Thousands of people have fled Mozambique to neighboring Malawi, seeking refuge from the nation’s deadly post-election unrest. The exodus follows the confirmation of the ruling Frelimo party’s win in the October vote by Mozambique’s Constitutional Council last week.
The opposition denounced the result as fraudulent, and the top court’s rubber-stamping triggered violent protests, vandalism and looting.
Ellen Kaosa is one of over 13,000 Mozambicans who sought refuge in Malawi’s southern border district of Nsanje. She and some of her family members fled on the day the court validated the election results.
Kaosa told DW that her group traversed dangerous routes, including across the Shire and Zambezi rivers on a boat, to reach Malawi. She eventually arrived at a displacement camp in the village of Tengani, where she described the conditions as “problematic.”
“Since Monday I have not eaten, I have children, and other women are pregnant, elderly and others with disabilities,” Kaosa said.
Dire humanitarian situation
Kaosa told DW that the camp has no toilets, running water or mosquito nets, adding that well-wishers only provided one cup of porridge to some of them upon arrival.
“We are prone to diseases like malaria and waterborne diseases at this time of the rainy season,” she said.
“The whole reason we have fled to Malawi is the safety of our lives, but we plead for help in areas of food, bedding and a place to be accommodated in because it is hot living in tents.”
Other women told DW that they could not find their husbands, fearing they may have taken different routes into Malawi.
“The situation remains dire as these individuals urgently require humanitarian assistance,” Nsanje district commissioner Dominic Mwandira said in a letter to the country’s commissioner for refugees, reported Reuters news agency.
Kaosa, like thousands of others who have fled to Malawi and Eswatini, the tiny kingdom that borders Mozambique to the south, are hoping for peace so they can return to their homeland.
Calls to prioritize vulnerable groups
Human rights campaigners have urged Malawi and the international community to prioritize the well-being of women, the elderly, people with disabilities and children.
Moses Mkandawire, director of the Nyika Institute, a think tank, noted that Mozambican lawmakers and opposition members, along with the 16-member Southern African Development Community (SADC) and other stakeholders, should work together to foster dialogue, reconciliation and lasting peace.
“Now what should we do as a nation, what is needed therefore is to ensure that we provide them with food, blankets and other humanitarian kind of support,” Mkandawire said, adding that Malawi should engage SADC colleagues in Mozambique for help.
Malawian authorities confirmed they are working with the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) to assess the humanitarian support needs of those fleeing Mozambique.
However, Malawi is already grappling with food shortages to feed its own citizens, as well as around 54,000 refugees — mostly from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Burundi — who are accommodated at the Dzaleka refugee camp in central Malawi.
Malawi’s refugee struggle
To further complicate matters, the UNHCR is struggling to feed existing refugees in Malawi due to of a funding crisis at the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP).
Robert Naija, a spokesperson for Nsanje District, told DW that Malawi has provided hundreds of bags of maize flour and beans to feed the refugees.
He added that so far the government has provided shelter to the asylum seekers chiefly in primary schools, however they were being relocated to evacuation centers.
Nsanje resident Malita Banda, who helped some refugees find shelter, noted that while Malawians also face hunger due to El-Nino induced weather, the government should increase its budget to meet the demands of those fleeing Mozambique’s post-election violence.
“My only request is that the Mozambican government should do something as quickly as possible because it is likely that they will have difficulties in finding food to eat on a daily basis,” said Banda.
Frelimo party leader Daniel Chapo is expected to be sworn in as Mozambican president on January 15. The Constitutional Council said Chapo won the October 9 presidential election with around 65% of the vote. Opposition candidate Venancio Mondlane was said to have received 24% of the vote.
Meanwhile, Mondlane, who says the election results were rigged, said that his fight for a recount is not over and that he will issue a new call for action in the coming days.
Edited by: Keith Walker
