At least 30 members of Mozambique's former rebel movement Renamo will face court cases arising from last week's disturbances in the district of Cheringoma, in the central province of Sofala.
Sofala provincial governor Felicio Zacarias, cited in Friday's issue of the Beira daily paper "Diario de Mocambique", said that five people will be charged with the assault on Quisito Binze, a local official of the ruling Frelimo Party, which took place on 10 August.
The other 25 will be charged in connection with the raid on the police station in the town of Inhaminga the following day.
The 25, all of them armed, went to the police station to demand the release of the two men whom the police had detained for the attack against Binze.
They removed the two without a fight: the police, reluctant to open fire, handed them over. They later negotiated for the return of the detainees, without success. It was then that reinforcements were requested.
A riot police unit arrived in Inhaminga on 12 August, and in the ensuing clashes with the Renamo "Presidential Guard" one policeman lost his life.
The "guards" have now left Inhaminga, but Zacarias said police operations are under way to track them down and arrest them.
Although it seems that no shots were fired when the 25 Renamo members invaded the police station, Zacarias said that their behaviour still constituted an attack - and anywhere in the world an attack by armed men against a police station would be regarded as a terrorist offence.
The governor noted that Renamo leader Afonso Dhlakama is about to visit the United States. Zacarias suggested that he ask politicians from both the Republican and Democratic Parties "how they would describe an attack against a police station. They will both have the same reply: they will tell him it is terrorism".
Asked when Renamo's "guards" will be integrated into the police force, Zacarias said that was entirely up to the Renamo leader himself.
"Go and ask that question to Afonso Dhlakama", he said. "Ask him when he's going to hand his men over for us to train them".
Zacarias, like the general commander of the police, Miguel dos Santos, thus made clear that the offer to integrate Renamo's guards into the police is still on the table. Plans to recruit these former Renamo guerrillas into the police were under way in 1997, but stalled because Renamo would not accept that, once its men were in the police, they would take orders from their superiors in the police hierarchy, and not from the Renamo leadership.
Zacarias pointed out that distrust of the police force was no good reason for maintaining an illegal militia. If Dhlakama did not feel happy about entrusting his personal security to the police, then he had a perfectly legal alternative - he could hire the services of one of the country's many private security firms.
The men employed by these security companies are mostly demobilised soldiers, from both the government and Renamo armies.
Yet Dhlakama has preferred to maintain a force of his own, consisting of fighters who, in violation of the 1992 peace accord, were never demobilised.
Most of this force is not protecting Dhlakama - only a handful of the guards are to be found stationed at Dhlakama's Maputo residence. Instead they are roaming round Cheringoma and the neighbouring district of Maringue, places which are scarcely ever visited by Dhlakama.
Fonte: AIM
