“All must be beheaded”, Revelation of atrocities at French energy giant’s African stronghold - September 26, 2024

The shipping containers were a familiar sight to the villagers of northern Mozambique’s remote and troubled Afungi peninsula: a dozen steel boxes lined up end-to-end with a guarded gate in the middle. They formed a makeshift barricade at the entrance to an enormous natural gas plant that the French energy giant TotalEnergies was building in a region plagued by a violent Islamist insurgency. The villagers had been caught in the crossfire between the Mozambican army and ISIS-affiliated militants. Having fled their homes, they had gone to seek the protection of government soldiers. Instead, they found horror. The soldiers accused the villagers of being members of the insurgency. They separated the men — a group of between 180 and 250 — from the women and children. Then they crammed their prisoners into the shipping containers on either side of the entrance, hitting, kicking and striking them with rifle butts. The soldiers held the men in the containers for three months. They beat, suffocated, starved, tortured and finally killed their detainees. Ultimately, only 26 prisoners survived. Through interviews with survivors and witnesses, and a door-to-door survey of the victims’ villages, I was able to reconstruct a detailed account of the atrocities carried out during the summer of 2021 by a commando unit led by an officer who said his mission was to protect “the project of Total.”

News of the massacre can only add to the gathering sense of catastrophe that now surrounds a project that was once — together with the development of a second gas field by ExxonMobil — heralded as the biggest private investment ever made in Africa, with a total cost of $50 billion. Construction on the gas plant has been halted since 2021 when the Islamist rebels overran the region, massacring more than 1,000 people. French authorities are already investigating TotalEnergies’ management over the deaths of its contractors in that attack. This second bloodbath, reported here for the first time, was carried out not by Islamists but by a Mozambican military unit operating out of the TotalEnergies gatehouse. The energy company’s alliance with the Mozambican military inevitably raises questions over the leadership of TotalEnergies CEO and Chairman Patrick Pouyanné. He had intended the Mozambican mega-project to be the showpiece of his ambitions for a low-carbon future. Instead, his strategy of high-stakes investments in unstable parts of the world now risks falling foul of mounting legal efforts to bring multinational corporations to international justice...

Mozambique LNG, TotalEnergies’ publically responded to the allegations in the attachment above.