Theo Neethling, University of the Free State

Recent events in Palma, a town in the volatile Cabo Delgado province in the north of Mozambique, have taken bloodshed in the region to new levels. Dozens of people were killed when hundreds of Islamist militants stormed the town on Wednesday, 25 March. They targeted shops, banks and a military barracks.

The attack has been devastating for the people living in the area – as well as the country. The escalating violence has already left at least a thousand dead and displaced hundreds of thousands more.

The conflict has put a temporary lid on plans that have been in the making for more than a decade since rich liquefied natural gas (LNG) deposits were discovered in the Rovuma Basin, just off the coast of Cabo Delgado. Western majors like Total, Exxon Mobil, Chevron and BP entered the Mozambique LNG industry as well as Japan’s Mitsui, Malaysia’s Petronas and China’s CNPC.

The gas projects are estimated to be worth US$60 billion in total. Some observers recently predicted that Mozambique could become one of the top ten LNG producers in the world.

The development of the projects had led to the area becoming a hive of economic activity.

The plan was for Palma to become a LNG manufacturing hub where hundreds of skilled workers would be located. And, more broadly, the hope was that it would drive the rapid advancement of a country that ranks close to the bottom of the United Nations Human Development Index. More than 70% of the population have been classified as “multidimensionally poor” by the United Nations Development Programme.

The LNG projects in the northern Cabo Delgado area represented a silver lining of hope. Since 2012 the major multinational energy companies have spent billions of dollars on developing the offshore gas sites. Today, offshore exploration in the Cabo Delgado area includes Africa’s three largest LNG projects. These are the Mozambique LNG Project (involving Total and previously Anadarko) worth $20 billion; the Coral FLNG Project (involving Eni and Exxon Mobil) worth $4.7 billion; and the Rovuma LNG Project (involving Exxon Mobil, Eni and CNPC) worth $30 billion.

Production was scheduled to start in 2024 but intensifying attacks near the gas site on the Afungi peninsula are now posing serious challenges to the production time lines.

There have been no material benefits for the people of Cabo Delgado thus far. Moreover, many local people feel deeply aggrieved because many were evicted and had to relocate soon after the discovery of gas in Cabo Delgado to make way for LNG infrastructure development.

History of instability

Cabo Delgado is Mozambique’s most northern province. Neglected over many years, the people who live there have been politically marginalised. And the area is underdeveloped.

Since independence in 1975 investment, and rising incomes, were largely confined to the capital Maputo in the south as well as the southern parts of the country.

In addition, the central government in Maputo has only had a fragile and precarious control over the territory and borders of the country. A 16-year civil war that involved clashes between the central government and Renamo, a militant organisation and political movement during the liberation struggle and now opposition party, claimed more than a million lives.

More recently, since 2017, the militant Islamic movement, Ansar al-Sunna, locally known as Al-Shabaab, has been active in Cabo Delgado. It now poses the biggest security threat in the country, rendering some of the northern parts almost ungovernable.

The militants took advantage of the Mozambican government’s failure to exercise control over the entire territory of the country.

Ansar al-Sunna reportedly pledged allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in April 2018. It was acknowledged as an affiliate of ISIS-Core in August 2019. In view of this, the US Department of State has designated Ansar al-Sunna Mozambique, which it refers to as ISIS-Mozambique, as a foreign terrorist organisation.

What makes this armed force so significant is that the movement has orchestrated a series of large scale and targeted attacks. In 2020 this led to the temporary capturing of the strategic port of Mocimboa da Praia in Cabo Delgado.

In addition, the turbulence caused by the militants’ attacks has displaced nearly 670,000 people within northern Mozambique. Obviously, foreign companies in the LNG industry with their considerable investments feel threatened, especially at the current stage where final investment decisions have to be taken.

In recent months the situation in Cabo Delgado has gone from bad to worse. In November 2020, dozens of people were reportedly beheaded by the militants. Now the bloodshed has spread to Palma.

Amid the development of an increasingly alarming human rights situation towards the end of last year, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, appealed for urgent measures to protect civilians. She described the situation as “desperate” and one of “grave human rights abuses”. Bachelet also stated that more than 350,000 people had been displaced since 2018.

Growing risk

There is little doubt that Islamist insurgents are increasing the scale of their activities in Cabo Delgado. A lack of governance and a proper security response by both the Mozambican government and southern African leaders make this a case of high political risk for the LNG industry.

The escalation of the insurgency can potentially jeopardise the successful unlocking of Mozambique’s resource wealth. Until now, the main LNG installations and sites have not been targeted, but the attacks in Palma have brought the turbulence dangerously close to some of the installations.

