Maputo, 15 Nov (AIM) – The Ressano Garcia border post between Mozambique and South Africa was effectively closed for the second day running on Thursday.
Demonstrators obeying instructions from fugitive opposition leader Venancio Mondlane formed human chains across the border road, and refused to let vehicles pass in either direction. Long queues of trucks, up to 15 kilometres long, built up on both sides of the border, waiting for the demonstrators to lift their blockade.
There was a substantial presence of the Mozambican defence and security forces at the border, but they made no attempt to disperse the demonstrators and clear the road.
The film shot by television crews seemed to show friendly relations between the soldiers and police on the one hand, and the demonstrators on the other, despite the official government declarations that the protests are “subversion” and “urban terrorism”.
On Thursday, the demonstrators allowed pedestrians through their blockade, but the only vehicles they welcomed were from the press.
In a phone interview with AIM, the spokesperson for the Maputo provincial immigration service, Juca Bata, said negotiations were under way between the police and the demonstrators to persuade them to abandon the road, but without success.
The demonstrators warned that if the police used force to clear the road, the demonstrators would set fire to the Ressano Garcia power station, to the local police stations and to other institutions in the border area. Astonishingly, the government has not provided sufficient security to ensure protection for the power station.
The film shot by the independent television station STV showed that when the blockade started, there were only a few dozen demonstrators. By Thursday afternoon the number had risen to several hundred.
The blockade was not total: the demonstrators opened the border at 03.00 on Thursday morning to allow trucks through that were carrying goods for the Mozambican market. But, as from midday, the total blockade was back in force, and no vehicles could cross.
Bata recognised that the demonstrations were seriously affecting the state revenue normally collected at Ressano Garcia. He had no idea when the situation might be normalised.
Mondlane had decreed a “fourth phase” of demonstrations, running from Wednesday to Friday, and concentrating on the provincial capitals, the borders and the ports.
In most of the provincial capitals, nothing at all happened. In Xai-Xai, capital of the southern province of Gaza, good sense prevailed, in that the police allowed a march to take place.
Apart from Ressano Garcia, the situation at the border posts was largely quiet. Thus at Machipanda, the main crossing between Mozambique and Zimbabwe, no disturbances were reported.
The Minister of the Interior, Pascoal Ronda, threatened on Thursday that no further demonstrations would be allowed. The threat sounds hollow: the protesters did not ask for permission for most of the previous demonstrations, but they went ahead anyway. Nobody asked permission to block the Ressano Garcia border, but the military and the police have tolerated the blockade.
Ronda declared that, for as long as the demonstrations tended to result in serious damage, they would be forbidden. “There are no demonstrations!”, he declared. “They are banned because of their seriousness”.
Speaking at the inauguration of electronic gates at Maputo International Airport on Thursday morning, Ronda said that the clashes of the last few days did not fit the legal definition of a demonstration. Instead, they had become acts of “terrorism” and “subversion” – the same words used previously by the General Commander of the police, Bernadino Rafael.
But the Mozambican Constitution guarantees freedom of assembly, including the right to hold peaceful demonstrations. And no Minister has the right to override the Constitution.
(AIM)
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