Maputo — Mozambican musicians Roberto Chitsonzo and Joao Carlos Scwalbach on Monday night launched a six minute compact disk, entitled "Bayete, Comandantes da Verdade !" ("Hail, Commanders of Truth !"), in homage to murdered journalist Carlos Cardoso.
The title is drawn from a piece written by Graca Machel in 2001, in which she compared her husband, the country's first President, Samora Machel, to Cardoso, and to murdered economist Antonio Siba-Siba Macuacua, as three men of different generations, but fighting for the same ideals, with the same courage, and meeting the same brutal death.
Speaking at the launch ceremony, the country's foremost writer, novelist Mia Couto, declared "Cardoso spoke up when many of us were silent, Cardoso fought when many of us held back".
Society's real tribute to Cardoso, he added, was that "We did not shut up about this murder". As a result a trial was held and six of the murderers sentenced to lengthy jail terms.
"We can be proud that the trial worked out well", said Couto. This put Mozambique among the small minority of countries where people who murder journalists are hauled before the courts - Couto recalled the statistics made available by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), according to which, in 94 per cent of cases of murdered journalists the culprits are never brought to trial.
Couto called for the same pressure to be brought to bear on the authorities over the assassination of Siba-Siba Macuacua.
This young economist, only 33 at the time of his death, was appointed interim chairperson of the ailing Austral Bank, when it came close to collapse in April 2001, and was abandoned by its private shareholders.
Siba-Siba started investigating the bank's finances, and published a list of over 1,200 debtors. He was murdered in his office at the bank's headquarters on 11 August 2001, and his body hurled down the stairwell.
"There is a strategy of forgetting that will consign this case to oblivion, unless civil society fights to keep it alive", warned Couto. "The heroes of the Cardoso murder case are those who ensured that the case could not be shelved. We must do the same in the Siba-Siba case".
In his sleeve notes to the CD, Couto wrote that, after Cardoso's death, "there was no truce, no discouragement among those who fought for justice. Even when they had to face slanders and lies, their voices did not fall silent. And they have won.
They stopped the case from being forgotten. The suspects (or some of them) were detained, the trial was held, and the untouchables found themselves where they never imagined they would be. And an entire nation watched and listened as justice was done".
Couto believed that initiatives such as this new CD can help "keep belief alive and encourage other young people to embrace the cause of truth and of ethics".
"The little that we can change will be a great deal if we do it in the right direction", he added. "And that direction is to build a Mozambique that is a clean house, in which decent, working people can live".
All the proceeds from sales of the CD will go towards the Carlos Cardoso Fund. This fund was set up in December 2000, shortly after the murder. It is administered by Cardoso's widow, Nina Berg, the family's lawyer, Lucinda Cruz, and former finance minister Abdul Magid Osman, and audited by the company Ernst and Young. The purpose of the fund is to honour the memory of Carlos Cardoso, and to assist in the continuing investigation into the murder, and the legal costs involved.
