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March 2, 1976, Page 8Buy Reprints The New York Times Archives

LISBON, Feb. 29—Portugal is receiving a new wave of refugees, this time from its formes East African colony of Mozambique.

Unlike the refugees from Angola, the Portuguese from Mozambique are not fleeing civil war but rather the rigors of independence.

For the past month, almost daily flights have brought refugees from Mozambique with litter tales of “persecution,” work camps and now the nationalization of property.

A new airlift that began last week to Windhoek in SouthWest Africa is expected to bring out more than 7,000 Portuguese fleeing continued unrest in southern Angola.

It is estimated that more than half a million refugees have fled the two former colonies to Portugal in the past year, and more are coming.

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Attention has focused onl recently on Mozambique, where the dominant nationalist movement, the Mozambique Liberation Front, took over without the upheavals caused by the three warring independence movements In Angola.

In the last few weeks, however, there have been urgent appeals by lawyers and relatives to start an airlift to Mozambique to save the remaining some 50,000 Pprtuguese and an unknown number of Mozambicans opposed to the new regime.

At present, there are no, direct flights between Portugal and Mozambique and the refugees are coming by commercial lines through Angola.

The Minister of Cooperation with Former Colonies, Vitor Cresno, said recently to the weekly O Jornal that he was concerned over the fate of the Portuguese community in Mozambique.

The minister, Portugal's former ‘High Commissioner in Mozambique, has urged Portuguese settlers to stay in Mozambique and to work for the newly independent state.

Now, however, he insists that “the rules must be clearly defined” if Portuguese are going to remain in Mozambique, particularly in the civil service. Mozambique has called for Portuguese technical assistance and there are now about 120 volunteers.

The Portuguese weekly Tempo recently published a dramatic appeal for help from 86 prisoners in the Maputo Industrial Penitentiary. Some of them have been held since March 1975—although the country received independence only in June and the Ministry of Cooperation has claimed that all preindependence prisoners were released.

The newspaper also published a list of another hundred names of people said to be imprisoned in different parts of the country.

“There's no future for Portuguese ‘ in Mozambique, only persecution, insults and provocations,” a 58‐year‐old office worker; said, refusing to give his name. He carried two small plastic bags with clothing, which he said was all he had saved from 30 years of work in Mozambique. He has a brother somewhere in Portugal and is going to try to find him and begin a new life.

He and a group of refugees arrived here from Mozambique Thursday and were waiting in the airport for the National Refugee Agency to find some kind of lodgings for them.

Lidia Sousa Pereira, a 49year‐old woman who came here with her daughter on the because of constant harassment and arbitrary arrests.

“You had to take your identity card with you to the grocery shop or you'd be arrested,” she said. “They were always picking up people for nothing — like the boy arrested for working overtime or another one for carrying a piece of wire.”

None of the refugees in the group had suffered ill treatment but all said they knew of cases of torture and harassment.

Amilcar dos Santos Pereira, a former paratrooper, said he had seen civilians beaten up or arrested on,. any pretext—for parking on a sidewalk or accidentally driving into the ropes that cordon off the Government headquarters area.

“But it's the people who were with the Portuguese Army —blacks as well as whites—whose lives are in danger,” Mr. Pereira emphasized, He said he had received reports that about 60 of the 80 men in his army company, mostly blacks, had disappeared and had probably been killed.

When Mr. Pereira got out of the paratroops in October 1974, he took a job in a bank in Maputo, formerly Lourenco Marques, “so they wouldn't know I was a former military man.” But he was harassed by the secret police and so sent his wife and baby son to Portugal at the end of December and fled himself on Feb. 2. Since then, he has been sleeping in Lisbon police stations and trying to find a job. His wife is with relatives in a village in northern Portugal.

“The Portuguese have to get out of Mozambique or they'll all be killed,” he said flatly. He is now trying to persuade his mother, a widow, to leave now that their home and rock quarry have been nationalized.

A 34‐year‐old Portuguese journalist, who was arrested and held for two months in the Maputo penitentiary, said that the Mozambique Liberation Front had begun to arrest people “at random,” even before independence.

“Whole families have been detained and there are reports of many children dying,” he said.

Cases of Torture Reported

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