The Mozambican armed forces are clearly stretched beyond the point where they can protect the local communities. A part of the solution lies in Southern African Development Community or at least South African military support to stabilise Cabo Delgado and restore law and order in the short term. Wider international support might even be necessary.

But this would require the Mozambican government to change its stance by allowing multinational foreign military forces on its soil.

At the same time, a long term solution should be pursued. This will require better governance of the northern areas and the local people in what has been called a forgotten province.

It is clear that Cabo Delgado is an area which the central government in Maputo is unable to control, govern effectively, or even influence. In short, weak state institutions – including weak armed forces – are key to the problems of Mozambique and specifically the turbulence in the northern parts.

Theo Neethling, Professor of Political Science, Department of Political Studies and Governance, University of the Free State

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Rory Hopcraft, University of Plymouth, Kevin Jones, University of Plymouth, Kimberly Tam, University of Plymouth

It’s estimated that 90% of the world’s trade is transported by sea. As consumers, we rarely give much thought to how the things we buy make their way across the planet and into our homes. That is, until an incident like the recent grounding of a huge container ship, the Ever Given, in the Suez Canal exposes the weaknesses in this global system.

High winds have been blamed for the container ship blocking the narrow strait, which serves as a trade artery that connects the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. But with shipping so heavily reliant on such narrow channels, the potential for these incidents is ever-present.

As researchers of maritime security, we often simulate incidents like the Ever Given grounding to understand the probable long and short-term consequences. In fact, the recent event is near identical to something we have been discussing for the last month, as it represents an almost worst-case scenario for the Suez Canal and for knock-on effects on global trade.

The Suez Canal is the gateway for the movement of goods between Europe and Asia, and it was responsible for the transit of over 19,000 ships in 2019, equating to nearly 1.25 billion tonnes of cargo. This is thought to represent around 13% of world trade so any blockage is likely to have a significant impact.

The Suez Canal Authority started expanding the strait in 2014 to raise its daily capacity from 49 vessels at present to 97 by 2023. This gives an indication of how many ships are likely to be affected by the current situation. There are reports that the incident has already halted the passage of ten crude tankers carrying 13 million barrels of oil, and that any ships rerouted will have 15 days added to their voyage.

The severity of the incident is because of the dimensions of the vessels using the canal. The Ever Given is 400 metres long, 59 metres at its widest point and 16 metres deep below the waterline. This makes it one of the largest container ships in the world, capable of carrying over 18,000 containers. Depending on the severity of the grounding, the salvage and re-floating of this type of ship is a complex operation, requiring specialist equipment and potentially a lot of time.

While the exact number of container ships of this size transiting the canal is unknown, container vessels account for almost a third of all canal traffic. Their depth and girth make for difficult navigation within the canal. When operating within such tight margins, ships of this size have to maintain a certain speed to keep their steering effective.

With the capacity to carry over 150,000 tonnes of cargo, these ships cannot stop suddenly. If something does go wrong, crews have very little time to react before the ship runs aground.

This makes a blockage of this type almost inevitable, especially considering that the length of these ships far exceeds the width of the canal. But what makes this incident particularly disruptive was the location of the grounding. Since the canal was expanded, the Mediterranean end of the Canal now has two channels for ships to take, allowing seamless transiting even if one channel is blocked.

But, in its location at the Suez end of the Canal, the Ever Given was blocking the only channel for ships to pass through. As ships travel through the 193km of canal in convoys with tightly scheduled slots, vessels leading these groups can block the channel like this, creating a backlog of ships or even collisions. It’s unclear if the goods being delayed are time-sensitive (for example: medicine or food), but understanding what effects these incidents have on trade can help us preempt effective solutions.

Could it have been worse?

We’re also interested in what other factors can influence an event like this. One element is the time of year. Traditionally, in the build-up to Christmas, October and November are busy times for maritime trade. A disruption in the global supply chain during this period would have a far greater impact, and could coincide with difficult weather conditions which would exacerbate things, like visibility-reducing fog.

Another element is the unevenness of the canal’s banks. If the incident had occurred only a few kilometres down towards the seaport of Suez where the strait ends, the ship would have run aground on banks composed of rock, not sand. An impact here might have caused serious damage to the hull, making salvage operations harder.

While not identical to our team’s table-top scenario, the latest incident does highlight that as ships get larger and more complicated, their reliance on narrow shipping routes constructed in an earlier age looks increasingly risky. This blockage will have limited long-term implications, but incidents like it could be triggered maliciously, causing targeted or widespread impacts on global and local trade. We need to be more aware of these weaknesses as our world becomes more connected.

