Among the atrocities committed by the Portuguese, it is possible to list the massacres in Xinavane, Mueda, Mucumbura, Wiriyamu, Chawole, Inhaminga, among others. University of Coimbra’s Documentation Center “25 de Abril” has a rich collection about what happened in Wiriyamu, with a hundred articles and newspaper clippings from the most diverse countries that participated in spreading information about the acts of the Portuguese in the region. On Saturday, December 16, 1972, Portuguese soldiers killed approximately 400 Mozambicans in Wiriyamu. Today, in the old village of Wiriyamu, there is a monument with the bones of the victims.
Furthermore, there is evidence published by Le Monde Diplomatique (1972) that two South African pilots were hired as mercenaries by Portugal, and carried out secret chemical warfare missions against nationalist fighters in northern Mozambique. The operation was aimed at destroying the crops that would feed FRELIMO guerrillas, using the substance 2,4‐D, Dichlorophenoxyacetic Acid, which was among those used by the U.S. in Vietnam and World War II.
(Source.)
As a complement to the concentrationary policy of interning the African populations in large villages, the military hierarchy would use, from 1971 onward, the desperate option of “cleanup” operations, already largely implemented in Northeast Mozambique and on the eastern shore of Lake Malawi. These were meant to eradicate villages, exterminating all their inhabitants and emptying the territory to block the path of the guerrillas.
By the end of 1972 the “cleanup” operations along the Zambezi, from Mucanha and Mucumbura to Inhaminga, started to prefigure a wider genocidal strategy. […] Soon […] the 6th Commando Group arrived in helicopters, surrounded Wiriyamu and entered it. The people were lined up, men in one group, women in another. For the most part they were then shot, but others were herded into houses which were set on fire, while some of the children were kicked to death and other individuals were murdered in various atrocious ways. […] At the same time, the rural areas were bombed, eventually with napalm, before the launching of “cleanup” operations to exterminate the remaining populations, supposedly in contact with the guerrillas.
And the Estado Novo’s colonies were all in Afrasia (not merely Africa as such).
It really bums me out seeing somebody deny that the Iberian parafascists engaged in white supremacist violence. I am guessing that that is a product of the Portuguese education system rather than a conscious distortion, but still it really depresses me. It’s like nobody cares that the Iberian parafascists massacred Afrasians.
I’m surprised that nobody defended the Western Allies’ takeover of former Axis empires yet. I am going to write this to prevent any attempts:
The Western Allies reused the Empire of Japan’s system of forced prostitution.
Italian anticommunists pardoned Fascists while punishing thousands of partisans; there was no equivalent to the Nuremberg Trials for the Italian Fascists; the liberal bourgeoisie refused to prosecute Fascists for their atrocities in Ethiopia; and there were continuities between Fascism & the post‐1945 Italian police.
When the Western Allies took Algeria from the Axis, they let the fascists continue running the internment camps; important elements of the Fascist era survived in postwar France.
The U.S. Army continued keeping Jews in the Axis’s concentration camps (‘We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them, except that we do not exterminate them.’ — Harry Truman, Sept. 1946); West Germany’s régime was polluted with surviving Axis personnel; fascist elements survived in West Germany.
Somebody could argue that there was no alternative to the Western Allies, but plenty of partisans were active in France, for example, and the Eastern Allies could have reached every Axis‐occupied region given enough time.
I’ll freely concede that the Western Allies were better than the Axis… but that’s not exactly saying much.