U.S. Policy Under Attack

Critics charge the Administration with being rigid and unrealistic

I love the rhetoric. Keep it coming. Meanwhile, we're all waiting for the action." So said one African diplomat in Nairobi last week, acidly summing up the reaction of many of his colleagues to Jimmy Carter's three-day visit to the continent and to the President's keynote speech in Lagos. In that well-intentioned address from the Nigerian capital, Carter called for a fair and peaceful transmission of power from the governing white minorities in southern Africa to black majorities; at the same time he issued a tough warning against the growing Cuban and Soviet presence in Africa. To the dismay of Administration officials, the speech got a lukewarm reception from many of the listeners for whom it was intended. Even South Africa's leading black paper, the Johannesburg Post, buried the story on an inside page and did not bother to make an editorial comment.

This week the Administration is attempting to move beyond words to concrete action. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance flies off to Africa for a series of meetings with parties directly involved in the unsolved Rhodesian crisis. His basic goal: to convince the Presidents of the so-called front-line states, the two key black nationalists who head the Patriotic Front, and the black leaders who have accepted Prime Minister Ian Smith's internal settlement for Rhodesia that the main hope of avoiding a protracted civil war remains the Anglo-American proposals. Both Smith's Salisbury agreement and the Anglo-American plan predicate eventual black-majority rule. The difference is that Washington and London--neither of which really trusts Smith's assurances of positive transition--would step in under their proposal to supervise such essential instruments of government as police, courts and army.

In Washington as well as in many African capitals Carter's policy toward the continent, and particularly toward the treacherous problems of southern Africa, has come under attack. "Our foreign policy as it applies to Africa is in total shambles," says Illinois Congressman Edward Derwinski of the House International Relations Committee. "As usual, it's too little too late." In a trenchant editorial on the President's Lagos speech, the Washington Post accused Carter of succumbing to Nigeria's "uncomplicated fervor" for a guerrilla victory by the Patriotic Front forces, headed by Joshua Nkomo of Z.A.P.U. (Zimbabwe African People's Union) and Robert Mugabe of Z.A.N.U. (Zimbabwe African National Union). Meanwhile, the Nigerian joint communique failed to mention any progress achieved from Smith's internal settlement, which the Post called "more democratic, moderate and multiracial than any government the guerrillas might construct." To gain, in effect, revolutionary credentials, the President appeared to be holding Salisbury "to lofty moral and political standards, while often appearing to wink at the failings of the Popular Front."

In South Africa, there is criticism of U.S. policy from some who might be most expected to support it. "Even those who once sympathized with Washington's concern over black conditions and rights are dismayed," reports TIME Johannesburg Bureau Chief William McWhirter. "Many young blacks in South Africa, who believe that Washington's way offers no solution at all, are turning instead to the growing influence of Cuba and the Soviet Union. It was only three years ago, during their lightning advance across Angola, that Zambia's anxious President Kenneth Kaunda rushed to confer with Prime Minister John Vorster, describing the Communists as the 'plundering tigers of Africa.' What are those same tigers now doing right? Nothing very different. But at least they are candid about their own self-interest and know when to hand out the arms and shut up."

The Administration's basic problem, the critics charge, is that its rhetoric does not seem to encompass the realities of African politics. White South Africans, particularly, feel that U.S. moral judgments are hypercritical and based on a double standard--an argument that helped Vorster win a huge majority in last fall's national elections. A case in point: Carter in Lagos criticized injustice in South Africa but made no mention of the fact that Nigeria is a tough military dictatorship; criminals are regularly executed every Saturday on the Lagos beach. As the Afrikaner newspaper Beeld put it: "Morality is binding universally or not at all." On Rhodesia, the South Africans feel that Washington has made a number of strategic errors, initially by failing to use enough persuasive force on the Patriotic Front leaders to make some kind of deal with Smith, and then by trying to undercut the internal settlement as the basis for further negotiations.

Another sore point for the South Africans is Namibia. Carter referred to South Africa's intransigence in his Lagos speech, but failed to mention that the Marxist SWAPO (South West African People's Organization) has also rejected a settlement plan put forward by five Western powers. Carter only regretted, and did not condemn, the cold-blooded murder of Herero Chief Clemens Kapuuo, who almost certainly was the victim of a SWAPO assassination campaign directed against moderate black Namibians. One famous South African, Heart Surgeon Christiaan Barnard, charges that Washington refuses to accept admittedly imperfect internal settlements in Namibia as well as Rhodesia, even though the U.S. acquiesced to naked Marxist takeovers in Angola and Mozambique. "It is not majority rule that Carter is asking for," Barnard says, "it is black rule by pre-selected majority."

