Nampula in 2012.

I spent a late afternoon with him and we reflected on past battles.

He seemed deeply troubled about the future, stating that Frelimo was trying to “destroy him”, and warning that Renamo was “on life support” and that he was going to fight for his survival.

When I left, he ordered his rag-tag presidential guard of eight armed men to line up and give a salute of honour. I remember that several had broken boots and that their AK-47s were poorly maintained.

My meeting with Dhlakama convinced me that he was dangerously isolated and could miscalculate, and I warned Guebuza that he needed to communicate with him and make him central to Mozambique’s 2012 celebrations of the Rome accord. This advice fell on deaf ears.