Insurgency disrupts research, endangers lives in region

The ongoing Islamist insurgency experienced in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique’s northernmost province, since 2017, which has already displaced more than 250,000 people and killed more than 1,500, is damaging the operations of the region’s higher education institutions, affecting students and staff.

While confirmed casualties have yet to include academics and students at the region’s institutions, local higher education leaders are concerned about the risks. Lúrio University, Rovuma University, the Catholic University of Mozambique and Alberto Chipande Higher Institute of Sciences and Technology, all of which operate premises in Pemba, the province’s capital and major port, have restricted the services they provide in the region.

All four had been developing academic research and fieldwork in coastal districts outside Pemba, an area especially affected by the insurgents, who are aligned with Islamic State, and known as Ansar al-Sunna. These have been disrupted and work largely halted, although operations in Pemba, which is relatively secure, have continued.

A smaller port city north of Pemba, Mocimboa da Praia, the epicentre of the insurgency and surrounding villages and districts such as Quissanga, Macomia, Nangade and Muidumbe, among others, have become ghost towns where all tertiary education activities have been abandoned, and even primary and secondary schools have closed.

Research hit hardest

Marcelino Caravela, director of the faculty of natural sciences at Lúrio University, said the attacks have especially hit the university’s ability to undertake marine environmental research, developed in coastal areas.

Work shelved includes the assessment and management of pristine and vulnerable aquatic habitats in the region, aquaculture projects, fishery analysis and management. Caravela said: “We are apprehensive in sending our students to areas close to the conflict zones,” saying that for the time being such work was being undertaken in and around the 201,000 people city of Pemba and surrounding districts.

At Eduardo Mondlane University, the country’s largest and oldest university, security concerns have restricted outreach work, such as research and fieldwork into agricultural production in Cabo Delgado, with academics and students training farmers, researching soils, analysing the climate and researching pests. The university’s pedagogical director, Elias Manjate, said the insurgency had also affected the ability of students from Cabo Delgado to return home for academic holidays.

This has been of particular concern during the COVID-19 epidemic, with the university fearing for students wanting to return to homes in the conflict zone when their classes were suspended due to the disease.

Some students have remained living on the university’s main campus in Maputo, afraid to travel even through Central Mozambique because of attacks on the main South-North highway, the EN1, by another (non-Islamic) rebel group, RENAMO, the remnants of a resistance group that fought the Mozambique civil war from 1977 to 1992 and lost.

Teachers flee to other provinces

Eduardo Mondlane University has also been unable to operate a work placement programme that had seen 650 students gaining experience in Cabo Delgado province during holidays. It has had to cancel this scheme in insurgent-affected zones in the past three years. This has had a regional economic impact, because 1,500 students had previously found jobs in these districts because of the programme, said a university official who requested anonymity.

Also, more than 750 teaching graduates from these universities who have positions in Cabo Delgado secondary and primary schools have fled to Pemba to avoid being attacked by insurgents, said Mozambique’s National Teachers' Organisation (Organização Nacional dos Professores). More may follow as the union has about 3,000 members in Cabo Delgado, including tertiary education teachers.

Teodoro Muidumbe, the union’s secretary general, said the risks faced by all academics and teachers in the region was “terrible”, and while so far there are no confirmed reports that teachers or lecturers have been killed or seriously injured, he said there may be attacks that have yet to come to light.

He told University World News that there was “double suffering” for educational institutions in Cabo Delgado, given that they face the impacts of COVID-19 and Islamist insurgent attacks. He thinks more teachers and lecturers have fled their posts: "This number is not definitive because there are many teachers, we do not know their whereabouts, others have fled to neighbouring provinces," he stressed.

Displaced teachers and lecturers have called for more help from the government in a meeting called with provincial governor Valige Tauabo. Edgar Ali, a teacher from Mocímboa da Praia, complained: “We are not benefited by humanitarian aid; allegedly because we have salaries, but we have lost everything,” reported local newspapers.

Gonçalves Fernando, another refugee teacher, asked the provincial government to locate refugee teachers in other schools outside the insurgency zone while the civil strife lasts.

Students cannot go home

Gemesio Teodoro Candido, Maputo-based president of the Student Association of Eduardo Mondlane University, said: “We feel the burden of the insurgency in our lives because we cannot move, we cannot do our research.”

The association has scheduled a survey on the social responsibility of multi-nationals working in Palma, Northern Cabo Delgado (just south of the Tanzanian border), a port hosting major liquified natural gas industrial works, but researchers cannot travel there due to the Islamist insurgency.

Gemesio said students whose families live in the conflict zones have been suffering because they cannot contact or see their parents because it is too dangerous to return home for visits. Some students have been orphaned due to the insurgent attacks.

As for research in the region, it is a non-starter: “There is no student who would dare to move to those areas. Many of our colleagues who had research to do in those regions have been advised to change the location or the nature of their research because there is no guarantee of security.”

Origin of conflict discussed

One area of research is booming, however, and that is studies into why Mozambique has been hit by an Islamist insurgency in the first place. Cabo Delgado is one of two Mozambique regions with a Moslem majority (54%), the other being Niassa (61%), further inland and largely free of the insurgency.

Salvador Forquilha, director and senior investigator at the Maputo-based Institute of Social and Economic Studies (IESE - Instituto de Estudos Sociais e Económicos) has concluded that the origin of the conflict is as much ethnic and social as religious. "The insurgency is fuelled by multiple cleavages of ethnic, historical, social and political origin," he has told a seminar on the issue staged online by Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, an independent think tank based in London, UK.

A study by another IESE researcher Sérgio Chichava nonetheless stressed that radicalisation has played a role in Cabo Delgado, profiling the first leaders of Ansar al-Sunna, saying they were young informal traders influenced by radical foreign sheikhs, particularly from Moslem communities in neighbouring Tanzania, who enjoy significant prestige in East Africa.

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