Kissinger Starts a Final Crusade

Early this week Secretary of State Henry Kissinger embarks on his latest--and almost certainly last--diplomatic foray. It may also be his most dangerous and most difficult because its goal is nothing less than preventing a race war in southern Africa.

Last week, following a three-day meeting with South African Prime Minister John Vorster in Zurich, Kissinger flew to London, Paris and Hamburg to report on the talks' progress to America's allies, then returned to Washington to confer with President Ford. Almost immediately, Ford and Kissinger decided that the Secretary should proceed to southern Africa to try his special style of shuttle diplomacy. In the meantime, Vorster will meet with Rhodesia's stubborn Prime Minister Ian Smith. Vorster is also scheduled to deliver a political address that may prove to be an important policy statement on South Africa's future.

Kissinger's efforts on behalf of southern Africa have come none too soon--and, some fear, may be too late. Even as he conferred with Vorster last week, guerrilla raids continued in Rhodesia and Namibia (or South West Africa), the onetime League of Nations-mandated territory that South Africa has ruled since 1920. Across South Africa itself, a wave of rioting, looting and arson sputtered on in the nation's non-white urban ghettos for the sixth straight week.

Whites Threatened. Hardest hit last week was Cape Province, where 15 "coloreds" (as South Africans of mixed blood are known) were killed in a single night by police fire; among the victims was an eight-year-old boy. The incident occurred one day after Prime Minister Vorster had repeated in a speech to his party's faithful that colored people would never sit in South Africa's all-white Parliament. In the city of Paarl, 35 miles from Cape Town, the main business district was closed after hundreds of youths stoned shops and cars and tried to storm a police station. "It looks like a battlefield," said a police official. At Stellenbosch, roads leading to the nonwhite townships were closed by police. In Kimberley, the diamond-mining city in the center of the country, police clashed with a crowd of 700 students. In Manenburg, mobs stoned police and threatened to attack nearby white areas; the cops responded with rifle and shotgun fire, killing at least 14. All told, more than 325 people have been killed throughout the country since violence broke out at Soweto township near Johannesburg last June 16. Of these, all but two were black or colored.

Few white South Africans believe the long-feared Armageddon is at hand --the moment when the country's 18 million blacks, 2.3 million coloreds and 750,000 Asians would suddenly rise up against the 4.2 million whites. The whites, however, have deeply been shaken by the current violence and the realization that Africa's white bastion has at last become a theater of grave danger.

John Vorster is not yet prepared to negotiate a meaningful change in South Africa's system of apartheid, or "separate development." Late last week, though, the government announced some concessions "to eliminate outmoded practices that cause discontent." Henceforth, coloreds and Asians will be allowed to set up businesses in all industrial areas of the country and engage in trade outside their residential ghettos. They will also be able to serve on boards of racially mixed unions, and have been promised equal opportunity with whites in the civil service. Most of the rioting coloreds, however, are students with little Interest in improved business conditions--and nothing at all was conceded by the government to the blacks.

Vorster is convinced that if the Rhodesian and Namibian problems can be settled, his own country will gain some precious time in which to build a genuine detente with black Africa. For that reason he welcomed the Zurich meeting. For the benefit of his conservative constituency, he criticized a speech in which Kissinger openly denounced apartheid, and fretted that he would not negotiate with him on the Sabbath.* In truth, Vorster came to Zurich a chastened man prepared to do business. For his part, the Secretary easily extracted from Vorster enough concessions to justify the meeting as the promising start of another session of Kissinger-style diplomacy.

Kissinger and Vorster met at neighboring mountainside hotels in the suburban section of Bolder. Both were whisked from the airport to their hotels in an orange Sikorsky helicopter, high above the city of Zurich and far from any demonstrators. Over dinner (at which the South Africans were hosts) and lunch (given by the Americans) and in between, the two leaders talked for a total of 13 hours, reviewing the southern African situation in considerable detail. Though neither was prepared to disclose the substance of the talks, it is known that the chief subjects discussed were Namibia and Rhodesia.

