Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Mozambique: A Painful Reconciliation

1992; Indiana University Press; Volume: 39; Linguagem: Inglês

1527-1978

Antonio Matonse,

Poverty, Education, and Child Welfare

As the cruel war in Mozambique continues, a process of national is occurring. On one hand, President Joaquim Chissano and his ruling Frelimo' Party are coming to terms with dubious class enemies like the petite bourgeois of intellectuals, assimilado civil servants, emergent vigorous small entrepreneurs and private farmers. Chissano is offering them a nationalistic long-tenn program of reconciliation and reconstruction different from the classist populist agendas for peasants and workers, which held sway under his predecessor, Samora Machel.2 In this context, Mozambique's one-party state parliament voted in the fall of 1990 for a new constitution which establishes a multiparty system, an independent judiciary, a presidential and parliamentary elections calendar, and free market economic principles. As a result, about ten new opposition parties have emerged and are tenaciously trying to gain national recognition, judges and lawyers are already distancing themselves from the executive branch, and a new Mozambican private sector is flourishing.3 In addition, the Mozambican leadership is negotiating an end to the devastating war of destabilization carried out by the infidelis of Mozambique National Resistance, better known as Renamo.' Chissano has offered to this armed band political space in times of peace, inclusion in the national army and, above all, forgiveness. This is a painful step for the Mozambican people and its leadership. The enormous wounds of death and destruction are felt everywhere in Mozambique. First there are more than four million Mozambicans under threat of starvation, a situation compounded by southem Africa's worst drought in a half century, following the destruction and destabilization. Second, 1.5 million people made refugees in the neighboring countries by the lethal terror of Renamo wait anxiously for peace to signal the time to return home. Finally, about one million people have encountered violent