Rumours of Glory

by Bruce Cockburn

  19

  It’s a testament to the quality of life in Canada that, in the fall of 1995, I was able to saunter into the Centre Block of the Houses of Parliament with a bag of anti-personnel mines and nobody stopped me. It was theatre, of course—the land mines, though real, were inert—but no one knew that when I dragged five of them out of my backpack and placed them on the podium at the beginning of a press conference in the basement of the historic building. It was an amusing ploy for a serious cause: a proposed ban on land-mine production and use.

  Just before landing at Parliament, I’d wrapped up a series of speaking engagements describing my second fact-finding mission to Mozambique on behalf of Cooperation Canada Mozambique (COCAMO). In 1992, after fifteen years of civil war, the FRELIMO government and RENAMO rebel force signed a peace accord in Rome. By 1990 the two sides were so militarily depleted—especially after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the collapse of South Africa’s apartheid government, which had supported FRELIMO and RENAMO, respectively—and so literally famished that there was no choice but to give up the war. In 1992 a U.N. peacekeeping force entered the country and stayed for two years, leaving shortly after the democratic elections of October 1994. Mozambique was at “peace” for the first time in nearly thirty years, but because all sides in the war of independence against Portugal, and the subsequent civil war, used land mines as offensive weapons, true peace could not—and will not—be attained in the country until all the mines are removed. COCAMO’s efforts would now shift from helping the populace get through the war to the demining and reconstruction of a country whose economy was still largely based on agriculture.

  The wars in Mozambique emptied vast areas of countryside. I arrived on September 5, 1995, in the middle of a mass migration, as one and a half million refugees were straggling back to their homes. Crucially, such a return in large part meant addressing the presence of millions of land mines that remained scattered throughout parts of the country.

  I flew south out of London at the end of a European tour, changed planes in Harare, Zimbabwe, and landed in Maputo, Mozambique’s capital and home to more than one million souls. There were a few days of orientation in the old city, whose architecture includes charming colonial, Stalinist cement-block, and, increasingly these days, modern high-rise. I met Chude Mondlane, daughter of Eduardo Mondlane, who served as FRELIMO’s first president for seven years before being assassinated in 1969. Chude, a lively and attractive young woman and a professional singer of great talent, would eventually join our efforts to generate support for COCAMO in Canada. I found a wonderful souvenir in the marketplace: a toy tank made of wicker, with wheels that turned and a swiveling turret complete with cannon.

  During a meet-and-greet dinner at a restaurant, I reconnected with some musicians I had encountered in Mozambique during my first visit in 1988. Among them was Zena Bakar, one of the founders of the group Eyuphuro. Things seemed to be falling apart for her. One of the members of her band—which had enjoyed some success not only in Africa but throughout Europe and the United States—had sold all their instruments and with the money bought himself a one-way ticket to Copenhagen, where he was said to have become a street singer and acquired a Danish girlfriend. Zena had undergone a bit of a breakdown. People whispered that she was possibly also the victim of spousal abuse.

  Zena greeted me warmly, then honoured me with a traditional welcoming song, which she performed while kneeling at my feet, singing directly at me. Others at the gathering were not so traditional, and they squirmed in embarrassment. Most compelling, though, was the poignant sorrow in the timbre of Zena’s voice, which, springing from the depths of the battered morale she couldn’t really hide, seemed to sing for the whole country.

  The journey truly began with a flight into the city of Quelimane, a sixteenth-century Portuguese slave-trading post on the central coast of Mozambique, over a thousand kilometres from Maputo. Rex Fyles, COCAMO’s man on the ground, had arranged for us to travel by vehicle the 350 miles from Quelimane to Nampula, where COCAMO had its operating base. This was exciting because in 1988 I’d had no opportunity to savor the countryside. The highway was a winding red dirt slash across a landscape of rolling savannah mixed with areas of dense bush. The most obvious evidence of human activity was found in the places where RENAMO had cut wide ditches across the road, which we had to power around with the four-wheel drive in low range. Here were the scenes of past ambushes of vehicle convoys, the road now littered with the twisted remains of rocketed armour and trucks, the husks occasionally populated by scrap metal gleaners picking through the rusted shapes.

