Ordeal of Blood and Hunger

By Michael S. Serrill

With a little luck, the sprawling, sparsely populated country that lies just northeast of South Africa on the Indian Ocean should have thrived. It is blessed with rich agricultural lands, large mineral deposits and untapped reserves of natural gas and oil. But the Marxist-oriented government of President Samora Machel, who came to power in 1975 after the departure of the Portuguese, has had little opportunity to exploit these resources. In little more than a decade, everything that could have gone wrong in Mozambique has gone wrong.

The Machel government is under siege by a ten-year-old guerrilla insurgency that claims to control two-thirds of the rural interior and is now active in several urban areas. Last week rebels of the Mozambique National Resistance (M.N.R.) set off two car bombs in the capital of Maputo, injuring some 50 people, three of them critically. Despite its army of 15,000 men and a steady flow of military equipment from East bloc countries, the government has been unable to fight off the insurgents, who boast 10,000 men under arms and are suspected of receiving clandestine backing from South Africa.

To make matters worse, for the past seven years Mozambique (pop. 14 million) has been beset by drought and widespread starvation. In 1983, an estimated one-third of Mozambique's population did not have enough to eat. As many as 100,000 died. The situation has stabilized, but Mozambique remains one of the largest food-aid recipients in Africa. "People are not dying so much anymore," says a CARE worker in Maputo. "But they are fleeing. They are barefoot and wandering."

The combination of drought and civil war has uprooted as many as 2 million people from their villages and forced them into a nomadic existence. About 100,000 of these refugees, many of them orphaned children, live in more than 100 resettlement camps, most of them strung out along Mozambique's 1,500-mile coastline. "At the worst time, a year ago, we were getting 50 to 75 people a day," says Alberto Cavele, director of the resettlement camp at Cambine, near the coastal city of Inhambane. "Some people have walked here from 250 miles away. And some died on the way."

Visitors who travel to Cambine are usually accompanied by squads of Mozambican soldiers toting AK-47 assault rifles. The settlement is protected by armed members of the local "home guard" militia. New arrivals build themselves grass-hut homes. Recently, a refugee named Joanna Cuevelo sat in front of a new hut, feeding her four children, whom she had just brought on foot to Cambine from a village 65 miles to the north. Her ten-year-old son, who was bitten by a cobra on the way, lay on a blanket, his face pinched and gray. "His mother won't part with him," said Cavele. "We think he will die."

Giving aid and comfort to the refugees can be dangerous. In March, a Mozambican official named David Campos left Inhambane in a well-marked Red Cross Land Cruiser loaded with food and medicine. Ambushed by three separate guerrilla groups, he successfully drove a gauntlet of gun fire from the first two before being stopped by a bazooka blast from the third. The rebels dragged the seriously wounded Campos from his vehicle, shot him again three times and beheaded him, according to an assistant who lived through the ordeal. Says Amos Mahanjane, director of Mozambique's Department for the Prevention of Natural Disasters and Relief: "These men are not people. They are animals." Indeed, the U.S. State Department's 1985 human rights report described the rebels as "brutally violent."

Though a senior Administration official in Washington describes the M.N.R. as "basically an organization without political ideology," it has since 1980 been provided with weaponry, logistical support and manpower from inside South Africa. In 1984, under pressure from the U.S. and Western Europe, the government of State President P.W. Botha agreed to negotiate a mutual nonaggression pact with Machel. Mozambique, for its part, denied bases to militants of the African National Congress, the outlawed black organization that has been conducting a terrorist campaign in South Africa, on the condition that the Botha government not support the M.N.R. Mozainbican officials fear they were victims of a double cross. While A.N.C. operations against South Africa have been halted, raids by well-armed M.N.R. rebels have, if anything, increased since the agreement was signed.

The pact with South Africa is only one example of Machel's efforts to set aside ideology in favor of practical solutions to his country's desperate problems. Though the Maputo government maintains close ties to the Soviet Union, Machel last year visited Washington to seek U.S. economic aid. Machel joined the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, opening up his ruined economy to international scrutiny. He has also paved the way for entrepreneurs to take over ailing nationalized companies and has attempted to spur agricultural production by selling off unproductive state-owned farms. Until recently, says U.S. Ambassador Peter de Vos, "we had a presence here but no dialogue. Now it's gangbusters."

Still, until the grinding destruction of famine and civil war can be brought under control, Mozambique will continue, like its people, to be a barefoot and wandering nation. "If we have peace, we can produce," says Mahanjane. "If we have peace, we can save the country." But for most Mozambicans, peace and prosperity seem further away than ever. --By Michael S. Serrill. Reported by Peter Hawthorne/Maputo

With reporting by Peter Hawthorne/Maputo