Section 1

Introduction

Operation Rachel, an arms destruction operation, conducted by the police of the Republic of Mozambique and the South African Police Service started in 1995. The overall aim of Operation Rachel was to locate abandoned and hidden arms caches left over from the civil war in Mozambique, and to destroy their contents. The collaboration between the two police agencies is stipulated in a presidential agreement of co-operation and mutual assistance in the field of crime combating (as contained in Section Two). Under the framework of this agreement, the combined Operation Rachel successes include the destruction of over 20 000 rifles, over 7 000 grenades, 8 700 mortars and mortar bombs and several million rounds of small arms ammunition that have been destroyed on-site in Mozambique. The exact number of weapons and ammunition destroyed per operation is presented in Section Six.

The success of the operations is largely based on the collaborative manner in which the two police agencies have undertaken this joint venture; each sharing their experience, expertise, resources and time.

Section Three outlines the training and capacity building that went into preparing the teams for undertaking the operations.

Section Four focuses on the application of this training in maintaining information networks to source abandoned arms caches. The initial operations were funded from the budget of the South African Police Service; in more recent operations both private sector and government donors have made contribution (as contained in Section Five).

Section Six gives a description and breakdown of the actual destructions per operation.

The last section is a short overview of the process of the collection and destruction of small arms and light weapons by CCM through its 'Transforming Arms Into Ploughshares' (TAE) project.

This publication is deliberately produced in binder form so as to update the statistics on destruction on a regular basis rather than reproduce a publication every year.