  Many rainy seasons had come and gone without anyone maintaining the road, which tossed us around no matter how slowly we moved. The rutted track at times wound prettily between groves of mango and cashew trees planted by the colonial masters to draw people to places where their activities could be monitored. Few entered those areas now, as RENAMO had mined them extensively to prevent the harvesting of their fruits.

  With the Mozambican economy eviscerated, the postwar government was in the process of restructuring to meet the demands of the IMF and the World Bank, inviting a feeding frenzy of carpetbagger capitalism—old-school colonialism in a brand-new suit. Foreign interests gobbled up rights to Mozambique’s oil and minerals, timber, offshore fisheries, the remains of what was once the world’s largest cashew industry, and—in a bitter irony seen often in poor lands with high food exports—a very hungry labour force. Even the HIV virus, kept at bay by Mozambique’s relative isolation during the war, began appearing as a colonizer. Underpaid teachers charged students for the release of their marks, and thousands of demobilized soldiers turned to banditry to survive, sometimes renting their weaponry from police officers who themselves resorted to mugging passersby to augment their wages. About this I can speak with some authority, as I was held up by two cops near my hotel in Maputo. I was robbed of a hundred dollars but allowed to keep my knife, Leatherman tool, and passport, as well as the body parts they threatened to remove. After pocketing the money the officers became genial, as if we had just done business together. They wished me a good evening. They probably had not seen a paycheck in months.

  Social spending was nonexistent. When I visited in 1988, during the civil war, the central hospital in Nampula City was still functional, if poorly supplied. In 1995 it was a cesspool of misery. Mentally ill patients wandered the hallways, raving and stinking of urine. The walls were filthy. People brought their own brightly patterned cloth (if they had any) rather than put themselves in contact with the hospital bedding. The gurney used to transport patients who couldn’t walk was an old bloodstained stretcher rigged with wheels. Fecal-smelling wards were crammed with people, many of them fighting infections acquired at this very institution. If you needed an IV, you had to pay. If you needed blood, you had to buy it. If you needed medicine, your family had to comb the pharmacies in town because all the drugs had been sold off by hospital staff. Yet the government couldn’t raise salaries for fear of losing the support of the World Bank and the IMF. This was all happening against a backdrop of the near-total destruction of transportation, schools, and farms in the wake of war, drought, and, in the north, a disastrous hurricane. The war killed off the cattle and drove away or killed the wildlife, including the elephants, hippos, lions, warthogs, and antelopes of famed Gorongosa National Park, where RENAMO had its headquarters. It destroyed nearly all the trucks, wrecked rail lines, and left all but the major cities in ruins.

  Most pernicious were the land mines, a plague of amputation and death waiting hidden in the fertile soils of this rich and storied African land. The United Nations estimated that, in 2013, between two and three million land mines remained scattered throughout Mozambique. At least sixty million are still buried across the globe, including a staggering twenty-three million in Egypt alone (more than any other nation), alongside unexploded ordnance left from World War II, disallowing use of huge regions in the north and east of the country. Angola is
plagued with fifteen million mines; Afghanistan, ten million. Iran and Iraq share twenty-five million land mines still in the ground, and China has ten million. Neighboring Vietnam is thought to still have three million land mines. The small country of Cambodia—which I visited in 1999, just after that country’s decades-long war ended—still suffers with six million of the things, an improvement over the estimated ten million, one for every person, that were in the ground when I went there.

  Land-mine deaths are bad enough, but the maiming they cause in agrarian countries like Mozambique and Cambodia paints a patina of horror across the landscape. The injured almost always end up disabled and become a burden to their families. They swell the numbers of urban beggars, contributing to the instability of society. Mine victims are most likely to be rural civilians who depend on a degree of physical fitness for their survival. In Quelimane I talked with a one-armed, badly scarred, and blinded youth whose sister led him around to beg from foreigners at a riverfront café. He had hit a mine with his mattock while working his family’s machamba, or garden plot, well after hostilities had ended.

