Afonso
Dhlakama, the leader of Mozambique’s main opposition group, held
responsible for exceptional brutality by its often youthful soldiers
during a civil war that claimed up to a million mostly civilian lives,
died on Thursday at his hide-out in the Gorongosa mountains in southeast
Africa. He was 65.
The
Mozambican authorities confirmed the death but did not specify the
cause. News reports said it was either diabetes or a heart attack. President
Filipe Nyusi, who had been negotiating a rapprochement with Mr.
Dhlakama, a former guerrilla commander, said he had tried to have him
evacuated by helicopter for medical treatment but “I could not because
he was in a place where I could not help.” The impact of Mr. Dhlakama’s
death on a frail truce, negotiated in advance of elections scheduled for
2019, was not immediately clear.
Mr.
Dhlakama had headed the opposition Renamo movement for almost four
decades in the former Portuguese colony. In Portuguese, the group’s
initials stand for Mozambique National Resistance.
Mr.
Dhlakama had fought briefly with the Soviet-backed and avowedly Marxist
insurgents who took power when Mozambique gained independence in June
1975. But he defected soon afterward and joined a dissident group
opposed to the dominant Frelimo (Mozambique Liberation Front) led by
Samora Machel, the first president of independent Mozambique.
During
the civil war against the leftist government in Maputo, which began in
1977 and ended in 1992, Renamo was cast as an international pariah,
little more than a pawn in the Cold War-era conflicts that ended white
minority rule across southern Africa.
The
group was established with the support of white intelligence officers
in neighboring Rhodesia, now called Zimbabwe, who saw it as a means of
undermining Mozambique’s role as a base for Zimbabwean nationalist
guerrillas led by Robert Mugabe.
With
Zimbabwean independence in 1980, white-ruled South Africa took over as
the chief covert backer and arms supplier to Renamo, using it once more
as a force of destabilization — this time against President Machel’s
support for the anti-apartheid African National Congress operating in
exile from Mozambique and elsewhere.
In
1984, President Machel was forced to sign a treaty with South Africa —
named the Nkomati Accord for the area where it was signed — in which he
offered to withdraw support for the A.N.C. in return for South Africa
ending its sponsorship for Renamo. The agreement was broken often by
both sides and it was not until South Africa’s white rulers finally
pledged to abandon apartheid that Renamo opened peace talks with the
leadership in Maputo.
By
that stage, the two sides had fought to a stalemate in a bush war
characterized by massacres, rape and looting. At the same time, the
distant world beyond the conflict was changing fundamentally as the Cold
War drew to a close.
In
1988, the United States State Department sponsored a report accusing
Renamo of widespread atrocities including forced labor and arbitrary
executions. The report, likening Renamo to the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia,
accused Mr. Dhlakama’s troops — some of them child soldiers — of a
string of massacres, including one at Homoine in which more than 400
civilians died. Mr. Dhlakama denied the charges, insisting that
government forces staged atrocities to discredit the dissidents.
“If
we were just a bunch of bandits we would have been caught and been
handed over to government forces long ago,” he said in an interview with
The New York Times in 1988. “Our aim is not to win the war militarily
but to force the Frelimo government to accept our conditions” for
establishing democracy.
Afonso
Dhlakama was born on Jan. 1, 1953, in the Sofala Province of central
Mozambique, the son of a traditional ruler. He was educated by Roman
Catholic seminarians in the Indian Ocean port city of Beira, according
to “The Battle for Mozambique,” a study by an American analyst of
African affairs, Stephen A. Emerson.
He
was conscripted into the Portuguese colonial army but deserted to join
Frelimo. When he defected to Renamo, the study said, the Frelimo
authorities said he had been dismissed for corruption and misconduct —
charges he denied.
Mr.
Dhlakama rose rapidly through the Renamo ranks, and when its leader,
André Matsangaissa, was killed in action in 1979, he took over the
organization and presided over the expansion of its ragtag army into a
force numbering up to 20,000 guerrillas.
In
his 1988 interview, Mr. Dhlakama said the guerrillas’ hit-and-run
strikes against towns held by the Mozambican Army were designed “to
demoralize and lower the profile of the enemy” rather than hold
territory. “It serves no purpose to hold towns that are empty,” he said.
His forces also struck at vital regional transport links.
Renamo
was always hostage to events beyond its control. As South Africa’s
support for the dissidents slowly dwindled, the Frelimo government drew
on backing from Zimbabwean, Tanzanian and Zambian troops and persuaded a
key supporter, Malawi, to cease aiding the rebels in 1986. For all
that, Renamo’s control of so-called liberated rural areas turned many
remote towns into islands of government control, reachable only by air.
In
1992, Mr. Dhlakama signed a peace treaty with the Mozambican president,
Joaquim Chissano; after a blanket amnesty, Renamo became a legal
political party but retained its guerrilla force. In successive
presidential elections — Mr. Dhlakama contested all of them — the
government’s candidates won every vote, and in 2013, Renamo said it was
abandoning the 1992 peace accord.
Mr.
Dhlakama left Maputo and returned to his wartime hide-outs in
Gorongosa, losing yet another presidential election in 2014 and facing a
string of assassination attempts.
He
announced a truce in 2016 and a year later held talks with President
Nyusi aiming at a reconciliation with Frelimo, which has held power
without interruption since Mozambique’s independence.Following
his death, President Nyusi called him “a citizen who always worked for
Mozambique,” news reports said. “I hope that we as Mozambicans can
continue to do everything so things do not go down.”
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