Word: frelimo
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Eduardo Mondlane was a revolution ary, and the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo) he headed was one of black Africa's more effective independence movements. Tall, handsome Mondlane was also a scholar who loved the bookish academic world he abandoned just six years ago, and it is clear that his enemies knew their man all too well. Last week an expertly built bomb killed him as he worked at an American friend's villa' in Dar es Salaam. The bomb had come to him concealed in a book...
...assassination was the culmination of some 18 months of increasing difficulties within Frelimo's leadership...
...Frelimo's military operations in Mo zambique reflected these difficulties. The tempo of combat has dropped in recent months, or so the Portuguese claim, but Frelimo's estimated 8,000 well-trained guerrillas (most of them Mozambicans trained in Tanzania and sup ported from that country) are tying down more than 40,000 Portuguese regulars. The major centers of Frelimo activity are in northern Mozambique, where the rebels fully control three districts: the area around Tete, on the Zambezi River in the northwest and on the Mueda plateau in the north...
Despite his experience, Sigauke retains his original idealism. Frelimo will not engage in terrorism and the murder of civilians, he says, "not because it would give us a bad image, but because it is wrong." "We fear racism," he adds. "We have known long enough the miseries of division. You cannot expect us to want to continue them ourselves." As for the future, "there will always be a place for the white man in Mozambique," he says adding softly, "Portugal is a poor country, we cannot expect them all to stay at home...
Portugal is a poor country, and it cannot afford to maintain a lingering colonial war on several fronts for a long period of time--perhaps no more than five years. Although Frelimo's guerillas, who number only a few thousand, are far from constituting a major threat to the polished forces of the Portuguese, they do not have to seize large areas of land or fight major battles. Time is on the Africans' side. As long as the rebels can maintain forces in the field, they will be winning the battle...