  Mines can lie in hibernation for fifty years or more without losing their potency. They come in many shapes and sizes, but can be loosely divided into “anti-tank” and “anti-personnel” devices. Anti-personnel mines can be further differentiated as “blast” and “fragmentation.” Blast mines, as the name implies, work by releasing a massive energy burst, shattering any proximate parts of the human body. Fragmentation mines work like a big grenade, sending shrapnel over a wide radius. There are various methods of initiating detonation, the most common being foot pressure or a trip wire. Anti-tank mines are designed to blow the track off sixty-ton armoured vehicles and generally require a substantial weight to set them off. The front wheel of a jeep will do it, and there won’t be much left afterward. Fortunately, anti-tank mines are present only in small numbers in Mozambique. The real obstacles to social and economic recovery were the anti-personnel mines and the perception of them.

  Unlike other weapons, mines are activated by the victim. Nobody is aiming them. Mines are used to deny access to an area, to create a defensive perimeter around a base, business, or town, and to prevent ambushes. These were common applications in Mozambique. During the war of independence (1964–1974), the Portuguese laid mines in this way. In the late seventies, the Rhodesian forces mined the border areas of Mozambique to deter guerrilla incursions. The FRELIMO government, fearing invasion, laid strings of mines around towns, hydro lines, military bases, and key industrial sites. Private companies mined their operations as well. The defunct Canada Dry mineral water bottling plant I visited at Namaacha, near the border with Swaziland, was surrounded by four different rings of anti-personnel mines. For all that, RENAMO was still able to capture and destroy the plant.

  Of course, RENAMO received an almost endless supply of land mines from apartheid South Africa and used them liberally as terror weapons. No records were kept as to their placement. Put a couple on the trail where you might expect enemy troops to walk, but also lay some near the local health post or in the schoolyard, or maybe don’t lay any, but say you did. RENAMO used a lot of forced labour (and, as noted in chapter 15, child soldiers). In one case, a primary school teacher was put to work for several days carrying boxes of mines from one of their camps to a farming area. He told acquaintances what he was doing, and the word spread that the region was now unsafe. After the war, locals learned that he had been carrying only crates of rocks. It was a trick. It served the purpose, though—area denial—and I wonder if anyone is farming that land even now. When you’ve seen what these things do, you’re not inclined to take chances. Everywhere I went in Mozambique, I saw land-mine victims with limbs missing, ranging in age from infants to the elderly.

  The problem is, when you’re a subsistence farmer, you have to grow food or starve. So what do you do? You start to mythologize the danger. Land mines become like an evil spirit, the ogre that lurks under your bed when you’re a kid and leaves you afraid to step down onto the floor at night. If your child scampers into the trip wire of a fragmentation mine and is suddenly reduced to a few bloody scraps of clothing, it’s because somebody has offended the ancestors. It’s not because companies in Russia or India or China or the United States manufactured a lethal device and sold it for five bucks to a low-budget army. It isn’t obvious that the manufacturer’s government will give its taxpayers’ money to the United Nations so the U.N. can hire that same manufacturer to remove that mine for a thousand dollars. All you know is that there has been no war for more than twenty years, yet your daughter, working in a field, was just blown to pieces in front of you.

  A group of us visited a U.N. demining site that included the aforementioned mineral water plant. The main building, a large concrete box maybe three storeys high, had one wall blown out. A distorted vestige of the Canada Dry logo was still recognizable. Anything usable inside had long since been destroyed or looted.

