Africa Notes: Conflict Resolution in Mozambique - February 1990

A Status Report

When the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Frelimo), formed in 1962 in Dar es Salaam, led Mozambique to independence from Portuguese colonial rule in 1975 after a decade-long guerrilla war, the challenge ahead was expected to be nation-building. In 1976, however, the intelligence service of white-ruled Rhodesia set up a shadowy organization in the neighboring state to gather information about Robert Mugabe's Mozambique-based Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) and harass the newly established government of President Samora Machel. Mozambican dissidents who objected to Frelimo's increasingly radical political orientation were a key source of recruits. Before the year was out, an insurgency had been launched by what came to be known variously as the Resistência Nacional Moçambicana (Renamo) or the Resistência Nacional Moçambicana (MNR). (For early background, see "The MNR" by ColinLegum, CSIS Africa Notes no. 16, July 1983.)

Witney W. Schneidman