When a Nation Shuns Its Tribes : A COMPLICATED WAR; The Harrowing of Mozambique, <i> By William Finnegan (University of California Press: $25; 368 pp.) </i>

Renamo, the Mozambican National Resistance, has laid waste not just to a country but to most attempts at analyzing it. For those who observed the world through a bifocal Soviet-American lens, the end of the Cold War has only seen an intensification of the civil war between Renamo and Frelimo, the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique, which has governed since independence. South African support, a major factor in Renamo’s rise, has long since dwindled, yet the massacres, the looting and kidnaping and destruction of crops, continue to produce tides of refugees. The scale and relentless intensity of the violence in Mozambique will eventually exhaust casual efforts to understand.

And since the New World Order has returned Mozambique and other Third World battlegrounds to a customary oblivion, it’s easy to stop trying. So if by an accident of the news you read about a Mozambican child forced by Renamo guerrillas to burn the hut where its family has taken refuge, what can you do but mentally flinch? To analyze such things itself seems immoral. Instead, you start to think in simpler terms: disease, evil, unfathomable brutality.

If Americans cared more about Mozambique, this would probably be a controversial book. William Finnegan hasn’t flinched: He went to Mozambique with the conventional view that Renamo came “from Hell” by way of South Africa; after two months there and a good deal of subsequent research, he realized that “Renamo did not come from Hell. Renamo came from Mozambique.” That is the simple thesis of “A Complicated War.”

Writing about a country as physically and intellectually inaccessible as Mozambique takes courage, patience and especially a willingness to pay attention to the particular. Finnegan has all of these. He brings to his subject a reporter’s instinct for the facts of the story and a writer’s sensitivity to character and language. His first book, “Crossing the Line,” described a year of teaching in a mixed-race high school in Cape Town; “Dateline Soweto” pursued black South African journalists through the state of emergency in 1986. All three of his books combine political reportage, research and personal narrative.

It’s not easy to find a natural structure to contain this hybrid genre, and structure is “A Complicated War’s” only real weakness. Finnegan, a longtime traveler, has chosen to organize this book by place; but he hasn’t written a travel book. What matters isn’t whether something happened inBeira or Zambezia but how it changed his grasp of the meaning of the war. As a result, individual sections lack the sense of a discovery unfolding as in “Crossing the Line.” For want of a foothold in the narrative, an important passage about Finnegan’s shifting view of Renamo is buried in the notes.

All this is barely even secondary to the book’s power and thoughtfulness.

How did Renamo come from Mozambique? In part, “A Complicated War” is about the failure of African nationhood. When it became independent in 1975, after centuries of Portuguese colonial indifference and cruelty, and after a decade of Frelimo’s guerrilla war of liberation, Mozambique didn’t exist as a coherent state.

Thirteen years later, Finnegan encountered Mozambicans who couldn’t name their president and for whom “Mozambique itself seemed to be a fairly hazy idea.” Frelimo, spurred by Marxist-Leninist ideology and the need to forge a country, declared the end of tribal “obscurantism,” ignored the authority of local chiefs and shamans, and drove people into “communal villages.” All of this centralization didn’t establish a national identity, but it managed to turn large sections of the peasantry against leaders who seemed to have replaced a colonial elite with a revolutionary one.

As Finnegan says, “Many new governments in Africa have alienated large parts of their own populations. Few have had the bad luck to live next door to a powerful foe ready to exploit their every misstep.” Renamo began as colonial soldiers, Frelimo deserters and other malcontents under the command of Portuguese settlers and Rhodesian military men out to reclaim Mozambique from the Mozambicans and punish Frelimo for its support of the black guerrillas in what would become Zimbabwe. But Renamo’s ability to hold territory and terrorize the countryside improved drastically after 1981, under South African tutelage.

Finnegan finds no reason to believe that Pretoria actually wanted Renamo to take power, for which Renamo was completely unready: “There was little or no evidence of any sustained political discussion, or any line of ideological development, within Renamo.” South Africa simply wanted to ensure that a black-ruled country on its border, led by a party some Westerners held as a model for the rest of Africa, would fail. A decade later, with South Africa officially no longer involved, its policy is an indisputable success.

“From its origins as a puppet group,” Finnegan writes, “Renamo evolved into a broad, violent collection of Frelimo’s enemies. . . . The history of Mozambique’s peasantry was one of bottomless pain and sorrow, and its great store of brutalized rage was now being used, cynically and savagely, to destroy the country’s future.”

A proxy war became a civil war, the government on one side; on the other, bands of peasants led by politically unformed military men. But in a war like this, of course, everyone in Mozambique is involved or affected. By the end of the decade, in a country of 16 million, 900,000 were dead and 3 million driven from their homes.

The war goes on, not because of foreign intervention of ideological fanaticism so much as hunger, despair and the almost unstoppable momentum that such violence produces. Wandering through methodically pillaged towns, talking to soft-voiced refugees, Finnegan learns that some--not most--atrocities seem to be committed by government troops, perhaps including a notorious highway massacre widely attributed to Renamo.

In one district, the war seems a struggle between two powerful women: a magician on the side of Renamo, and an official in the Ministry of Agriculture. Young men slip from one army to the other, or try to stay out of the clutches of both. The life story of Dividas, Finnegan’s knowing interpreter, takes him through two Mozambican factions and all over East Africa; it seems to encompass the ambiguity and caprice of the country’s recent history.

“Local conditions dictated who Renamo was locally”: With every political conflict, every configuration of power, the war has a slightly different motive and is perpetuated by different forces. It has become indistinguishable from the character of the country, like geography or economic life. For that reason, in spite of foreign withdrawal, multi-party elections and the start of talks between Frelimo and Renamo, there’s no sign that it will end soon.

At a certain point, though, analysis stops. “Most of (Renamo’s) brutalities,” Finnegan says, “had discernible motives,” and he then explains that the town “where the worst single massacre of civilians” took place was “a thriving town, and as such was widely seen as an advertisement for the government.” Beyond this, one can’t explain why hospital patients were therefore slaughtered; or why Renamo is more brutal than the UNITA guerrillas in Angola; or why the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka are so much crueler than the Karen rebels in Burma. From these mysteries Finnegan doesn’t try to wring answers.

What absorbs him most are the individuals caught in the war. He spends several days making the rounds of a devastated district with the agriculture official, a woman named Lina Magaia. She plainly loves the farmers she’s trying to help; she is energetic, imperious and plagued with frustration. Unlike most Mozambicans who, Finnegan hears, “have to be laid-back just to avoid having their personalities destroyed by disappointment,” Lina wears passion on the sleeve of her black sweat shirt. And her grief echoes in the book’s last lines.

For all the sadness of Mozambique, though, “A Complicated War” draws its greatest power from the common decency Finnegan keeps encountering. In Malawi he meets a district commissioner responsible for 220,000 Mozambican refugees. It’s a position that normally would produce cynical corruption at best. But Geoff Mwanja tells Finnegan, “We cannot close our eyes to what we see. Because you have clothes, you must not think you are all right. That naked man? He is you . We are all involved. Man himself did this.”