Unango attack
The attack in Unango (also: Lichinga attack ) on December 6, 1984 near Unango in Mozambique was one of the most serious terrorist attacks against GDR citizens .
background
At the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, the People's Republic of Mozambique was the strongest recipient of the GDR's development policy commitment. The support measures referred to as “scientific-technical cooperation” on the “basis of mutual benefit” included, among other things, the posting of experts and qualified specialists.
On February 24, 1979, the GDR State Council Chairman Erich Honecker and the Mozambican President Samora Machel signed a treaty on friendship and economic cooperation in Maputo . In 1980 the GDR started one of the largest agricultural projects in Africa in the north of Mozambique . The plan was to set up large farms with up to 120,000 hectares of arable land. Products for export to the GDR were to be grown there in order to pay for the delivery of goods, trucks, agricultural machinery and equipment for the construction of infrastructural projects. On the Mozambican side, the project was under the administrative management of Adelaide Amurane in the then Ministry of Agriculture. Mozambique did not only pay with the income from the new agricultural production facilities, but above all with hard coal from the Moatize hard coal mine .
In 1984 there was civil war in Mozambique between the Marxist liberation movement FRELIMO and the anti-communist resistance movement RENAMO, which was supported by South Africa . The GDR supported FRELIMO by sending military advisers, but the fronts were unclear. In 1982/83, agriculture in Mozambique almost collapsed due to the drought and war, and tens of thousands of people died of hunger. The illegal warfare of the RENAMO with its strategy of robbery and looting was also directed against the local population and against the development workers.
Unango on the Lichinga Plateau in the Mozambican northern province of Niassa was one of ten planned locations for state farms and became the most successful economic project of the GDR in Mozambique. The construction workers, known locally as Cooperantes , came from near Jena and had been delegated to Mozambique by their LPG . They lived with their families in Lichinga , in an apartment block built during the Portuguese colonial rule in the mid-1970s. Because of the increasingly unsafe situation, farmers only drove to the Unango state farm in 1984 with armed escorts.
The attack
On December 6, 1984 at around 7.15 a.m., as on every working day, the convoy of five IFA W50 trucks and one Multicar set off from Lichinga to Unango. 21 militiamen accompanied the convoy from Bacarilla through endangered area. At the head was a command vehicle with ten militiamen with a light machine gun (LMG) and submachine guns . This was followed by the Multicar with the director of the state farm and four militiamen armed with submachine guns, bazookas and a heavy machine gun (SMG). In third place in the column followed an IFA W50 workshop truck with a box body, nine GDR citizens, two Yugoslavs and a Mozambican on board. There were no militiamen on it. The end of the column was formed by a tanker and two trucks loaded with fertilizers. Other militiamen drove on these vehicles.
The attack took place ten kilometers from Unango. When the column had to slow down on a mountain, they were ambushed and attacked with machine guns from the bush. The multicar was shot at with a bazooka . The militiamen who were supposed to protect the convoy fled. The workshop trolley was the main target of the approximately 45 attackers armed with submachine guns, bazookas and SMGs. The attack lasted only a few minutes, although the exact course of events cannot be clearly reconstructed afterwards.
After the attack, four Germans were found shot outside the truck. In the vehicle itself there were three other dead GDR citizens, as well as the Yugoslav and the Mozambican, who had all been murdered by targeted bullets in the head. A fourth German survived initially seriously injured. Some of those murdered were robbed of clothes, shoes and other items. The ninth German had dropped out of the cab of the W50 during the attack and had gone undetected in the thicket of the ditch. Together with some of the other survivors of the escort team and his dead colleagues, he returned to Lichinga by truck to inform the wives of the news of their husbands' death. The next day he was flown to the GDR with the dead and all relatives on a special plane. The seriously injured GDR citizen, who in the meantime had been operated on in Maputo by Soviet doctors, later succumbed to his head injuries and was thus the eighth fatality among GDR development workers. In addition to the Germans and Yugoslav helpers, Mozambicans were also killed, the exact number of which is unknown and varies between 5 and 15 depending on the source.
Some FRELIMO officials were of the opinion that the attack could be avoided. There would have been indications in good time of increased gang activity, which, however, would not have led the local authorities and the provincial military leadership to the necessary decisions. Immediately after the event, the Mozambican side told the GDR delegation who had traveled to the country what military support was now expected from the GDR. In Maputo it was hoped that the GDR would deliver the attack helicopters that had been wanted for a long time as a reaction to the attack . As in previous years, however, the GDR held back with direct military aid.
Six months after the attack, around 1,000 GDR development workers were withdrawn from Mozambique. The development boost expected by the leadership of the GDR had not materialized. After the USSR rejected Mozambique's application to join the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance in 1981 , relations between the FRELIMO government and the GDR leadership had deteriorated. Mozambique tried to get closer to South Africa politically during this time. The attack had only accelerated the retreat.
Reaction in the GDR
Immediately after the attack, the GDR media reported that "in a brutal attack by counterrevolutionary gangs, seven citizens of the GDR were maliciously murdered". A subsequent precise explanation of the events never took place. In its report, the Ministry of State Security merely stated the “capitulant behavior of almost all security forces”. In the autopsy report of the Forensic Medicine Institute of the Charité in Berlin , it was noted that the deadly projectiles had been fired from "weapons of the Kalashnikov type of Soviet design".
Processing and commemoration
The background to the attack is still unclear. There was no final investigation and no trial. In Germany, too, there was no reappraisal of the events. In 2009 the Gera public prosecutor closed the proceedings in Germany and referred the case to the Maputo court . After the GDR helpers left the country, the water dams were destroyed and the Unango model farm disintegrated into many individual farms. In 2009, the provincial government of Niassa had a memorial stone erected on the site of the attack for the Germans who were killed. For the inauguration, a commemorative event for the 25th anniversary of the attack was held with official representatives of the provincial administration and the economy of Niassa province, a German delegation made up of former GDR agricultural specialists and representatives of the Wayao ethnic group living in this area .
Individual evidence
- ^ Horst Möller, Gregor Schöllgen: Files for the Foreign Policy of the Federal Republic of Germany 1980. Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag ISBN 3-486-70219-X p. 296 Google Books
- ↑ a b c d e Thomas Kasper, Henry Köhler: GDR in Africa - Fatal assassination attempt in Mozambique Exact - The story, MDR
- ↑ The then director of the state farm, Paulo Francisco Zucula, who was slightly injured in the attack, has been Minister for Transport and Communications of the Republic of Mozambique since March 2008.
- ↑ a b c d e Ulrich van der Heyden: Nothing must happen! Development policy engagement of the GDR in Mozambique between solidarity and risk . In: Matthias Voss (Ed.): We have left traces! The GDR in Mozambique. Experiences, experiences and knowledge from three decades. LIT Verlag, Münster 2005 pp. 278-313, ISBN 3-8258-8321-3 , Google Books
- ↑ GDR in Africa - Fatal assassination attempt in Mozambique ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. ARD program, picture gallery
- ↑ Manfred Grunewald: Lichinga 25 years later ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 2.7 MB) Encontro, newspaper for the 7th meeting of the Friends of Mozambique on April 16 and 17, 2010
literature
- Manfred Grunewald: The fatal shots from Unango: Memories of Moçambique 1984. Self-published, 2005
Coordinates: 12 ° 52 ′ 28.1 ″ S , 35 ° 24 ′ 20.2 ″ E