A mass killing by the army of at least 150 detained local men at the entrance to the Afungi gas zone soon after the occupation of Palma in 2021 has been confirmed. Although the massacre was well known locally, it was only investigated recently and reported yesterday (26 September) in Politico, a Brussels-based website owned by Axel Springer. https://www.politico.eu/article/totalenergies-mozambique-patrick-pouyanne-atrocites-afungi-palma-cabo-delgado-al-shabab-isis/
The investigation is by Alex Perry, who had earlier reported an estimated 1000 deaths after the Palma occupation.
Palma, Cabo Delgado, was occupied by insurgents on 24 March 2021 and held for 10 days. After the insurgents left. Palma was looted by soldiers and police, who robbed local banks and gas contractor facilities. Gas company Total (from 2024 TotalEnergies) which was leading the on-shore development on the Afungi peninsula, just south of Palma, withdrew all its staff on 26 April and declared force majeure. Left behind was the “Joint Task Force”, a Mozambican Ministry of Defence military unit of 700 Mozambican soldiers, commandos and paramilitary police paid by TotalEnergies to defend the Afungi gas site.
With the military otherwise engaged, insurgents continued to be active in the area for several months. Frightened, poorly paid and under-trained soldiers accused local people of supporting what were known as machababos. And misconduct by the army definitely led local people to fear and distrust soldiers and police, and at least not oppose the insurgents.
Fighting increased south of Afungi in June 2021, and local people were told to walk north to the Patacua military base, which they did, arriving 1 July. The local people were divided. Some women were sexually assaulted and beaten, but women and children were released within a few days. However the soldiers accused all the men – a group of 180-250 aged from 18 to 60 – of being insurgents. They were taken in army trucks the short distance to the entrance of the Afungi gas base, which has a barrier created by containers. The large number of men were stripped of identity documents, phones and money, and forced into two containers. There were no windows, were so closely packed they had to stand, had little food or water, and had no toilets. Soldiers began to beat and torture the men.
Reporters from the government’s TVM filmed the containers on 3 July and interviewed some of the men. The commander said his mission was to defend the Total installation. He said there had been a battle in which “we managed to slaughter 156 terrorists.” The men in the containers “were captured during combat, in a battle where we were exchanging fire with the enemy.”
But there was no such battle – the men had arrived voluntarily two days before. The 156 were squeezed into the containers and only killed later.
Over some days, the soldiers began to remove groups of men, saying “It’s time to chop wood”, and the men were never seen again. By September the surviving 26 men were found in the containers by Rwandan troops, who released them. Perry’s researchers recorded the identities of 22 women and 75 men who had been killed or “disappeared,” taken away and never seen again.
In late 2022, Total appointed Jean-Christophe Rufin, former vice president of Doctors Without Borders, to assess human rights around the gas plant. A key recommendation was that the Joint Task Force should be disbanded and not paid by Total. Clearly, Total knew about the massacre of local men, but said nothing.
And after Palma
In his new article, Parry points to his previous more controversial investigation which he says showed “Islamist rebels overran the region [around Palma], massacring more than 1,000 people”. In fact, the dead and missing are real, but the killers are more varied.
In late 2022, Parry set up a survey team of nine researchers which visited 13,686 homes in Palma and nearby villages, on the peninsula and north of Palma, between November 2022 and March 2023. They identified 978 local people known or believed dead, including 366 shot, 330 beheaded, and 209 abducted and never seen again. In addition, 432 were still missing. Some non-local dead were also identified, including 55 construction workers: 53 Mozambicans, one South African and one Briton.
The issue is that it is very difficult to label the killers. Parry says “We did not ask for the identity of the perpetrator” and simply assumed they were insurgents because soldiers had fled. I do not accept that simplification. As the new report shows, soldiers and insurgents were both clearly active during the months after the Palma occupation. Videos and other reports show that soldiers also beheaded victims. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International both wrote of human rights violations by soldiers. And as we saw with the containers, soldiers simply assume all local people support the insurgents.
Of the known dead, 45 drowned, almost surely trying to escape soldiers or insurgents. And in late 2023 the UN estimated there were 628,000 displaced people in Cabo Delgado, so many of the 432 still missing could be in displaced camps and not knowing how to contact family.
So it cannot be said that 1000 people were killed by insurgents. What can be said is that Parry’s investigation does show 900 people were killed by insurgents or soldiers, probably in equal shares.
(https://bit.ly/Moz-sub)