  A short distance down the road, a couple of dozen men were engaged in sweeping a wide field for mines. They had already lost a team member in the process of clearing the sides of the adjacent road. Each team member had been assigned a “lane” about a metre wide, which it would be his responsibility to make safe. The area overall was about the size of a football field. We watched, sweating under a sky that seemed to radiate heat, as the men first carefully cut away overgrown vegetation looking for trip wires, then swept the ground closest to them with a metal detector. If there was no reading, they would inch forward to do it again. If the metal detector gave any sort of response, they would mark the spot and begin poking the soil with what looked like overgrown knitting needles, gingerly attempting to ascertain the outline of whatever had set it off. It might be a spent cartridge casing, it might be the lid of a soft drink bottle or a tin can, or it might be a mine.

  Determining what a found object is requires exposing it to view, an act requiring archaeological patience using hands and brushes. Some mines have been in the ground long enough to become chemically unstable. Others have triggering devices that are activated by motion. The most common trigger is a pressure switch. A given mine could present a combination of all three. (More recently, deminers in Mozambique and elsewhere have been employing a species of large sub-Saharan rat, harnessed and trained to sniff out TNT, but once a mine is located it still has to be deactivated by a human.)

  Demining is very stressful and, much of the time, very boring. By the time you’re halfway down your one-meter lane, having turned up nothing but the foil from a cigarette package, you may start to lose your edge. You may get a little careless. While you’re on your knees, one of your feet might stray into an uncleared area. You might push your probe a little too hard. There is no margin for error.

  As we watched, someone turned up a mine, so we were treated to the spectacle of its destruction. As per the preferred remedy, it was to be surrounded with plastic explosives and blown up where it sat. We all retreated to a safe distance while a charge of C4 was laid next to the mine. On a signal, a team member threw a switch and a patch of ground fifty metres away erupted with a heavy whump into a dense cloud of smoke and dust. A staccato rattle of pebbles peppered downward into the silence that followed. The men mopped the sweat from their eyes and went back to their work.

  There’s a broad river winding

  Through this African lowland

  The moon is held up orange and big

  See it raise its hands

  And the last ferry’s pulling out

  With no place left to stand

  For the mines of Mozambique

  There’s a wealth of amputation

  Waiting in the ground

  But no one can remember

  Where they put it down

  If you’re the child that finds it there

  You will rise upon the sound

  Of the mines of Mozambique

  Some men rob the passersby

  For a bit of cash to spend

&
nbsp; Some men rob whole countries dry

  And still get called their friend

  And under the feeding frenzy

  There’s a wound that will not mend

  In the mines of Mozambique

  Night, like peace,

  Is a state of suspension

  Tomorrow the heat will rise

  And mist will hide the marshy fields

  The mango and the cashew trees

  Which only now they’re clearing brush from under.

  Rusted husks of blown-up trucks

  line the roadway north of town

  like passing through a sculpture gallery

  War is the artist

  but he’s sleeping now

  And somebody will be peddling vials of penicillin

  stolen out of all the medical kits

  sent to the countryside.

  And in a bare workshop they’ll be molding plastic

  into little prosthetic limbs

  for the children of this artist

  and for those who farm the soil that received

  his bitter seed. . . .

  The all-night stragglers stagger home

  Cocks begin to crow

  And singing birds are starting up

  Telling what they know

  And after awhile the sun will come

  And we’ll see what it will show

  Of the mines of Mozambique

  “THE MINES OF MOZAMBIQUE,” 1995

  To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/80.

  In 1992 the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation (VVAF) spearheaded the creation of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), a coalition of more than fourteen hundred NGOs including Human Rights Watch, the Mines Advisory Group, Physicians for Human Rights, and Medico International. Four years later the government of Canada became the first nation to pick up the issue from the ICBL and convene an international summit. Fifty governments and observers from twenty-four other countries met in Ottawa to develop a treaty to ban land mines. Just a year later, on December 3, 1997, the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention—otherwise known as the Ottawa Treaty—to ban the production, stockpiling, and use of land mines was opened for signing. It was the most quickly drafted and ratified international arms treaty in history, and it earned Jody Williams, whom VVAF had hired to organize the campaign, and the ICBL the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize.