The Shortened Fuse

Ceremonially wigged and gowned, Speaker of the House Arthur Stumbles eased himself into his heavy chair while his symbolic golden mace was laid on the table in front of him. Thus, making up in pomp what it lacks in representation, Rhodesia's white-dominated Parliament was called to order last week for the first time since Prime Minister Ian Smith seized independence.

The decorum was short-lived. Hardly had the session begun when Dr. Ahrn Palley, a balding pediatrician and an independent member from Salisbury, bounced to his feet with a point of order. "Certain Honorable Members in collusion have torn up the constitution under which this House meets," he roared. "The proceedings have no legal validity whatsoever." That was as far as he got. While his 50 fellow whites hooted and jeered ("The law is an ass!"), Palley was suspended from Parliament. Nine African deputies walked out with him.

Place of Slaughter. There were other demonstrations last week that hardly befitted a newly independent nation. At the industrial capital of Bulawayo (which means "Place of Slaughter" in the Sindebele language), a policeman shot and killed an African member of a mob stoning a bus. Soon the entire African community, usually docile, was up in arms. Half the city's labor force walked out in protest. Factories, shops and restaurants closed. Street sweepers laid down their brooms. At Bulawayo's fashionable Hotel Victoria, guests were forced to make their own beds. Tear gas and threats to fire all strikers finally restored a semblance of order, but not before black nationalist agitators had made their first successful show of force --and had been given their first martyr.

Most dangerous sparks of all, however, were flying in Zambia, Rhodesia's black-ruled northern neighbor, where moderate President Kenneth Kaunda was under mounting pressure to do something about the Smith takeover. Powerless to act on his own, and dependent on Rhodesian railroads and power to keep his vital copper exports flowing, Kaunda found himself being pressed to accept troops from those two eager conspirators, Egypt's Nasser and Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah, as well as military aid from Moscow and Peking. Kaunda wants no part of it. He believes there is real danger that Rhodesia could explode into a worldwide "racial or ideological war" unless Britain itself fills the military vacuum in Zambia. Only the British, he figures, could enter Rhodesia without spreading the war. The British, of course, say they have no intention of sending troops into Rhodesia, but Prime Minister Harold Wilson was seriously considering flying in at least a token R.A.F. contingent to man the key air strips in Zambia.

Blackout. Last week Kaunda's pleas for British troops carried a new urgency. A narrowly averted incident on the border with Rhodesia led him to pull his own small army back to Lusaka to avoid an accidental clash. In the rail center of Livingstone, the town's first race disturbance--a minor scuffle in which nobody was seriously hurt--caused 300 white railwaymen to strike for government protection, and the walkout crippled the nation's copper shipments. Three hundred miles to the north came the most serious incident of all: saboteurs blew up the main power line from Rhodesia, blacking out most of the copper mines.

In London, Harold Wilson felt pressures of his own. His cautious measures to bring Smith down had failed. Rebellion had not broken out in the ranks of Smith's civil service and armed forces, and it would be months before economic sanctions could have much effect. It was time for more pressure. As one Whitehall official put it: "The fuse has got to be shortened."

But how? Britain had promised the United Nations to impose an oil embargo on Rhodesia, but such a ban would be almost impossible to enforce, since neither of Rhodesia's two friendly neighbors, South Africa and Portuguese Angola, could be expected to cooperate. And though some oil producing nations agreed to a ban, others were quite ready to fill Rhodesia's orders.

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