Wiriyamu massacre

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The village of Wiriyamu in the northern Mozambican province of Tete became famous for a massacre committed there by Portuguese soldiers , which in December 1972 killed almost the entire population of several other villages. Through the following international reporting the interest of the world public in the year before the Carnation Revolution was directed to the crimes of the Portuguese colonial wars.

The situation of the liberation struggle

The FRELIMO , the socialist embossed liberation movement against colonial rule, the first north of the Zambezi had operated opened in 1968 and reinforced in 1971, originally the guerrilla struggle in the more southerly parts of Tete province with the intention the dam project from Cabora Bassa to prevent. In the final phase of this conflict, the military and the secret services reacted increasingly repressive and brutal. The Wiriyamu massacre had been preceded by a whole series of punitive actions and atrocities by the Portuguese armed forces in the villages on the Zambezi since 1971, which committed missionaries were able to document in various reports, but whose knowledge did not initially reach local church superiors and official departments. The world has never heard of presumably many others; It was only the diverse and comprehensively documented murders of Wiriyamu that penetrated media interest and thus the awareness of the European public.

The massacre

On December 16, 1972, two military aircraft bombed the villages of Wiriyamu and Juwau, 25 km southeast of Tete near the Zambezi. Shortly thereafter, soldiers of the 6th Company of the Portuguese Colonial Forces broke into Wiriyamu and some neighboring villages and shot their local residents, including women and children, or burned them in their huts. On the same day, the command murdered 53 residents of the village of Chawola. The actions were accompanied by excessive cruelty.

The operation, called Operation Marosca by the military , was instigated by the secret police DGS , a successor organization to the notorious PIDE , and was led by its agent Chico Kachavi, who was later killed in an assassination attempt while proceedings were still being initiated against him. According to him, the order was to kill all residents. The crews consisted of black and white soldiers, the officers were all white.

The number of dead is given as around 300 to 500 people, or a third of the residents.

Reactions

Two fathers of the Spanish Institute for Foreign Missions, also known in Germany as "Burgos Priests", among them Vicente Berenguer Llopis, who happened to meet the few survivors the day after the massacre near the devastated village, provided detailed reports in the following days the statements made by the bereaved, but also by Portuguese soldiers. An investigation promised by the Governor General never took place. Two Spanish fathers, expelled from Mozambique for their criticism, smuggled one of the reports into Europe, where the British theologian and historian Adrian Hastings found out about it and offered it to the Times for publication. There it appeared on July 10, 1973 on the first page. That was a week before the 600th anniversary celebrations of the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance , to which Marcelo Caetano , the Portuguese Prime Minister, traveled. A correspondingly excited and still controversial media discussion followed. On July 20, 1973, Hastings was heard before the UN Special Committee on Decolonization. A month later, Spiegel published a cover story about what Fathers Vicente Berenguer Llopis and Julio Moure had recently reported in more detail in an interview during a visit to the German capital . Unlike Hastings, the two were sources who had had direct contact with those affected.

Even when the military and the Portuguese government denied the massacre, withheld their own investigation reports, tried to blame other actors for the crimes of FRELIMO, or conservative sections of the German press initially followed the Portuguese positions, they became publicists, church representatives and more and more German politicians mobilized against the colonial war in Africa. So the revelations helped isolate the Portuguese regime and pave the way for the Carnation Revolution . Wiriyamu thus played a very similar role for Mozambique as the Mỹ Lai massacre in the Vietnam War.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hastings, Wiriyamu (Ger.), Pp. 59-76; Gegenger, pp. 33-35.
  2. ↑ Wiriyamu was the largest village in a cluster of villages ("Chief Gandali Area") in the triangle between the Luenha River, the Zambezi , into which the Luenha flows, and the road from Beira and Changara to Tete , 25 km southeast of this provincial capital . The place was not and is not recorded on generally accessible maps. For a while, this allowed the Portuguese to deny the existence of the place and thus of what was happening. Today the place no longer exists. The coordinates given above are therefore only approximate. For localization cf. Gegenger, p. 26 and the map sketch at Hastings (German) p. 7.
  3. ↑ Cf. the documentation of the testimony in Ansprenger, pp. 16–23
  4. ↑ Up-to-date sources on the number of victims on December 16, 1972 in Wiriyamu and the neighboring villages are two reports by the priests from the Changara mission station. The minutes of Vicente Berenguer et al . Translated from Portuguese and printed in Hastings, Wiriyamu (English), pp. 75 and 76, Hastings, Wiriyamu (German), pp. 93 and 128, as well as Ansprenger, pp. 15 and 16 go from numbers between “more than 300” and “about 500”. The data determined later by Felicia Cabrita: Massacres em Africa , Lisbon 2008, pp. 243-282 are of this order of magnitude.
  5. ^ Adrian Hastings: Portuguese Massacre reported by Priests . In: The Times, July 10, 1973, pp. 1, 5, an editorial on p. 15. Also expanded in book form: Wiriyamu . London: Search Press, 1974. ISBN 0-85532-338-8 (a German edition followed in 1974).
  6. ^ Hastings, Wiriyamu (Ger.), Pp. 116-132
  7. ^ Translation of the UN document A / AC.109 / PV.929 by Ansprenger, pp. 32–39.
  8. ↑ Anonymous: Portugal: Temporary Colonies? In: Der Spiegel (33), August 13, 1973.
  9. ↑ The wording of the critical interview with the KNA on August 9, published by Ansprenger, pp. 40–48.
  10. ^ Arslan Humbarachi & Nicole Muchnik: Portugal's African Wars , NY, 1974.
  11. ↑ Documentation of contemporary statements in Ansprenger, pp. 125–177.
  12. ↑ A corresponding subtitle has been added to the American edition of the book by Hastings: Wiriyamu - my lai in Mozambique , New York, Orbis Books, 1974.
  13. ↑ Gabriele Vensky: murders in Africa. No differences between white and black policies of oppression . In: Die Zeit (30), July 27, 1973.
  14. ↑ Copac: bibliographic detection
  15. ↑ DNB: bibliographic evidence
  16. ↑ DNB: bibliographic evidence

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Coordinates: 16 ° 21 ′  S , 33 ° 35 ′  E