A hard blow for a staggering regime OLIVER TAMBO, president of the ANC, and Joe Slovo, a leader of the ANC and chair of the South African Communist Party; Maureen Reagan; Yassar Arafat; and Guy Penne, representative of the French president Mitterrand were a few of the personalities who attended Samora Machel's funeral in Maputo on October 28. The absence was noted of any Eastern Bloc leader and of Fidel Castro, who had in the past offered Cuban aid against the South African-manipulated guerrillas.
While the circumstances in which the airplane carrying the Mozambiquan leaders crashed in South Africa remain obscure, after 11 years of independence Mozambique's future continues to be overshadowed with doubt. Samora Machel was part of the group that unleashed the armed struggle against Portuguese colonialism in 1963, and he had presided over the country's destinies since their surrender on June 25, 1975. His death is going to complicate a domestic situation that is being described as catastrophic. There are a number of reasons for this alarm. One is the geo-political conditions of southern Africa, in which the South African regime is intervening directly and through the movements that it supports. Another is the choices made by the ruling party, Frelimo, since independence. And all of these problems have been aggravated by natural disasters.
MOZAMBIQUE South African regime, which is its main paymaster today, although it also gets aid from some Gulf states, such as Saudi Arabia and the Sultanate of Oman.
This is one of the differences from the Angola situation. While the anti-Communist guerrillas of UNITA have an umbilical cord linking them to the country of apartheid, they have their origins in a component of the movement of resistance to the Portuguese colonialists, which gives them the possibility for influence beyond their specific ethnic base.
Ending South African support for the RNM guerrillas was the quid pro quo officially accepted by Pretoria in return for a clampdown on the ANC operations based in Mozambique. These provisions were part of the nonaggression pact signed between Samora Machel and P.W. Botha on March 16, 1984, on the bank of the Nkomati river, not far, as it happens, from where the Mozambiquan president's plane went down.
Mozambique kept its pledges, expelling most of the ANC representatives within two weeks of signing the agreement. It reduced the ANC's local listening post to a few individuals. South Africa was far from so scrupulous. Documents seized at general headquarters of the RNM, which was briefly occupied by Mozambiquan and Zimbabwean forces, showed that the flow of aid from Pretoria never dried up.
Was this accord a swindle, a betrayal? The least that can be said is that Mozambique gained nothing from the pact signed at Nkomati. Angola, which was in a bit better military position, also signed an accord with South Africa that also bore the seeds of a Pax Americana.
The question of whether Mozambique had an alternative in the middle of March 1984 is not the real one. Nkomati was only the inevitable conclusion of the nine preceding years. Of course, Samora Machel was not wrong when, in the wake of the accord,
10 Samora Machel (DR) 3
JEAN-JACQUES LAREDO
Agriculture, the country's principal resource, is moribund. Production of maize, citrus fruits, manioc, tea, cacao and sugar cane has been hard hit by falling world prices. Only about 20% of these crops is marketed. Moreover, the marketing of these crops is totally disorganized. They have suffered from drought, as well as from errors in economic orientation made by the Frelimo leaders.
The transport network, another cornerstone of the economy, the ports and railways used both by Mozambique and its neighbor Zimbabwe, have been severely affected by the operations of the Renamo (RNM, National Resistance Movement of Mozambique).
Since independence, Mozambique has never known any peace. Some 42% of its budget (more than 11% of the Gross Domestic Product) is absorbed by the war effort. In nine of the country's ten provinces, Frelimo is threatened by the RNM.
Renamo was created by the Portuguese colonialists with the support of Ian Smith's Rhodesia, which saw this as a means of weakening Robert Mugabe's guerrillas, who were backed by independent Mozambique. When power changed hands in Salisbury, which became Harare, in Zimbabwe in 1980, the RNM had to look for a new godfather. It found one in the
International Viewpoint 10 November 1986
he said, You choose your friends, not your neighbors." But in 1984 Mozambique was exhausted by paying for the mistakes of the regime, and was in a trajectory leading it back to an orientation toward the Western countries.
Portuguese colonialism had done everything but develop the country. There was a "growth without development," based primarily on port and railway facilities and on an importsubstituting industry in the hands of the colonists. The features of this colonization did not permit the development of a Black petty bourgeoisie or a layer of skilled native workers. Portuguese revolution took Frelimo by surprise
Caught by surprise by the Portuguese "Revolution of the Carnations" on April 25, 1975, Frelimo had no idea that it was so close to taking power. It had about 12,000 members. It was to find itself obliged to assign about one third of those to the state apparatus after independence. The dethe Portuguese colonists became a serious drain on the country. Between September 1974, when the transitional government was set up, and the end of 1985, the white population fell from 230,000 to 25,000.
