Word: frelimo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Some terrorists came to our camp and said that if we wanted a cease-fire to come to a place they indicated. Our officers went as directed. The Frelimo crept up and surrounded us. I thought we had been tricked, but when they saw we had no arms they threw down their guns and embraced us and called us brothers. Now we are planning a soccer game. -Letter from a Portuguese soldier in Mozambique...
...streets of Mozambique, shouting "Viva Spinola! Viva Spinola!" Out in the bush, where there had been bitter fighting only days before, guerrillas and Portuguese soldiers laid down their arms and shook hands in a spontaneous ceasefire. In the northern province of Tete, a stronghold of the Mozambique Liberation Front [Frelimo] and scene of the war's worst civilian massacres, hatred seemed magically transformed into brotherhood. A rebel leader high on Portugal's "wanted" list exhorted a throng of blacks and whites "to live in harmony." Frelimo guerrillas were feted at a dinner party by army officers...
...significant that The Rhodesia Herald, a colonial paper which understandably records FRELIMO's victories with jaundiced eyes on account of the revolutionary fervour such successes are likely to engender among Southern African blacks, has nevertheless had to carry several grim stories of Portuguese military reverses. For example, on July 24, the paper reported...
...company of Portuguese troops led by their field commander has deserted to join Frelimo. The troops, based at Macossa, about 80 km from Vila de Gouveia, Central Mozambique, have drawn up a manifesto which has been sent to the Portuguese High Command in Nampula. The Manifesto tells High Command that the company has joined Frelimo as "the only valid party in this country...
...press reports the only sources of information on the war front. Eyewitness accounts, once shorn of the rather rich vernacular imagery, do point to marked disarray among colonial forces in sharp contrast to FRELIMO's high morale and that movement's inexorable march to political independence...