“He went fishing and never came back.”says Maundi*. Instead, we received a corpse. » In March 2022, soldiers beat Maundi’s uncle to death. Its only flaw: getting too close to TotalEnergies’ liquefied natural gas plant in Mozambique. Located in the province of Cabo Delgado, in the northeast of the country, the site is one of the emblematic projects of the multinational, valued at 23 billion dollars.
The local infrastructure of the French oil company is at the center of a jihadist insurgency that has plagued the region since 2017. When the rebellion reached the outskirts of its site, in March 2021, Total suspended its activities and left its infrastructure under protection. of the Mozambican armed forces, grouped in a unit called the Joint Task Force (JTF).
However, numerous testimonies like that of Maundi* accuse them of abuses against the civilian population for several years. In the summer of 2021, according to the newspaper politicalThe Mozambican army kidnapped and tortured dozens of civilians in metal containers for several weeks on the land granted to the project. In response, TotalEnergies responded that there was no “I never received any information indicating that such events actually took place.”. However, when contacted, the company said that Mozambique’s Attorney General had opened an investigation, at its request.
The documents prove that Total was aware of the abuses
According to unpublished Total documents that the world He was able to consult, however, these were not the first accusations against these soldiers. The reports of extortion, disappearances and even violence that caused the death of two fishermen are included in the quarterly social reports prepared by the Mozambique LNG teams themselves, the subsidiary through which Total leads the project. These reports are then transmitted to the program’s public funders, in this case the Italian export credit agency, SACE. It is with it and by virtue of the right of access to information that the Italian NGO ReCommon and the world were able to obtain these documents.
These reports describe a long list of violence against civilians, beginning in April 2021: “Since April 2, local residents have regularly reported human rights violations committed by the Joint Task Force (restrictions on freedom of movement, extortion, violence, arrests, disappearances)”details a report from September 2021.
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