A group of military personnel report that they fought terrorism in Cabo Delgado without any pay and, after a year, were told to wait at home. The group of more than 300 soldiers feels abandoned by the state and reports difficult situations due to a lack of logistics.

According to a publication in the newspaper "The Country"These are young people who have completed their compulsory military service and were demobilized. However, they responded to a call to defend their homeland and volunteered to be on the front line, which they did.

"I was trained in Chókwè, in the 8th Brigade, in 2018, and I was demobilized in 2020. The Ministry of Defense released a document from the 110th Battalion, belonging to Moeda, which needed demobilized soldiers to be reintegrated and return to work for the Armed Forces, to defend our nation. We saw that document and followed it. We were told to go to the 'PCC de Macomia', in Cabo Delgado. When they received us, they said 'your reintegration is in Catupa'," described one of the soldiers.

It was in August last year. The Catupa base in Macomia is much talked about. It is an area that was once used as a terrorist base and after a major offensive the national troops took the area, but it has never been a peaceful place. The last terrorist attack took place on the afternoon of May 27 this year.

"During that attack, we lost many colleagues and there are others who, to this day, we don't know if they made it home or not," noted another soldier, supported by another who hinted at the logistical weaknesses in the position where they had been fighting for a year. "They shot us down, but we didn't retreat. But because we lacked some material, we retreated. Some people had no weapons. The weaponry wasn't enough for the people who were there." It was during this fight that our interviewee was hit in the left forearm: "I was shot by a PK there, in Macomia, I tried to pull myself up and some colleagues helped me out of the woods."

In the forests of northern Cabo Delgado, bloody battles are fought almost every day. What the group of more than 300 soldiers didn't expect was to be able to fight in difficult situations, but without any kind of pay and, in the end, to receive an order to go home and less than four thousand meticais for transportation back to where they came from.

"Yesterday a motorcade came saying that our reinstatement hadn't been accepted yet and that we had to go and wait at home. We were amazed and asked how we could wait at home, because we've been without anything for a year. In my case, I left my wife at home and I have a newborn child. I didn't send anything and I had to send money home to eat. I spent three months in that position with nothing to eat. I lived on vegetables every day, without salt or oil. We struggled for food. We put up with it and eventually food came in and we kept asking when we were going to start getting paid and they told us to wait, because our reintegration was in process," another soldier lamented in the same publication.

In all, more than 300 men were dismissed in Macomia on Monday (25). The interview took place at one of the inter-provincial transport terminals in Nampula, from where they went back to where they came from empty-handed, carrying the frustration of a situation that makes no sense to them.

"How does a graduate stay at home? Won't there be more crime? It's not easy to train a man and then discard him. Living with a person in society who knows how to use weapons, how to attack and come out victorious. It's very painful for me," said another interviewee.

Of the more than 300 soldiers concerned, around half are from Cabo Delgado and the rest from other provinces.

 

(Photo DR)