PRETORIA, South Africa (CU)_The government of Mozambique and the insurgents were accused by Amnesty for war crimes against civilians which included killings, dismemberment, torture and abductions. The reports was handed out on Tuesday.
It is reported that in Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado region, more than half a million persons have been displaced and many hundreds have been killed since the launch of the insurgency in 2017 by the Islamist militants.
Dyck Advisory Group, a South African private military firm has been engaged by the government to support fight the Ahlu Sunnah Wa-Jama insurgents who have acknowledged their allegiance to the Islamic State. This group is locally known as Al-Shabaab.
Accusations that Mozambique’s soldiers had committed atrocities such as killings on previous occasions have been vehemently denied by the government which states that these crimes were committed by Islamist insurgents masquerading as military personnel.
Reuters had initiated communications with Mozambique’s Ministry of Interior General Command by way of phone calls and emails requesting for the Amnesty Report but with no success. It is understood that an Official on a condition of anonymity informed Reuters that the government’s response to the allegations will be made later.
Reuters failed to contact the militants.
In its report, titled ‘What I Saw Is Death’: War Crimes in Mozambique’s Forgotten Cape’, Amnesty said it had interviewed 79 internally displaced people between September and January, and reviewed satellite imagery, photographs, medical records and ballistics information. Reuters was not independently able to verify the material described in the report.
Dyck Advisory Group’s personnel were accused of arbitrarily opening fire on civilians while in the process of chasing alleged fighters.
Lionel Dyck, the founder of the company, told Reuters: “We take these allegations very seriously and we are going to put an independent legal team in there shortly to do a board of inquiry and look at what we are doing.” He declined to give further details of the group’s mission in Mozambique.
According to Amnesty, insurgents had abducted young women and children, including young girls. “….Fighters routinely kill civilians, loot their homes, and then burn them down using petrol.”
It said residents used separate words to describe two Al-Shabaab methods of killing: “beheaded” and “chopped”, the second of which, it quoted a 75-year-old man as saying, meant “being ‘divided like a cow.’”
As for the government forces, Amnesty said videos and photos showed “the attempted beheading, torture and other ill-treatment of prisoners, the dismemberment of alleged Al-Shabaab fighters, possible extrajudicial executions, and the transport and discarding of a large number of corpses into apparent mass graves.”
Amnesty is requesting for a detailed investigation and they say the security forces were identified in the videos by the fatigue they wore and the language they spoke which was Portuguese and a local language from southern Mozambique.
United Nations has indicated that the violence and humanitarian crisis in Mozambique will heighten and become worse without international assistance as the immediate threat is overcrowding of displaced persons, malnutrition and the lack of basic essentials lie food and water.
