
: Médicos marcham pela saúde e direitos humanos em Maputo
Maputo, 6 Nov (AIM) – In defiance of orders from the police, about 300 doctors and other health professionals marched through central Maputo on Tuesday, in what they called “a march for health and human rights”.
Organised by the Medical Association of Mozambique (AMM), the demonstrators ignored the appeals of the police to march for no more than a city block.
When police vehicles were stationed at the junction between Eduardo Mondlane and Vladimir Lenin Avenues to block the advance of the marchers, they simply by-passed them and continued the march, which ended at the statue of Eduardo Mondlane, the first President of the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo), who is regarded as the founder of Mozambican nationality.
The police merely accompanied the marchers, and did not force them to change the route. The demonstration thus passed off without incident.
“It went very well, and we achieved our goals”, the spokesperson for the AMM, Napoleao Viola, told reporters. “We transmitted a message of peace, of health, of the need to improve public security, of non-violence, and of respect for human rights”.
The march had no political party motivations, Viola said, and participants were told not to carry any partisan placards or leaflets. Nonetheless, the main slogan chanted on the march was “This country is ours! Save Mozambique!”, which has become the main slogan of the Podemos party, the main force supporting the independent presidential candidate, Venancio Mondlane.
Elsewhere the demonstrations, supposedly against fraudulent election results, turned violent, sometimes with disastrous results.
In Ressano Garcia, on the border with South Africa, demonstrators set South African trucks on fire and put barricades on the main road to prevent the flow of traffic. The police fired tear gas, in an attempt to halt the looting of trucks.
At one house, the police shot a man five times, mostly in his legs. The victim told reporters from the independent television station STV, that he had nothing to do with any demonstrations and had been playing draughts with relatives on his veranda when the police bullets struck him.
The result of these clashes is that the Ressano Garcia border post, the largest in the country is currently closed, and the authorities are not sure when it will re-open.
Demonstrators who spoke to reporters said they were not fighting for any political party, “but for our children”.
Hundreds of kilometres to the north, rioters on Monday attacked a police station in Sussundenga district, in the central province of Manica. One man was killed, two police agents were injured and the car of the local police commander was destroyed.
But this demonstration had nothing to do with the election results. The rioters accused the Sussundenga police of protecting a man accused of trafficking in human beings.
(AIM)
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