Delaying a Showdown

No one left happy. After one of the longest and most acrimonious sessions in the 40-year history of the Commonwealth, a New Zealander complained: "The British were incredibly stupid and the Africans overemotional."

The paramount issue at the Singapore meeting of Commonwealth leaders was Britain's intention to resume arms sales to the white-supremacist regime of South Africa. At one point during the debate, the heads of delegations from the 31 Commonwealth nations left their huge elliptical conference table and retired to a basement room, locking the doors to all aides. There the heads of state threshed out the highly charged issue. They reached grudging agreement on a compromise, but then, in an atmosphere that one participant described as "unbelievably emotional and bitter," redebated it during the formal session until 4 the next morning.

What finally emerged was a plan that may merely delay a fateful showdown. For the next several months, an eight-member panel will study the recent increase in Soviet naval activity in the Indian Ocean, which Britain's Prime Minister Edward Heath claims has made the sale of frigates and other military equipment to the Pretoria regime a strategic necessity.

With typical bluntness and single-mindedness, Heath refused to budge from his determination to make the sale. At the same time, the Commonwealth's African members--particularly Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia--steadfastly maintained their total opposition to handing modern arms to South Africa's apartheid rulers. Unless one or the other undergoes a change of heart, the crunch may yet come.

Bellyful. If it does, it could bring a walkout of several Black African nations and possibly India and Canada as well. "If Heath goes through with the arms deal," said Uganda's Milton Obote, "he will be giving the Russians--and later the Chinese--an open invitation to go to Africa and replace the British and other Western powers."

For his part, Heath seemed to have had a bellyful of criticism. After his marathon session with other P.M.s, the British Prime Minister is reported to have remarked acidly: "I got the impression some of them didn't know where the Indian Ocean was."

Heath is certain to hear a good deal more criticism. Back in Britain, former Prime Minister Harold Wilson, whose Labor government banned arms sales to South Africa in 1964, seemed to be setting the stage for a major political contest on the issue. Speaking in Norwich, Wilson labeled his successor a "pathetic" politician who displayed "mulish stubbornness" and "personal prejudice" in Singapore and who proved that he was "not big enough to stand up to the bullyboys in his own party."

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