DIALOGUE WITH RENAMO “NOT WORKING”

Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi declared on Monday that the country must not be used as a guinea-pig for models of governance that violate the Constitution.Nyusi was speaking to reporters in the northern city of Nampula, at the end of a four day working visit to Nampula province. If anybody wants to make experiments, let them make experiments in their own country, he said.His main concern was clearly that the dialogue between the government and the former rebel movement Renamo is going nowhere. “The dialogue to obtain effective peace is not working, because there is somebody putting conditions on it, and people are living under threat because there are people moving around with guns”, said Nyusi – clearly referring to Renamo leader Afonso Dhlakama and the illegal Renamo militia which answers only to him.There was nothing normal about a dialogue, such as that between the government and Renamo, where the delegations had met on over 100 occasions, without producing any results.He pointed out that an international monitoring team, known by the acronym EMOCHM, had been set up to oversee the disarming of the Renamo militia, and the incorporation of its members into the armed forces (FADM), the police or back into civilian life.Officers from eight countries (Botswana, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Cape Verde, Kenya, Italy, Portugal and Britain) were to join Mozambican military experts from both the government and Renamo in order to supervise the dismantling of the Renamo militia. Despite an extension of the initial EMOCHM mandate of 135 days by an extra 60 days, nothing at all was done.Not a single Renamo gunman was demobilized – because Renamo simply refused to hand over the list of its members it wished to incorporate into the army and the police. “This meant that rivers of money were poured away without any result”, declared Nyusi. The government announced last week that EMOCHM had cost 15.7 million dollars, all of it coming from the Mozambican state budget. Nyusi stressed that where something is going wrong, those involved must enter into a dialogue to correct what is wrong “because development must not be held up because of differences in ideas”,“Policy makers must understand this”, he added. “Peace does not depend just on me, but on everyone. Dialogue does not mean imposing things – it means looking for consensus. Fortunately, our differences are minimal”