"The Only Way Left Is War"

There is not likely to be a Pioneer Day next year in Zimbabwe

The two leaders of the Patriotic Front guerrillas who are fighting for black rule in Rhodesia, Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe, flew separately last week to Addis Ababa. There they helped Ethiopia's Marxist military rulers celebrate the fourth anniversary of the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie I. More important, from Nkomo's and Mugabe's point of view, they had a chance to confer at length with visiting Cuban President Fidel Castro, one of their principal supporters in the six-year-old war against the Salisbury regime.

The meeting of Castro with the Patriotic Front leaders was the latest in a series of disturbing developments in the Rhodesian debacle. Two weeks ago there was the shooting down by Nkomo's guerrillas of a Rhodesian civil airliner with a Soviet-supplied ground-to-air missile. Anger and revulsion swept the white community, and this time Prime Minister Ian Smith was included as a target of white criticism, because he had secretly conferred with Nkomo in Zambia in mid-August.

Smith had offered, in effect, to set Nkomo up as the first leader of black-ruled Zimbabwe if Nkomo would join the interim government in Salisbury and thus help to bring an end to the fighting. After the airliner incident and subsequent atrocity, whites called for martial law, general mobilization and attacks on guerrilla camps in Zambia.

At first, both Smith and Nkomo seemed to be trying to calm things down. Smith promised merely a "modified" martial law and rejected the idea of general mobilization as an unnecessary burden on the country's economy; most young whites spend six months a year in the armed forces anyway.

But Smith did pledge to "liquidate" those organizations inside Rhodesia that were associated with the external guerrilla movements. Until now, his government had boasted about its release of political detainees and the freedoms enjoyed in Rhodesia by Patriotic Front civilian sympathizers. But no more. By midweek the government had arrested more than 200 blacks thought to be linked to the guerrillas and detained them without trial. As he tried to rally his white constituency, Smith raged that Nkomo, who had readily accepted responsibility for the destruction of the Rhodesian airplane, was "a monster" who had gone "beyond the pale."

From his base in Zambia, Nkomo announced that the plan for an all-parties conference on Rhodesia, long advocated by Britain and the U.S., was "dead and buried" and that "the only way left is war." He again sought to justify the destruction of the airliner. "Having about 40 people killed in a plane crash is not pleasant," he said. "We are not rejoicing over death. But the Rhodesian armed forces are killing 30 to 40 of our people a day."

In view of these "deliberate massacres," added Nkomo, "we cannot contemplate working with them. I don't think there will be a place for them in Zimbabwe."

Indeed, there was plenty of evidence that Nkomo and his colleagues were preparing for a long war. Last week TIME's John Borrell became one of the first Western journalists to visit one of Nkomo's camps in Zambia. Besides an estimated 10,000 fully trained guerrillas in Nkomo's army, hundreds more are arriving weekly by way of neighboring Botswana. The newcomers are screened and given some rudimentary training at a major transit camp in Zambia before being sent on to Angola or Eastern Europe for further instruction. Nkomo heatedly denies Rhodesian charges that the young blacks are forced to join his organization at gunpoint. "That's just nonsense," he says. "We have more people than we need or can cope with efficiently."

And so it seemed. "As Nkomo arrived at the spartan camp," reported Borrell, "thousands of young men in tattered clothing stood stiffly at attention, shouldering wooden staves as substitutes for the Soviet Kalashnikov rifles they will later carry. We watched as company-size units jogged in formation to the center of a parade ground, then formed a huge square around Nkomo. 'Z!' he shouted to the group, by way of greeting. 'Zimbabwe!' came the response from perhaps 6,000 voices."

The growing military threat was reason enough for both London and Washington to continue pressing the Salisbury government and the Patriotic Front to agree to attend an all-parties conference before the end of the year. Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda and the other front-line Presidents, who have been working jointly for a Rhodesian settlement, still favor such a conference. So does Robert Mugabe, Nkomo's somewhat estranged partner in the Patriotic Front. Mugabe is not nearly as popular a political figure as Nkomo, but because he controls at least two-thirds of the guerrillas who are fighting inside Rhodesia, he must obviously be a party to any successful settlement.

Whether that conference will ever take place was still the central question last week as white Rhodesians paused to celebrate the 88th anniversary of the founding of Fort Salisbury on the site of the modern capital. When Ian Smith arrived for the celebration at Cecil Square, one man shouted "Good old Smithy! Some of us are still behind you!" No doubt that was true, though it was hard to tell from the tepid applause.

During the service a few wept, but the majority stood in stoic silence. They were convinced that, whatever happens, this celebration would be the last of its kind; there is not likely to be a white Pioneer Day next year in black Zimbabwe. qed

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