At a stroke, Frelimo gained control of the country, without having to go through the civil war that the MPLA did before it could consolidate its government in Luanda. Thus, the Mozambiquan front did not take power in the course of an upsurge of social struggles - with the exception of an economic strike of dockers. And no lasting forms of self-organization arose.
The relations between Frelimo and the Mozambiquan masses were therefore determined by substitution of the party for mass action. The constitution of Mozambique expressed the reality quite well: "Power belongs to the workers and peasants united and led by the Frelimo."
Over the years, the consensus and sympathy achieved by the continuity of the struggle ("A luta continua" "The Struggle Continues," is one of Frelimo's central slogans) was to crumble, owing to the authoritarianism and bureaucratization of the government.
The existing mass structures were emptied of their substance, and those set up were primarily transmission belts for the party's line. The Grupos da dinamizaco [Sparkplug Groups] that appeared with the installation of the transitional government lost precisely their spark, and adopted the slogan:
"Unity-Vigilance-Work."
It was not until the Fourth Congress of the Frelimo in April 1983, which decided on an economic reorientation that the Workers' Organization of Mozambique (OTM) was launched. But this "socialist union" has not made itself known as a means for defending the interests of the working class.
At the founding conference of the OTM in October 1983, Samora Machei said, "its task is not to make demands." It is hardly surprising that such a structure set up by a regime that had denounced strikes as actions manipulated from abroad, has not gained the enthusiastic adherence of the workers.
Toward the rural population (80% of the total), Frelimo, if not its leaders, at least its apparatus, used methods that fueled the serious discontent it is facing. In the aftermath of independence, the land was nationalized. But the practice of forcibly regrouping the population in communal villages after 1979 and the exactions perpetuated by Mozambiquan soldiers, who held the people to ransom in order to feed themselves, had a repellent effect.
The RNM has behaved in a brutal way, pursuing a policy of terror in the regions where it operates. Thus, 300,000 persons have fled the combat zones, crossing the borders to endure the degradation of apartheid. When you consider what apartheid represents, such an exodus speaks volumes about the despair of the population buffeted by war.
Is Frelimo a party cast in the East European model? There is no lack of corespondences, and Frelimo maintains an orientation of special links with the Soviet Union. Socially, there are indeed features of the nomenklature system, with its train of privi Civil war continues in Mozambique (DR)
leges for the party leaders, such as special stores, and scarcity for the population at large, along with widescale corruption.
What has been decisive, however, has been the situation and history of Mozambique, the degree of consciousness of the masses, the cultural level and the low level of skills at which the population was kept by Portugal. Frelimo has indeed mounted campaigns directed at the population. A notable example is when it decided to open up its doors, to double its membership, by means of an original method - "electing the party." New candidates were presented to the people in mass meetings in order to prevent former collaborators with the Portuguese and other "dubious elements" from taking advantage of the chance to get into the party.
However, while this method of determining membership had a positive side, it was not accompanied by provisions giving the population the right to observe the discussions in a party whose members it designated, or the debates over the country's orientations.
Moreover, the leadership consciously chose to fuse Frelimo with the state. The party was set up to be a single party. In 1977, the Third Congress of Frelimo opted for Marxism-Leninism and declared the advent of the stage of "people's, democracy." If the regime chosen for the party was "democratic centralism," this was also to be the rule imposed on the People's Assemblies, "the supreme organs of state power at every level."
Samora Machel was able to preserve some of his popularity by permiting public criticisms and denunciations of bureaucratic and parasitic behaviour, even among ministers. Thus, for example, in 1978, the minister of agriculture was fired, and on several occasions there were actual purges in the apparatus.
Such denunciations, examples of which can also be found in Eastern Europe, also reflected internal divisions in the ruling apparatus. Economic policy and the attitude toward the Western countries and the world capitalist market underwent rectifications in accordance with the relationship of forces in the party.
The 1977 congress marked out a path inspired by the Soviet Union, at the time one of Maputo's few allies. "Taking agriculture as a base, industry as a locomotive and the construction of heavy industry as the decisive factor, we will break free once and for all from poverty and dependence, and we will build an advanced economy in the service of the people."
The nationalizations that followed independence extended beyond land to small and medium industry, as well
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PEACE MOVEMENT as trade, health services and education. But they did not affect big industry, the mines, energy or the plantations that belonged directly to Western companies or were technically or commercially dependent on them.
Even though the state sector came to embrace about 50% of enterprises in 1978, it could not serve as a basis for economic independence or as a springboard toward breaking from the capitalist market.