Criminals and Terrorists': Framing Mozambique's Insurgency
Criminals and Terrorists': Framing Mozambique's Insurgency
Alessandro Ford, OCCRP
April 2, 2021
See link
https://www.occrp.org/en/daily/14154-experts-mozambique-s-insurgents-framed-as-criminals-and-terrorists
for photo.
A report released Monday alleges that Mozambique’s Islamist insurgency
funds its “terrorist” activities through involvement in a range of criminal
economies, including illegal timber, gemstone, wildlife and drug
trafficking - these claims are contested, however, by several experts.
Published by the Counter Extremism Project, “An Unholy Alliance: Links
Between Extremism and Illicit Trade in East Africa” appears barely a week
after the militant group burst onto international headlines with their
brutal attack on the northern city of Palma, which killed dozens of people
near a major gas project run by French energy giant Total.
The conflict, rooted in poverty and marginalization, began in Mozambique’s
most deprived province, Cabo Delgado, in late 2017 and has since killed
over 1,300 civilians, burnt countless towns and villages and displaced over
700,000 people – about 30% of the provincial population—including some
250,000 children.
The “Al-Shabaab” insurgency, of no relation to its Somali namesake, was
officially designated an ISIS-affiliated terrorist organization by the U.S.
State Department on March 10 and, in line with Monday’s report, a senior
State Department official had already explicitly linked anti-drug and
anti-insurgency activities in July 2020.
The problem, however, is that multiple experts agree “Al-Shabaab” is simply
not involved in these criminal activities.
“I can clearly state that [the insurgency] is definitely not funded by
ivory trafficking,” Alastair Nelson, Senior Analyst at the Global
Initiative said on Thursday.
“Further, I also disagree with the statements in this report that
[Al-Shabaab] are tapped into the major illicit flows in the region – drugs,
gemstones and smuggling of migrants. The recent research that we
undertook…specifically found that they were not connected to these illicit
flows at all,” he told the OCCRP.
Rather, these illicit flows have been diverted around insurgent-held
territories for a variety of reasons, argues Nelson.
Dr. Joseph Hanlon, one of the world’s top Mozambique experts, also
confirmed to the OCCRP that “insurgents are not trading in either ivory or
drugs,” though he would not go into further detail.
Dr. Hanlon has, however, identified government involvement in certain
illicit economies, arguing in 2018 that of the US$600-800 million dollars
in heroin money entering Mozambique annually, around US$100 million goes to
bribing members of Mozambique’s ruling FRELIMO party.
He has also written extensively about why that same government is so keen
to frame the Islamist insurgency as a terrorist group: namely, because it
allows them to avoid any conversation about the insurgency’s roots in
economic inequality, historical marginalization and the greed of a FRELIMO
elite that refuses to share Mozambique’s astounding ruby, mineral and gas
wealth with its people.
“Crime, corruption, extremism and illicit trade are inextricably linked -
but in the case of [the insurgency] in northern Mozambique this is not
direct”, elaborates Alastair Nelson.
“Rather the illicit economies, the crime groups driving them and their
corrupt links to state structures created the breakdown in governance [that
enabled] the genesis of [Al-Shabaab] back in 2007-9,” he told the OCCRP.
Any solution, he concludes, must therefore address these core problems by
establishing security for local people, building resilience in local
government and community structures and sharing Mozambique’s natural wealth
with the people who most need them.