NAMIBIA. This was the easier one--the bottom-line issue that alone made the meeting worthwhile. South Africa had already agreed to Namibian independence by Dec. 31,1978, under a multiracial government. Vorster still refused to deal directly with the South West African People's Organization (SWAPO), Namibia's main liberation (and guerrilla) movement. But he hinted that SWAPO could be invited to the round-table conference--now under way at Windhoek, the Namibian capital --by conference delegates. He also indicated that South Africa might be willing to move Namibia's independence date forward to Dec. 31,1977. In return, Vorster would insist that a SWAPO-dominated government guarantee the safety and rights of Namibia's white minority.

RHODESIA. Vorster declared publicly that he was not prepared to put pressure on Rhodesia's Smith. In truth, he has been doing it for some time. Last year South Africa withdrew 2,000 of its paramilitary police from Rhodesia. Recently it pulled out 50 helicopter pilots, crew chiefs and technicians. Two weeks ago, South African Foreign Minister Hilgard Muller said Pretoria now regards the principle of black majority rule in Rhodesia as "acceptable." Privately, Vorster is said to believe Smith (a former R.A.F. pilot who Vorster feels is "refighting the Battle of Britain") must become more flexible. Vorster is prepared to "point out alternatives and offer advice" to the hardheaded Smith, but in return he insists that Kissinger must somehow persuade the guerrilla groups to ease up in their attacks on Rhodesia--hardly a simple task.

Vorster and Kissinger also talked about the British-American plan to set up a fund of about $1.5 billion to $2 billion to be underwritten by the U.S., Britain, West Germany and perhaps other Western countries. The purpose of this financial safety net would be to indemnify white settlers for any property seized by a black government or to buy the property from them if they decided to leave the country. The effect of the fund, Kissinger hopes, would be to assure Rhodesia's 275,000 whites that majority rule need not spell economic disaster for them. Details of the fund are still to be worked out, presumably by the Kissinger shuttle.

The meetings ended amicably. Before leaving for home, Vorster grandly told the press, "America is the leader of the free world, and I am part and parcel of the free world, and therefore America is also my leader." Kissinger, deliberately optimistic, called the discussions "fruitful." "Should I say progress is at hand?" he quipped, referring to his embarrassingly premature announcement in October 1972 that peace was at hand in South Viet Nam.

While Vorster and Kissinger were talking in Zurich, five African presidents met in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, at the behest of President Julius Nyerere. The African leaders tried hard to bring about a reconciliation among the three principal Rhodesian liberation movements, which have long been feuding, but failed once again. In truth, the disunity among Rhodesian blacks is almost as big an impediment to majority rule as Ian Smith's intransigence. In the end the five presidents could only agree that the guerrilla war should be "intensified," but, on the other hand, they had no objection to a Kissinger shuttle in pursuit of peace.

Kissinger, who did not hear about the Dar es Salaam meeting until the night before he left for Zurich, was worried that the African leaders would reject his negotiating offer before he had a chance to discuss it with them. Later he told newsmen that he had been invited to visit Dar es Salaam on his forthcoming shuttle. A Tanzanian spokesman put it somewhat differently: "He asked to come, and we said, 'All right, come along.' " Despite his minor gaffe, Kissinger will obviously be welcome in Tanzania, as well as Zambia, the most important stops on his current trip. From there, he will go to South Africa to see Vorster again.

The complexities of southern Africa's problems make those of the Middle East seem almost simple by comparison. Any negotiations on Rhodesia would include not only the three leading liberation groups, but also four black states bordering on Rhodesia, the Smith regime, and South Africa. To simplify the logistics a bit, at least at the start, Kissinger hopes to ask Nyerere and Zambia's President Kenneth Kaunda to handle the liberation movements and let Vorster deal with Smith.

Quite a chore to undertake in the best of times, let alone just seven weeks before a U.S. presidential election. But, as Kissinger argues, the risk of doing nothing is much greater. Unchecked, southern Africa will almost certainly drift into racial war. Whether the Soviet Union or any other foreign power could exploit such a phenomenon for long is doubtful, but the potential for short-term mischief making is awesome. Small wonder then that Kissinger is eager for one more crusade before he quits.

* In fact, the two men met on Sunday for more than four hours.

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