Good afternoon. For now, peace seems to have returned to the Niassa Special Reserve and the surrounding area; it has been over a week since the last insurgent attack, on the village of Macalange inside the nature reserve on 14-16 May. Now that insurgents seem to have withdrawn, according to credible reports, the commanders of the Mozambican security forces could draw some lessons from the attacks of the past month. For one thing, they need to act much more quickly in future on reports of insurgent movements when they are reported. The operators of safari and conservation camps based in and around the reserve sent warnings ahead of the first attack on 19 April, but they were not heeded. For another, the security forces could learn a lot from the resort operators about how to look after their personnel and their families.
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Alexandre Nhampossa
In the face of insurgent attacks, the operators worked hard to evacuate their staff and also to help evacuate reserve employees from the area. When rangers went missing, they conducted aerial searches and kept looking until they were accounted for or declared dead. The wounded ranger Mario Cristóvão, who spent four painful nights lying in the bush with bullets in both legs, was found thanks to repeated searches and quickly airlifted out, first to a local hospital and then to a private hospital in Maputo. The bodies of the two rangers who were killed were recovered and brought to their families. One was sent back to his family’s home town.