The critique by black Africa is different but also pointed. Reports TIME Nairobi Bureau Chief David Wood: "The days of the ugly American may be over, as Carter said in Lagos, but some Africans feel that they are being given a superficial, kiss-off kind of attention, a razzle-dazzle diplomacy begun by Henry Kissinger and continued by Andy Young."

As examples of this once-over-lightly approach, the Africans cite Angola, where Washington missed an opportunity to enter a crumbling colonial situation on the side of guerrillas who at that time were outside the Marxist orbit. In the Horn of Africa, critics charge, the U.S. was apparently the last to know that Somalia was planning an invasion of Ethiopia's Ogaden region, thereby helping to create an opening for Moscow in Addis Ababa. In Rhodesia, Washington failed to put sufficient pressure on either the Patriotic Front or the Smith regime to achieve a settlement at a time when Smith desperately needed to make a better deal with Nkomo than the one he subsequently offered to Bishop Abel Muzorewa and the Rev. Ndabaningi Sithole.

Finally, Carter turned off much of his African audience in Lagos by mixing an appeal for human rights with a warning against the Cuban influence. As the black Africans readily understand, every member of the United Nations has the right to ask for foreign military assistance, which the U.S. has often provided to clients of its own choosing--notably Kenya, Sudan and Zaire. Many black Africans fear that the U.S. is unable to distinguish between Communist-backed but legitimate liberation groups and committed Marxist revolutionary movements. Asks one Mozambican leader: "What are you Americans fighting here anyway--Cubans or white supremacists? We ask you for arms because we are fighting for majority rule, and you turn us down. Now we are fighting for majority rule with Communist guns, and you are still turning us down."

In answer, Administration officials argue that too often in the past the U.S. has ended up on the losing side of liberation struggles and that its belated courting of black African opinion makes good economic as well as political sense. U.S. trade with Nigeria, as Ambassador Young frequently points out, already exceeds that with South Africa. The Administration's policy is based on the firmly held premise that whether or not Washington supports it, Smith's internal settlement is a prescription for civil war.

"There's a tragic choice here," says Richard Moose, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs. "I can understand those people who look at this situation and say, 'Here is Smith (whose history and track record perhaps they don't understand) offering genuine majority rule. Here are those moderate leaders on the inside who are willing to join with him. Here are these people on the outside whom we see as Communists (because they are taking Soviet aid). So let's cast our lot with the Salisbury talkers, because, after all, they represent moderation, stability and respect for white rights.'

"The trouble with that argument is that at the end of the road we will have a situation in which Smith and the internal nationalists are on one side, supported by the South Africans and ourselves, and on the other side are the rest of the African countries, and most of the ex-colonial world, supported by the Russians and Cubans. It would be a dreadful conflict." The key to avoiding such a conflict, Moose maintains, lies in an evenhanded approach to the transition. "Whether the transfer of power is resolved politically or militarily," he says, "will have an enormous impact on the whole region; it will determine whether we'll have a southern Africa in turmoil."

Moose denies that the U.S. is leaning toward the Patriotic Front. "That's a fundamental misinterpretation of our policy. We have no special brief for the Patriotic Front. Our concern for an 'all-inclusive' process should not be misinterpreted as partisanship. Our objective is to secure the earliest genuine transfer of power in a manner that allows a free expression of political will and an outcome that, insofar as possible, will assure the rights of all the Zimbabwe people." Washington thus shares the view of the front-line leaders and the Patriotic Front that Smith's internal settlement is a clever form of tokenism that, in effect, ensures continuing white control of the military, the judiciary and the bureaucracy, even if a black Prime Minister is installed after elections.

The Administration is probably correct in assuming that any Rhodesian settlement that does not guarantee true majority rule is doomed in African eyes. Civil war, moreover, is all but inevitable unless the popular Nkomo is brought into a new Zimbabwe government. If it backed the internal settlement, the U.S. could face the Hobson's choice of impotent neutrality in the event of a civil war or lonely support for a regime denounced by almost all of Africa and already stigmatized in American documents as "illegitimate." The big question--for which Cy Vance will seek the answer on his forthcoming African mission--is whether it is too late to sell all of Rhodesia's nationalist factions on a reasonable alternative.

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