The open wounds of Cabo Delgado: almost a million displaced by the jihadist insurgency

Rabia Guambe does not remember exactly when she was born.

She says it was many years ago.

She also doesn't know the number of grandchildren she has;

she explains that she gave birth to five children and that she finds it impossible to keep track of how many children she has brought into the world each.

Until 2020, she and her family had lived a humble and peaceful life in a small village in Macomia, a district located north of Cabo Delgado, the northernmost province of Mozambique.

One day everything changed.

He does remember that well: “Some men arrived and began to set fire to the houses.

It was night.

They killed some of my relatives.

Some, like my sister and I, ran away, without taking clothes, without money, with nothing”.

That year, Guambe experienced the fury of the insurgent movement that has been operating in Cabo Delgado since 2017, the year in which this terrorist group, linked to the jihadist movement Al Shabab, assaulted a police post for the first time.

Since then, the attacks have been reproduced with some regularity in different areas of Cabo Delgado, extending to the neighboring regions of Nampula and Niassa and even to the neighboring nation of Tanzania.

The most notorious attack occurred in March 2021, when the rebels managed to control the city of Palma, located in the same province and with some 25,000 inhabitants, for several days.

In the last five years, according to UN figures from December 2022, the conflict has left some 6,000 dead and 900,000 internally displaced people who crowd into fifty informal camps.

Like the one that inhabits Guambe,

Women, often caring for their children, are significantly more vulnerable victims in the Cabo Delgado conflict, according to a report by Ayuda en Acción.

In the image, a woman with her son in the Maringanha displaced persons camp. José Ignacio Martínez Rodríguez

A boy carries cardboard, the material used to build houses, in the Maringanha displaced persons camp, in the city of Pemba, in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique.

Jose Ignacio Martinez Rodriguez

Rabia Guambe, in the foreground, with her sister.

They had to flee from a small village in Macomia, north of Cabo Delgado, after insurgent attacks.

“Some men arrived and began to set fire to the houses.

It was night.

They killed some of my relatives.

Some of us, like my sister and I, ran away without taking clothes, without money, with nothing." José Ignacio Martínez Rodríguez

A woman holds her son in her arms in the Maringanha displacement camp.

Behind, the precarious house in which they live. José Ignacio Martínez Rodríguez

A woman in front of the common houses in displacement camps in Cabo Delgado, in Mozambique.

There are more than 50, as the conflict has already caused around a million internally displaced persons.José Ignacio Martínez Rodríguez

Ines, who is blind, and Agustinho Paulo, along with a son and a granddaughter, in the house they had to build in Mpiri, a village in Balama, after fleeing from attacks by rebels from Mocímboa da Praia.José Ignacio Martínez Rodriguez

Maria Cheis and Ernestina Lucas, elderly women from the Makonde ethnic group, who had to flee their home due to the violence.

Jose Ignacio Martinez Rodriguez

Isabelle Grufina, 19, in the house where she has lived in Balama since she fled from the rebels in 2020. “They burned our entire field.

Now we plant corn, but there are some days that it doesn't come even like that”, he says. José Ignacio Martínez Rodríguez

Ángeles López, a Comboni missionary who survived a jihadist attack in September 2022. Her companion, the Italian Maria de Coppi, was assassinated. José Ignacio Martínez Rodríguez

Although the trickle of displaced persons has been a constant since the beginning of the conflict, the way of organizing and fighting on both sides has varied over the months.

The Mozambican army, which was soon overwhelmed, is now being supported by troops sent by Rwanda and the Southern African Development Community (SADC).

This has caused the insurgents to go from coordinating to control entire cities to applying a more typical guerrilla warfare tactic.

Pérez Marty, director of Ayuda en Acción in Mozambique, explains: “Government and international forces have succeeded in dismantling important bases and large groups.

There are now many small units that focus on attacks on local communities,

An abundance that does not reach ordinary people

Guambe took 10 days to reach the displacement camp.

“We have nothing, not even food.

We only eat when they bring us food, and they don't always do it, ”he continues.

His situation is that of needy among the needy.

Mozambique is one of the poorest nations in the world;

it ranks 185th in the Human Development Index.

Only six States on the planet with similar problems of armed conflicts and misery worsen their figures on this list.

Those who inhabit provinces such as Cabo Delgado, the northernmost in the country and eminently agricultural, suffer this statistic with special virulence.

Guambe lives with his sister, three children and four grandchildren.

“We cannot pay for clothes, uniforms or notebooks for the children's school, but it is not possible to return to our home either.

Until the war is over, we have to stay here, ”she laments.

Cabo Delgado is one of the richest areas in natural resources in southern Africa.

Their lands have gas, oil, marble, graphite, rubies, gold, and high-quality wood.

But this supposed abundance, normally exploited by Western and Eastern companies, does not reach ordinary people, entrenched in hunger and malnutrition.

