Amnesty International has called for an independent investigation into violence in Mozambique’s northern Cabo Delgado province which it alleges involves a South African-based arms company.
In a report released earlier this month, Amnesty International accused South African private military firm ‘Dyck Advisory Group‘ of firing indiscriminately on civilians while helping the government fight an insurgency.
Amnesty also accused both the government and the insurgents of war crimes against civilians.
Amnesty International’s Regional Researcher for Southern Africa, David Matsinhe, says the South African government has a duty to ensure companies based in South Africa and operating elsewhere abide by international and South African laws.
“We are calling for an impartial, independent and exhaustive investigation. The South African government has the duty to ensure that the companies that are domiciled in South Africa operating abroad abide by UN guiding principles on business and human rights by the SA legislation. There is a law that requires military companies and individuals seeking to provide military assistance abroad to apply for authorisation from the minister of defense. Has this happened? Does the Dyck Advisory Group have such authorisation from the South African government?”
Hundreds of civilians are being unlawfully killed by armed groups, government forces, and private military contractors in Cabo Delgado, #Mozambique.
Our report here: https://t.co/whYPtJMHWz ?
— Amnesty International (@amnesty) March 2, 2021
Report on Cabo Delgado
In its report titled, ‘What I Saw Is Death’: War Crimes in Mozambique’s Forgotten Cape’, Amnesty said it had interviewed 79 internally displaced people between September and January, and reviewed satellite imagery, photographs, medical records and ballistics information.
Reuters was not independently able to verify the material described in the report.
The report accused Dyck Advisory Group staff of opening fire indiscriminately on civilians while pursuing suspected fighters.
The founder of the company, Lionel Dyck, told Reuters, “We take these allegations very seriously and we are going to put an independent legal team in there shortly to do a board of inquiry and look at what we are doing.” He declined to give further details of the group’s mission in Mozambique.
According to Amnesty, insurgents had abducted young women and children, including young girls. “….Fighters routinely kill civilians, loot their homes, and then burn them down using petrol.”
It said residents used separate words to describe two Al-Shabaab methods of killing: “beheaded” and “chopped”, the second of which, it quoted a 75-year-old man as saying, meant “being ‘divided like a cow.’”
As for the government forces, Amnesty said videos and photos showed “the attempted beheading, torture and other ill-treatment of prisoners, the dismemberment of alleged Al-Shabaab fighters, possible extrajudicial executions, and the transport and discarding of a large number of corpses into apparent mass graves.”
In the videos, the security forces were identified by their uniforms and spoke Portuguese and a local language from southern Mozambique, said Amnesty, calling for a thorough investigation.
The United Nations has said the violence and humanitarian crisis in Mozambique will worsen without international help as displaced people faced overcrowding, malnutrition and a lack of essentials including food and water. – Additional reporting by Reuters
