Desert Mirage

Pretoria's empty victory

It certainly looked like an authentic election campaign in an emerging African nation. Buses adorned with blue and white balloons labored up and down the main street of Windhoek, the sun-swept territorial capital, loudspeakers blaring "Vote! Vote! Vote!" Mobile polls were transported to practically every village in Namibia, the resource-rich, population-poor (about 1 million) stretch of desert known as South West Africa that South Africa's white regime has ruled as a protectorate since 1920. Yet the result, reports TIME Johannesburg Bureau Chief William McWhirter, was about as real as the mirages of the Kalahari sands that stretch for trackless miles across Namibia.

Even the South Africans now realize that the huge territory they have ruled under a long-expired League of Nations mandate is on the verge of becoming independent. But in the past two years South Africa has spent at least $1 billion on economic and military aid in an effort to ensure that Namibia's first independent government will be one that can be lived with comfortably. South Africa last week staged elections in Namibia--not under U.N. auspices, as Pretoria had previously promised, but on its own terms.

As a result, the multiracial Democratic Turnhalle Alliance (D.T.A.), which South Africa has fostered and supported, ran virtually unopposed. To be sure, there were four right-wing fringe parties in the race, including one white-supremist group that ran under the portrait of a flaxen-haired young maiden holding a puppy with that party's slogan: VOTE FOR HER SAKE. The South West African People's Organization (SWAPO), the U.N.-backed political movement that has been waging guerrilla warfare in the territory since 1966, refused to take part in the elections.

For an organization waging a battle it could not lose, the D.T.A. fought remarkably hard. Using a network of 36 offices, 425 field workers, 21 armed guards, 132 vehicles and ten mobile TV units, the party staged some 500 rallies and spent an estimated $5.5 million, which is a lot of money, since Namibia has only 412,000 eligible voters. Under the D.T.A.'s white leader, a wealthy rancher named Dirk Mudge, 50, the party shrewdly maintained that it stood for independence from South Africa and an end to apartheid.

SWAPO tried to discourage foreign journalists from covering the election, contending that their presence would legitimize the proceedings. The SWAPO argument was echoed at the U.N. by the ambassadors from Zambia, Nigeria and Tanzania, who declared that reporters who attempted to cover the campaign would be doing a "disservice" to the U.N. While that seemed in line with a dubious belief that is steadily gaining ground in Third World countries--that the world press should be tightly controlled--SWAPO leaders inside Namibia privately expressed a belief that the presence of foreign reporters gave them some protection during the campaign, though not too much. Within full view of one press group, police attacked and badly beat up a sign-carrying SWAPO demonstrator.

Indications are that the D.T.A. will probably wind up with 80% of the vote. But the showdown between the D.T.A. and SWAPO lies ahead. SWAPO is still waging the guerrilla war. It might suspend the fighting during a U.N.-supervised election campaign, but it would not be prepared to lose that voting contest. Says a SWAPO leader: "The struggle will continue. That's all." Translation: If SWAPO should be defeated at the polls in such an election, the bloodshed would continue.

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