No Squawks, Please

Everybody was rushing to leave Sir Roy Welensky's rickety Rhodesia federation. Black-ruled Nyasaland was already assured of Britain's permission to secede. Northern Rhodesia's African-dominated Assembly last week voted, 21 to 14, to demand immediate secession. Even whiteruled Southern Rhodesia was now calling for "a clean break." Or, as the new Prime Minister, Winston Field, put it at the opening session of Parliament in Salisbury, "The question of Southern Rhodesian secession will not arise. We shall have been seceded from."

Britain's Deputy Prime Minister R. A. ("Rab") Butler had just spent two weeks in the Rhodesias, and concluded that a breakup of the ten-year-old federation was inevitable. Sometime in the coming spring, Butler is expected to call a conference in London to overhaul the constitution of Northern Rhodesia, and give the region the right to secede; he also hoped that he might salvage from the federation's wreckage some kind of economic link between the two Rhodesias. Field's aim is to win independence for Southern Rhodesia before Britain has a chance to draft a new constitution that would assure Southern Rhodesia's 3,616,000 blacks of majority rule over the 221,000 whites.

Field wants no squawks from native agitators while he tries to bring off his plan. This month his police arrested African Nationalist Leader Joshua Nkomo and seven other former leaders of the banned Zimbabwe African People's Union for taking part in an "illegal procession" and "obstructing police" at a protest rally, charges that could mean up to ten years in prison. With that. Field last week sent Parliament a spate of proposals that would give police broad new search and arrest powers, permit the whipping of prisoners (up to a maximum of ten lashes), and make hanging mandatory for anyone convicted of arson or the use of explosives.

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