Flash Point

The killing of a black leader

In tense southern Africa, much of the West's anxiety has focused on a possible civil war in Rhodesia. But another potential conflict is just as steadily approaching its flash point. This time the dispute concerns the mineral-rich, South African-administered territory of Namibia (South West Africa). There, last week, in the black township of Katutura, outside the capital of Windhoek, Chief Clemens Kapuuo, 55, a popular moderate and leader of the multiracial Democratic Turnhalle Alliance, was assassinated by two gunmen who escaped without a trace.

A former schoolteacher, Kapuuo had played a key role in the Turnhalle conference, which brought together eleven ethnic groups two years ago. This year they formed a political union that has become the leading opponent of the militant South West African People's Organization (SWAPO), which in 1973 was recognized by the United Nations General Assembly as the territory's legal representative. Significantly, the Turnhalle group supported a South African-sponsored "internal settlement" similar to the one fashioned in Rhodesia by Ian Smith. Under the South African plan, Pretoria pledged to grant independence to Namibia by the end of the year, and Kapuuo would have been a leading prospect for the presidency.

Last fall South African Prime Minister John Vorster appointed Supreme Court Justice Marthinus Steyn to administer the plan. In most sections of the country, Steyn dispensed with some of the most restrictive trappings of apartheid --pass laws, the mixed-marriages act, travel restrictions, indefinite detention and bans on black ownership of property. There was almost no opposition from Namibia's whites (who number 113,000 out of a population of nearly 1 million), leading many critics to wonder why South Africa could not do the same thing at home.

The problem has been that South Africa and SWAPO are in fundamental disagreement on the scheme, and the Western powers fear that it will not end the twelve-year-old guerrilla war raging between SWAPO and some 15,000 South African forces along the Namibia-Angola border. Thus the U.S., Britain, France, Canada and West Germany have drawn up a formula that would provide joint U.N.-South African supervision of the transition to independence and subsequent elections. Last week, after meeting with Andrew Young, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., SWAPO leaders agreed to the plan. South Africa has not yet responded, but Pretoria is expected to reject it and pursue its own settlement.

But Kapuuo's assassination has threatened to undo the solutions of all the parties. Kapuuo was chief of the Herero tribe, a warrior clan that numbers 63,000; SWAPO claims the support of the Ovambo, the territory's largest (membership: 400,000) tribe. Last month, following the assassination of another Turnhalle leader, Katutura township was torn by fighting between the two groups; 14 people were killed and more than 100 wounded. Some observers feared that the killing of Kapuuo could mean further tribal warfare.

All sides sought to reap political advantage from the assassination. South African officials charged that SWAPO had killed the black leader as part of an assassination campaign, and alluded to a "captured document" that purportedly included plans to kill opposition black leaders in Namibia. In Zambia last week, SWAPO Leader Sam Nujoma, who at one time studied English under Kapuuo, denied that his organization had had anything to do with the killing. The murder, he suggested, might well have been the work of South African provocateurs.

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