Portugal wants EU to help Mozambique military fight jihadists

The EU should consider sending a military training mission to Mozambique to battle Islamist terrorists, Portuguese Defense Minister João Gomes Cravinho told POLITICO in an interview.

Over the past few years, a growing jihadist insurgency has plunged Mozambique’s northernmost province into chaos, with violence surging in the Cabo Delgado region, home to natural gas developments worth about $60 billion. According to some estimates, the death toll has already topped 600. 

Cravinho, whose country holds the Council of the EU’s rotating presidency, said that in response, a military training mission “in our view would be something that is very much worth contemplating.” Currently, the EU only provides Mozambique with development and humanitarian assistance.

Mozambique is a former Portuguese colony and the two countries maintain close ties in a number of areas.

In a video interview, Cravinho argued that the situation in Mozambique is “an extension” of the fight against Islamist terrorism taking place in Somalia, a kind of terrorism that “is now making inroads into Northern Mozambique.”

“We understand what’s going on,” he said. 

Cravinho said an expanded EU presence in Africa is also what the United States wants, saying the EU ally “legitimately expects European countries to have a more active leadership role in the region.”  

Cravinho proposed “a non-executive mission,” similar to the training missions the EU already has in other African countries like Mali, Somalia and the Central African Republic. 

“But I would say a smaller one,” he said, because those existing missions “are about really constituting and training and building up the armed forces as a whole.”

Conversely, Cravinho said, in Mozambique, “what we need to do is to create the conditions for the Mozambican military — through special forces, commandos, marines — to establish sovereignty over their own territory. And this is what the Mozambican authorities have asked us.”

The idea has not yet been “discussed amongst the member states at the political level, but we will discuss the subject with our colleagues at the next opportunity,” Cravinho said. 

Still, work at a technical level is already underway. The European External Action Service, the bloc’s diplomatic body, has prepared a paper detailing options. “I would expect over the next three, four months for the EU response to crystalize,” Cravinho said. 

While the EU deliberates, Lisbon is planning to work with Mozambique on security at a bilateral level: “We will send a staff of approximately 60 trainers to Mozambique to train marines and commandos,” said a Portuguese official. 

It’s unclear if the EU has the appetite for such a mission. Critics say that despite EU talk about “strategic autonomy,” member states may not want to increase the bloc’s military presence. 

Already, the EU has struggled to fully maintain some of its existing military missions. The EU peacekeeping mission in Bosnia-Herzegovina had problems finding countries willing to replace a few hundred reserve troops the U.K. withdrew following Brexit. And Operation Irini, the EU naval mission in the Central Mediterranean, is continuously asking for more assets that member states are reluctant to provide. 

Yet Cravinho remained positive.  

“Force generation is still an issue,” he conceded, and EU hard power is “work in progress,” but “we are moving in the right direction.”

He noted that countries far away from Africa like Estonia, Sweden and Denmark have all sent soldiers to the French-led military missions in the Sahel.

“There has been a widening of the understanding of the EU interests as being the interests of all of us,” he said. 

Lisbon will push its point on May 28 at the informal gathering of EU defense ministers every rotating presidency organizes. Representatives from several African authorities will also participate. Already, Jean-Claude Kassi Brou, president of the Economic Community of West African States, has agreed to attend. 

“We should have eight to 10 representatives of African authorities,” said Cravinho.