The

, presented in November 2021 by the NGO Ayuda en Acción and the Institute for Studies on Conflicts and Humanitarian Action (IECAH), indicates that in this region, along with neighboring Niassa and Nampula, there were more than 900,000 people in a critical situation .

Of these, 227,000 needed immediate help to survive.

Pérez Marty, from Ayuda en Acción, acknowledges that the situation is not getting better.

Neither has it stabilized nor has there been a recovery of the local economy.

Mozambique is one of the poorest nations in the world;

ranks 185th in the Human Development Index

Agustinho Paulo, in his 60s, is from Mocímboa da Praia, a port city located north of Cabo Delgado, near the border with Tanzania.

A city in the crosshairs of the insurgents, who came to control it for a few days in 2021 and have carried out sporadic attacks since then.

“We had two houses, but the rebels came and burned everything.

We only kept the clothes we were wearing ”, recalls Paulo sitting at the doors of a house made of adobe, straw and bamboo that he has built in Mpiri, a camp for displaced persons in the south of this province.

He lives there with his wife Ines de él, who is blind;

two daughters and three grandchildren.

His wife adds: “They killed my cousin and kidnapped two granddaughters.

Since June 2020 I don't even know if they are alive or dead."

Some 1,200 people live in this displacement camp.

Many tell similar stories: they fled because of insecurity, because of the attacks, because of fear.

And, although they no longer fear the jihadist insurgents, they do fear the extreme lack of resources, hunger.

Vitorino Amarco, a 40-year-old man who became head of the families forced to live in Mpiri, speaks: “They haven't distributed food since December and on top of that this year it has rained a lot;

the little land we have to cultivate will not give enough maize.

We also do not have water or wells.

The Government says that everything is under control, that the war has ended, and it is not true.

If it was, why can't we go back?"

Felina Agustinha, a 38-year-old neighbor, expresses herself in similar terms: “We arrived after many days walking to have absolutely nothing.

victims in feminine

The report

, by Ayuda en Acción, Gernika Gogoratuz and the Center for Studies and Action for Peace (CEAP), for the month of March, emphasizes the need for a feminist perspective .

“Women, particularly older ones, are central in family and community spaces.

In the resettlement camps, they are the ones who carry out the vast majority of tasks, ”she prays.

In Cabo Delgado, 28% of the population forced to flee their homes are women, and around 52% are minors, whose care usually depends on mothers, aunts, grandmothers or sisters.

Maria Cheis and her mother-in-law Ernestina Lucas, both elderly women from the Makonde ethnic group, fled when the conflict began from Muidumbe, a district in the north of Cabo Delgado that still suffers periodic attacks (an example: in January of this year, Islamic extremists beheaded 10 people and looted and devastated different populations, according to local media).

The two women walk supported by a cane, stopping every few meters.

They arrived in another district of the province, Balama, together with some relatives, and there they are staying in a humble house belonging to a relative who charges them an affordable rent.

“Most of my people are already dead,” says the first.

Isabelle Grufina, her 19-year-old great-niece, who escaped with them, adds: “We are peasants, but the rebels burned all our farmland.

Now we plant corn on a nearby piece of land.

We are 5 adults and 8 children.

Two of them are orphans because of the war.

We all have to work, and some days we don't even get it”.

Desteria Mauricio, who is in his fifties, also talks about flight, fear and misery.

She says that she came to Balama from Muidumbe in 2020 and that, alone in charge of her two children, she was able to take advantage of the microcredit program of some Comboni missionaries.

“With the money I was able to start a cake business.

At least I get some income for the needs of my children, ”she celebrates.

The missionary María del Amor adds: “They tell stories of murders, kidnappings, rapes.

Some, very old, die on the way.

It's awful".

From the frontal clash to the guerrilla

Although less frequently, guerrilla warfare has already crossed the Cabo Delgado border and spread to neighboring provinces.

Ángeles López, a Comboni missionary in Mozambique, recounts: “I heard a shot and I thought: they are already here.

My reaction was to go tell Sister Maria;

I still didn't know they had already killed her."

She is referring to her partner Maria de Coppi, who died in the province of Nampula, adjacent to Cabo Delgado, in September of last year.

This is how she remembers it: “We had already gone to bed, but she came to read a message from her niece.

I did and we parted.

Shots rang out, and when I opened the door, I saw that she was dead.

López, who has been in Mozambique for more than 50 years, was held for about an hour.

Her experience as a nurse during the Mozambican civil war, which ended in 1992 after more than 15 years of bloody fighting, led her to think things like this: "I asked God to shoot me and not kill me with the katana.

She had the image in her head of suturing those wounds, day and night, and she didn't want to end up like this.

But they did nothing to me.

They told me they didn't like my religion and released me."

She had time to run and hide in the woods with another companion and 16 girls, beneficiaries of the educational programs of the missionaries.

Crouching there, already at dawn, they watched how what was once her home was reduced to ashes.

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