Venancio Mondlane confirms general strike for Monday

Maputo, 20 Oct (AIM) – Mozambique’s independent presidential candidate, Venancio Mondlane, on Saturday declared that the “national general strike” he has called for next Monday, against what he regards as fraudulent election results, will go ahead, despite the murders of his lawyer, Elvino Dias, and of Paulo Guambe, an election agent of the Podemos party, which supported Mondlane’s presidential bid.

Speaking at an evening vigil at the site of the two murders, on Joaquim Chissano Avenue, in central Maputo, Mondlane said “the murders of these two young men marks the start of revenge that begins with the strike scheduled for Monday”.

Declaring his solidarity with the two victims, Mondlane said “this is how martyrs are born. We are sad, but whenever a new page is written in a country’s history, blood is shed”.

The blood of Dias and Guambe “was shed by the regime”, he added, but the murderers “did not kill their ideals, which stir in the veins of our youth”.

Initially the call for a Monday strike had been simply that citizens should not go to work. But now Mondlane has transformed the strike, at least in Maputo, into a demonstration.

He urged his supporters to gather at the site of the murders at 09.00 on Monday. The demonstration would then set off at 10.00, marching through the streets of the city. Mondlane did not say where the march would terminate.

He insisted that the march would be peaceful, and warned potential demonstrators not to do anything that might be interpreted as “vandalism”. There should be no destruction of public or private property.

The police had threatened to repress any disorder, “but we are not going to do anything disorderly”.

Mondlane claimed the march is covered by the constitution’s guarantees on freedom of assembly, and so “we are not going to ask authorization from anybody. We are going to raise our placards peacefully, we are going to march and we shall demonstrate our repudiation of this crime”.

Mondlane accused the defence and security forces of killing Dias and Guambe. They had tried to hide their involvement by collecting spent cartridges from the scene of the crime, and seizing or damaging cell phones from potential witnesses.

The accusation is not as outrageous as it might seem. For the existence of death squads within the police was proven dramatically five years ago, when one such squad murdered civil society activist and election observer Anastacio Matavele in the southern city of Xai-Xai.

This was a murder that went wrong. The killers crashed their getaway car as they fled from Xai-Xai, instantly killing two members of the death squad. Four other members of an elite police unit were arrested and are currently serving prison sentences of 23 and 24 years.
(AIM)
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