Rory Hopcraft, Industrial Researcher, University of Plymouth; Kevin Jones, Executive Dean, Faculty of Science and Engineering, University of Plymouth, and Kimberly Tam, Lecturer in Cyber Security, University of Plymouth

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Armida L. M. van Rij, King’s College London

When Saudi Arabian dissident and journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, had not expected the outcry that would follow. For perhaps the first time in recent history, Saudi critics and Saudi supporters were united in their condemnation of the extrajudicial killing.

The allegations – that Khashoggi, who had disappeared after entering the embassy on October 2, had been murdered and his body dismembered and disposed of by Saudi agents – sparked a diplomatic crisis in Istanbul, Riyadh and London, but not in Washington DC. The then US president, Donald Trump, continued to publicly support Saudi Arabia and Prince Mohammed, its de facto ruler. Two-and-a-half years later, the White House has a new occupant. With a CIA investigation into Khashoggi’s murder now declassified, will the US president, Joe Biden, shift the gear on US-Saudi relations?

What the headline of the CIA’s report into the murder of Jamal Khashoggi would be has been relatively clear all this time: Prince Mohammed approved an operation to “capture or kill” Khashoggi. And yet Trump was not interested in justice for the murdered journalist. Trump’s focus on pursuing a transactional relationship with the Gulf state, quantifiable in billions made from weapons deals and arms exports, formed the baseline for the US relationship with Saudi Arabia during his presidency.

Biden, however, so far appears interested in restoring the importance placed on values in international relations, and has been more reticent about engaging with Prince Mohammed directly during his first month in office. The White House has signalled that Biden is looking to rebalance the relationship with Saudi Arabia. It is a challenge many US presidents have grappled with before. Biden will supposedly seek to carefully balance cooperation with a long-standing US ally, while taking more of a stand than his predecessor did against Saudi Arabia’s excesses, such as its waging of war in Yemen, which has sparked the largest humanitarian crisis in the world.

So far, Biden has ended US support for Saudi offensive operations in Yemen. He has also put a temporary stop to arms exports to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, including precision-guided munitions, which have been used to target Yemeni civilians. This is significant, given that in the period 2015 to 2019 just under 75% of Saudi arms imports came from the US. Alongside the publication of the CIA report, secretary of state Antony Blinken announced a “Khashoggi ban”, which imposes visa restrictions on any individuals who have threatened dissidents overseas on behalf of a foreign government. The US has immediately used the ban to impose visa restrictions on 76 Saudi nationals.

Still friends?

Ultimately though, none of these measures directly target or affect Prince Mohammed, who the CIA points to as the person who approved Khashoggi’s murder. While the White House has tried to send signals to Saudi Arabia and may not favour Prince Mohammed, it is likely he will take over the throne from his father and rule the kingdom for decades to come. The Biden administration may dislike Prince Mohammed personally, but they will probably need to work with him if the US is to maintain a working relationship with Saudi Arabia.

The Biden administration is sending a strong signal that past erratic behaviour by the crown prince will no longer be tolerated. However, it is not clear what, exactly, any consequences in response to such behaviour would be and the extent to which Biden is willing to put the US-Saudi alliance on the line. It is also unclear whether the Biden administration will seek to target Prince Mohammed individually.

Saudi Arabia anticipated Biden’s position and has sought to sweeten the new administration by releasing Saudi women’s rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul from prison and restoring diplomatic relations with Qatar. Having heard the promises Biden made while on the campaign trail, during which he called Saudi Arabia a “pariah state”, the timing of these is no coincidence.

The extent to which the US-Saudi relationship will indeed cool remains to be seen. Saudi Arabia is still considered a key US ally to hedge against Iranian influence in the Middle East. Iran has steadily increased its reach in the region through proxy organisations which operate in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Equally, the US may simply believe that they cannot afford to lose Saudi Arabia as an ally in the Middle East, particularly as the Gulf state is considered to be a key ally in counter-terrorism efforts.

So, while the Biden administration may seek to distance itself from the cosy relationship that Prince Mohammed enjoyed with the Trump family and reset the relationship in that regard, it is unlikely that it will cut all diplomatic and political ties with Saudi Arabia.

Where does this leave justice for Jamal Khashoggi? The CIA report does clarify where his body is. It is unlikely that Prince Mohammed will ever be tried by an independent judiciary for his role in the murder, or that he will be directly sanctioned by the US. Two-and-a-half years on, we are no closer to justice.

Armida L. M. van Rij, Research Associate in Security and Defence Policy at the Policy Institute at King’s, King’s College London

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