Mozambique warily polls for peace

Corporal Onofre Maquida dreamt the other night that he was watching his three sons playing a football match at home, and the youngest, Brushani, five, was in goal. 'Brushani was defending very well,' Corporal Maquida, 29, said proudly.

Dreams are as close as the corporal can get to his family as he sits with 1,200 other soldiers in a camp with three British and 40 Zimbabwean instructors who are helping to forge the remnants of the Renamo rebel and Frelimo government armies into the Armed Forces for the Defence of Mozambique (FADM).

The unified army was supposed to be 30,000 strong by now. While all other former troops were to be demobilised under United Nations supervision, the idea behind the new army was that it should maintain a two-year-old ceasefire and make sure that general elections on Thursday do not throw the country back into civil war, as happened in Angola, Mozambique's sister former Portuguese colony.

The demobilisation has been slow but largely successful, although in recent days several hundred soldiers of the Mozambique National Resistance (Renamo) who were previously in hiding have been turning up to demand their demobilisation pay. They said their commanders had told them not to go to the assembly areas as Renamo agreed when it signed a peace agreement with President Joaquim Chissano's Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo) government in Rome in October 1992.

The FADM still remains a largely fictitious army. After 17 years of civil war, in which up to a million people died and several million more were made homeless, few on either side want to remain soldiers. Although the peace agreement said the unified army was to be a voluntary force, most of the 11,000 troops in it had no choice.

Corporal Maquida joined the Frelimo army at the age of 16 in 1982 when his secondary school headmaster in Zambezia handed him over to military recruiters. A year later and 100 miles away, Private Adelino Francisco, 22, was kidnapped from his home when 11 by five Renamo soldiers. After a month of training he was handed an AK-47 assault rifle.

Both went to UN-supervised assembly areas last year, and were ordered by their commanders to join the new army. 'I do not know where I am going to be with this new army. I would like to know when I will be able to go and see my family. I want to know what they are doing,' said Corporal Maquida.

Private Francisco, who has heard nothing of his family in 11 years, has another dream. 'I would like to go home and try to get into school, but I don't know if they would accept me since I have already grown up.'

'This is a Catch-22 situation,' said Captain Mark Ross of the Royal Artillery, one of three British advisers at the Manhica camp, 50 miles north of the capital, Maputo. 'The soldiers want to leave because they do not like the army, but the army will not improve without them.'

The mission of Captain Ross and nine other British military advisers in Mozambique ended last week after overseeing the training of only six of the planned 15 infantry battalions. While the four-week crash courses have gone well, Captain Ross said the battalions would need several more years training before the new army could become an effective force. The Portuguese are training officers and commandos, while the French are instructing engineers.

With the election imminent, the only effective military force is the specially trained 'rapid intervention police 'run by the Minister of the Interior, Manuel Antonio. Upon the shoulders of the police would fall the duty of putting down any trouble should either Renamo or Frelimo or the smaller 12 political parties contest the results of the elections.

While both sides have ruled out restarting the war, Renamo's presidential candidate, Afonso Dhlakama, has vowed to reject the results if he detects fraud. His counterpart in Angola, Jonas Savimbi, made, and kept, a similar promise with disastrous consequences.

At one-third strength and with far more officers than necessary, the FADM would not be up to the task to ensure stability. It has fulfilled a prediction made two months ago by UN Deputy Special Representative in Mozambique, Behrooz Sadry, that 'by the time the elections are held, the defence capacity (of the FADM) will probably be minimal, with no operational air force or navy and little heavy weapons handling capacity.'

Yet at Manhica, relations between former Frelimo soldiers, who account for 70 per cent, and ex-Renamo fighters, appear excellent. 'We are friends. We eat together. Since I have been here there has been no problem. If my friend here does not have soap, I give him some. If I am sick, my friend will take my clothes for washing,' said Corporal Maquida.

'I don't think the war will return, because I have already received letters from my family in Zambezia (province) and they are working on their farms.

They say everything is fine.'

(Photograph and map omitted)