The Bishop's Tough Challenge

A hot debate on recognition will come with black rule

Backfiring and coughing out clouds of smoke, a long procession of buses snake-danced through the streets of Salis bury, packed with hundreds of singing, fist-pumping celebrants. They were supporters of Bishop Abel Muzorewa going to the victory rallies for the man who in June is to become the first black Prime Minister of a country that will be known as Zimbabwe-Rhodesia. But that as it happened was about all that could be said with any certainty about the break away British colony's future.

Despite the turnout of almost 1.9 million blacks, or an estimated 64% of those eligible to vote, there were reservations over how much pressure to cast ballots had been exerted by whites, especially in rural areas. There were also suspicions that under-18 youths had been al lowed to vote illegally in some places. Moreover, some of the districts where the bishop's United African National Council party had won most handsomely registered figures that approached, or were even higher than the 100% of voters who had been thought to live there, reflecting either ballot-stuffing or poor population estimates to begin with.

The most severe broadside directed at the electoral process came from the Rev. Ndabaningi Sithole, Muzorewa's main rival in the election and a colleague of his on the Executive Council that runs the interim government. After the polls closed, Sithole declared the elections a thumping success; within a few hours, he was charging that "gross irregularities" had occurred. Sithole's opponents accused him of being a bad loser, since his party, a branch of the Zimbabwe African National Union, got only 14 1/2% of the vote. Later, it was announced that his party had won twelve parliamentary seats and would qualify for two Cabinet posts in the new government. Most observers expect him to join the Cabinet.

Muzorewa's party won 67% of the popular vote and 51 of the 72 seats reserved for blacks in the new 100-member Parliament. On many issues the bish op will have the support of the Rhodesian Front, the party of outgoing Prime Minister Ian Smith, which won all of the 28 seats reserved for whites. Both parties recognize the need for unity against the guer rillas of the Patriotic Front. Says a white restaurant owner in Salisbury, expressing a hope shared by many of Rhodesia's 212,000 remaining "Europeans" "The bishop is a weak man who is going to be strong. He will ring up the Presidents [of Zambia and Mozambique] and tell them to close the terrorist camps. He will say, 'Smith is gone, I'm Prime Minister now. We will give you a month--it's either the hand of friendship or war.' "

There was no sign last week that Rhodesia's black-ruled neighbors would react favorably to such a call. Like many other African leaders, Zambia's President Kenneth Kaunda denounced the election; he also hinted that if South Africa entered into a military alliance with the new Salisbury government, he would be obliged to seek new Soviet and Chinese arms in an effort to stop Rhodesian attacks on the guerrilla camps in his country.

The Muzorewa government's first diplomatic objectives are to win international recognition and to try to remove the U.N.-ordered economic sanctions that have been imposed on Rhodesia. But, the election notwithstanding, neither Britain nor the U.S., the two Western countries most important to Salisbury, seems ready to lift the sanctions or to recognize the new regime soon, though there is some pressure on both governments to do so.

In Britain, Prime Minister James Callaghan has announced that if his Labor Party wins this week's elections, he will try to arrange an all-parties conference to which all the Rhodesian factions would be invited. If, on the other hand, Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives come to power, they will be much more likely than Callaghan to recognize the Muzorewa regime eventually. A senior Tory shadow Cabinet member told TIME last week: "In her heart, Margaret has decided to recognize the government, but in her head she realizes that it will have to be played coolly." Reason: a hasty move could jeopardize Britain's relations with such African members of the Commonwealth as Nigeria, Zambia, Kenya and Tanzania, all of which oppose the internal settlement. In any case, the Tories would probably not recognize the Muzorewa regime until after the Commonwealth Prime Ministers' conference in Zambia in August.

For the Carter Administration, Rhodesia presents a difficult problem. Congress voted last year that the U.S. should drop the economic sanctions if President Carter found that the Salisbury government had held a free and fair election and had shown a willingness to negotiate with the guerrilla leaders. Several new pieces of legislation that seek to force the President to lift the sanctions, including one by North Carolina Republican Senator Jesse Helms, have now been introduced.

Whether any of these bills has much chance of passing both branches of Congress is doubtful.

Antisanctions sentiment is fairly strong in the Senate, but the House of Representatives has a number of foes of the internal settlement.

Among them is New York Democrat Stephen Solarz, chairman of the African Affairs Subcommittee, who contends that it would be "rash" to assume that the turnout in Rhodesia "was any more an expression of support for the internal settlement than that the even higher turnout in the recent elections in the Soviet Union constituted an unalloyed endorsement of the Communist system."

Though the fairness of the election was an issue of some importance, what concerns many observers is the broader question of the fairness of the new constitution to blacks; under it the whites will retain control over the civil service and the judiciary, as well as of the security forces. U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young last week repeated his fear that by shutting out the Rhodesians whose loyalty is to the Patriotic Front, the internal settlement would "lead to all-out civil war." For his part, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance now counsels a period of caution on the Rhodesian question. In congressional hearings last week, he asked for patience on the sanctions issue and declared that it would be "premature" for anyone to make final judgments on the new political situation in Rhodesia just now.

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